CHACRDIGEST
JANUARY 30th, 2025
#40
The views expressed in this Digest are not those of the British Army or UK Government. This document cannot be reproduced or used in part or whole without the permission of the CHACR. chacr.org.uk
THE ROAD AHEAD In a salute to Janus – the Roman God of beginnings, endings and transitions, and from whom the first month of the year gets its name – January is typically a time we reflect on the past year and consider the one to come. Chatham House has produced a series of articles that identify the potential flashpoints of 2025, consider what the year holds for Africa specifically and the world generally. The think tank focuses on the potential impacts of the election of Donald Trump with comments about tariffs, the threat of inflation and the impact on the outcome of the Ukraine war, but also the imperative to prepare for the next pandemic and thoughts on fairer artificial intelligence, leadership in Europe, the UK’s place in the world and the opportunities for middle powers in Africa to seize their G20 moment (discussed further in the Africa section). These topics are replicated in the thoughts of 11 experts writing for the Council on Geostrategy, although the authors have a more pessimistic view, concluding that the risk of an axis of authoritarian nations, the ‘CRINK’ (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) means “the world finds itself in the worst geopolitical environment since the end of the Cold War and continues to hurtle towards everincreasing instability and uncertainty”. This pessimism is also evident in a Lowy Institute article on military trends to watch in 2025, written by the former Australian General, Mick Ryan. He proposes five trends that will influence the character of conflict: greater robotic and algorithmic war; the growth in the number of nuclear weapons and rhetoric to use them; US demands for greater military spending by their allies; greater consideration of national mobilisation; and the desire of the CRINK nations to overturn the postSecond World War global order. Equally, there is value in looking back over 2024 and the predictions that were made at the end of 2023. The International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Armed Conflict Survey has been using domestic, regional and global lenses to examine conflict trends, geopolitical exacerbators and potential flashpoints since 2015. In 2024 it identified increasing complexity of actors and dynamics, geopolitical fragmentation, accelerating climate change (or the greater impact of inaction on climate change as covered by Andrew Gilmour from the Berghof Foundation in the SMA Climate Effects Speaker Series), resurgence of inter-state wars and weakening of the global governance architecture; factors that are all likely to continue in 2025. At the end of 2023, S&P Global sought to identify the top geopolitical risks of 2024, referencing heightened non-military confrontations in the South China Sea and social unrest from food security challenges, which didn’t dramatically affect 2024, but remain areas of risk in 2025.
USA The inauguration of Donald Trump provoked a string of articles from Chatham House predicting how the businessman-turned-politician’s second presidency might herald a remaking of the international order, provoke a grand bargain in US-China relations or – given Trump’s ambiguous stance – may raise the risk of accidental conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Equally, commentators were at pains to point out what actions Europe should take to placate and renew America’s self-interested case for an enduring commitment to the Continent.
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