It is a really brave/naïve/silly person (select as applicable) who makes confident and precise predictions about what’s going to occur in the following yr. However, buoyed up by my recent track record – looking into the 2020s and predicting that SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (aka COVID-19) can be a serious issue in China, may spread into south-east Asia, but won’t grow to be a world pandemic, and Putin is a posturing bully who won’t launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine – I make my predictions for 2025!
Climate
First, the (depressingly) easy one. More global warming records will occur, because the planet continues its human-caused upward climb regarding global heating. More ice will melt on the poles and life will grow to be much more precarious for animals there, especially polar bears within the arctic.
Weather will proceed to be erratic and unpredictable, with severe events causing flooding and disruption. The daffodils in my garden will proceed the (now regular) appearance of full flowers in mid-December and positively well in time for Christmas. The confused garden primroses will proceed their recent habit of multiple flowerings over the yr and there can be few redwings feeding on the winter berries, attributable to their ability to now over-winter in ever-increasing numbers on the (warmer) continent.
Climate change deniers will proceed to say it’s all a hoax or wildly exaggerated. Others will proceed to argue that net zero goals have to be slowed attributable to their threat to our fuel security/living standards/national lifestyle (select as applicable). The US will withdraw from vital climate change commitments, while attempting to ignore the crises that worsening extremes of weather visit on it (as on the remaining of us).
On the opposite hand, there can be advances in sustainable technologies and carbon capture. So, there can be encouragements, in addition to anxiety-causing aspects, on this key area of contemporary life. But time is brief for motion.
AI and the data revolution
While AI is unlikely to see the world crumble (as its more apocalyptic critics suggest), its impact will proceed to speed up. OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT’ (already with over 300 million weekly users in 2024) points the best way towards how this information revolution will proceed to grow in use and influence.
The algorithms will proceed to polarise online information and speed up the divisiveness of digital discourse. More elections can be tampered with by the enemies of democracy. The ‘mainline’ legacy media will proceed to see its influence fall as more people seek their news and views from more tailored sources / prefer information that confirms existing biases / go for soundbites of dubious provenance over researched and attributable news (select whichever description most accords together with your outlook!).
But it should not only be the bringer of digital Armageddon. Expect to see large advances in its use in medical evaluation of knowledge and other areas of complex information evaluation. Google’s ‘DeepMind’ has already won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for its contributions to understanding protein-folding, using its AI model ‘AlphaFold 2’. Expect more of this and don’t assume that human civilisation is about to implode in an ‘AI-generated’ catastrophe.
Watch as hundreds of thousands more users of X (once called Twitter) move to Threads, BlueSky and other social media, in protest at Elon Mark’s openly rightward trajectory on ‘X’. A digital migration event is under way!
Like the invention of the printing press within the fifteenth century, and the worldwide web within the twentieth and twenty first centuries, AI will proceed to open the door into each good and sick. The key thing is: it should not go away.
The migrant crisis
Another predictable one. Expect to see a continuation of the movement of each undocumented economic migrants, and in addition asylum seekers, into Europe and the UK similtaneously Western governments fail to influence their populations that a big influx of expert and suitably qualified young staff from abroad is obligatory to support the care needs of an aging population and plug gaps within the workforce.
In the center of this conundrum, expect the continued upward trajectory of the best in France and Germany (and elsewhere); and expect to see Reform increasing its support within the UK (likely aided by the activities of Elon Musk and other billionaires) attributable to voter anxieties over levels of immigration. Like climate change (there are some connections) and war (also connected) this will not be going to go away.
The Middle East
Expect the US, under President Trump, to answer the battering of Hamas, the weakening of Hezbollah, and the collapse of Assad, to resurrect and extend the ‘Abraham Accords’, designed to normalize relations between Israel and a variety of Arab states. This will accompany further actions aimed toward reducing the influence of Iran and curtailing its nuclear programme. Look out for Trump because the Middle Eastern peacemaker, but one who kicks the Palestinian issue down the road. The query is: can the anti-Israeli feelings on the ‘Arab street,’ in support of Gaza, be ignored by Arab governments, desperate to reestablish stability within the Middle East? That is a ‘wild card’ that will upend the diplomatic game.
Ukraine
Talking of Trump, there’s an actual possibility that the ‘Disrupter in Chief’ may achieve peace (of a kind in Ukraine), albeit with a price to pay on each side. Even Kyiv – weary at its huge losses following Russia’s war of aggression – now seems open to the likelihood that Trump’s sheer unpredictability could be the only hope of ending this terrible war.
How might that occur? A Trump ‘peace deal’ could see Russia keeping control of Crimea and the 70% of the Donbas it now holds, but with strong security guarantees for Ukraine (but not NATO membership) and the promise of massive US support for Ukraine if Putin reneges on the deal. It can be a ‘deal’ that satisfies nobody, but which freezes the present hot war.
At the identical time, expect a gradual distancing of the US from NATO, with the organisation facing the challenge of greatly increasing its defence spending in an try to make up something of the lack of US support. The query is: can the alliance find the collective resolve to do that? The jury is out on that one.
Trump could yet fish for a Nobel Peace Prize, having brought peace, of a sort, to each Ukraine and the Middle East, but on a regular basis storing up trouble for the longer term by failing to handle the basic problems in each areas and with the US being semi-detached from world events. Nevertheless, that will be a headline to recollect: ‘President Trump Wins Nobel Prize.’ Never say never.
The Trump presidency
The above raises the broader query of what the brand new Trump presidency can be like? That will not be a simple subject to predict, to place it mildly.
On one hand, we might even see ‘Trump Unleashed.’ What might that seem like? The possibilities include things that – if written because the screenplay for a political drama in a previous age – would have been returned with the scribbled editorial note: “Tone it down and make it more believable!”
So, what might we see in ‘Trump Unleashed’? Here are some thoughts:
Semi-militarised mass deportations of undocumented migrants, accompanied by mass push-back in a deeply divided nation, and civil unrest.
The much-promised tariff-war with China, resulting in a world tariff-war, spiking inflation that hits the US and the world economy. If so, it could force some major realignments in global relationships, including forcing the UK to push past the ‘Brexit roadblock’ (itself yesterday’s news and increasingly tied to a declining, if still vociferous, voter demographic and a largely anti-EU press) to realign more closely with our closest trading bloc.
Back to the US. A weaponisation of the justice system could see its deployment against Trump’s opponents.
Massive tax cuts for the better-off would accompany federal agencies subjected to ‘slash and burn’ policies.
US interventions in Mexico could destabilise its neighbour.
The Republican Party can be fully subordinate to the MAGA movement, with the last traditional GOP conservatives forced out or acting as ‘GOP submarines’, keeping below the surface and offering no goal for Trump – and MAGA wrath. The
Democrats will descend into an internal-party civil war, a continued concentrate on ‘identity politics’ that failed to achieve electoral traction in 2024, and be out of power for a decade.
Or will the realities of US checks and balances force a ‘Trump Lite’ experience? Lots of the above but on a much smaller scale.
Trump and Musk (each men with egos the scale of a small planet) will fall out. The incontrovertible fact that Trump can’t be president again, will embolden GOP law makers to do their very own thing at times, despite the ‘wrath of Trump.’ Was the dearth of GOP unity over the federal budget in December 2024 the primary taste of a Republican Party that doesn’t at all times move lock-step with the person within the White House?
Increasing tensions between GOP lawmakers desiring a federal ban on abortion (and hoping to make use of their House and Senate majorities to attain this) and Trump, who has already rowed back on this, sensing it as an electoral liability for him.
The Democrats finally choose a centrist leader who will unite the party (papering-over its internal divisions) and mount a comeback aimed toward the following mid-term elections. This can be assisted by ‘buyer remorse’ among the many US electorate as Trump policies backfire.
Faced with these options, I feel that I have to be decisive and make my Trump prediction. I believe that the Trump presidency can be … turbulent, unpredictable, contradictory, chaotic. There, you heard it here first!
What is obvious is that the turbulence, which has been such a characteristic of recent global events, seems set to proceed – even to speed up – in 2025.
Martyn Whittock is a historian and a Licensed Lay Minister within the Church of England. The writer, or co-author, of fifty-six books, his work covers a big selection of historical and theological themes. In addition, as a commentator and columnist, he has written for several print and online news platforms and been interviewed on TV and radio news and discussion programmes exploring the interaction of religion and politics. These have included being interviewed on news platforms regarding the religious dimension to current US politics, Christianity and the Crown within the UK, and the war in Ukraine. His recent books exploring contemporary politics and culture include: Trump and the Puritans (2020), The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State (2020), Apocalyptic Politics (2022), and American Vikings (2023). He is currently writing a book on the origins of the contested legacy of history in Russia and Ukraine.
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