This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘What to expect in 2025’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This is the last edition of 2024, so I thought we’d round up where we are in world affairs with three of my favourite pundits. Alexander Gabuev is head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center based in Berlin. Jeremy Shapiro’s the director of the Washington office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. And Karin von Hippel is director of the Royal United Services Institute here in London. Last year’s been hugely turbulent in Ukraine, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. So what can we look forward to in 2025?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Donald Trump voice clip
I wanna thank the American people for the extraordinary honour of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president. And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve — and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America. That’s what we have . . .
Gideon Rachman
Donald Trump’s electoral victory was the capstone event of the last year. His actual return to the White House will shape world events over the next months. I recorded my conversation with Jeremy, Karin and Sasha earlier this month as part of the FT’s Global Boardroom series in front of an audience of FT subscribers. I was in Washington at the time, and the morning we were talking, it was clear the Assad regime was wobbling, although hadn’t quite fallen. I began the conversation by asking Jeremy about Trump’s appointments to the top jobs in his new administration. What do they tell us?
Jeremy Shapiro
To me, by and large, what we’re seeing is — and I think that this frankly, comes through from the last term — that the main criteria for appointment is in the first instance, loyalty and secondly, that they have to kind of look good on Fox News or in a suit. I think when they take a picture of this cabinet, I will predict on January 20th, it will be the cabinet with the best jawline in American history. And beyond that, I think we’re looking at a sort of random assortment of people, and particularly for issues that don’t come to presidential attention, they will have quite a lot of freedom and will exercise quite a bit of discretion. But I think they are collectively a somewhat random assortment, and so I think what we can predict is a lot of incoherence, a lot of chaos and a shocking amount of infighting. All of these things were characterised the first Trump administration, so they’re not very outrageous predictions.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. A Washington think-tank has said to me it won’t be so much team of rivals as nest of vipers. But Karin, what do you make of it? Do you discern any kind of coherent policy lines coming out of this?
Karin von Hippel
I fully agree with what Jeremy said. I actually also think that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s not worth trying to predict policy coherence because most of those people won’t be there by the end of the year. So to add to Jeremy’s list of incoherence and chaos and infighting, it’ll just be a lot of turnover as well, as we saw the last time around. And at the end of the day, if any of these people not only goes for too much attention on their own or oversteps in an area that he cares about, they’ll either be gone or they’ll be smacked back pretty quickly. You know, it’s almost like what he’s doing with his appointments is like a Jackson Pollock painting. He’s just throwing everything at the wall, throwing a lot of crazy characters at the wall in hopes that some of those guys will get through. And so I think it’ll be hard for the Senate to say no to most of them, but they certainly will say no to a few of the more egregious ones. But that does mean some will get through that probably shouldn’t get through.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, Sasha, so you’re sitting in Berlin, but follow two countries particularly closely as Russia and China. What do you think the Russians and the Chinese are making of all this?
Alexander Gabuev
It’s like birthday, Christmas, New Year in the Kremlin all in one day. You can uncork whatever’s left of your stash of vintages and hope that maybe sanctions are leaked. And even if there is no deal inside on Ukraine, which I think is problematic, because I don’t see any reasons why the Kremlin would climb down from some of its maximalist demands f