The major stories of 2025 -- and a look ahead

Usually the most important things that happen are processes that unfold over time, not single events.  Here, in my view, are the most major stories of 2025:

1.  The erosion of Russian and jihadist power by Ukraine and Israel respectively.  This seems indisputably first in importance.  Russia and jihadism are the most dangerous enemies of the West, though China is also a rising threat.  Russia spent 2025, like the previous three years, failing to conquer Ukraine while losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the process, its incompetent and corrupt leadership feeding them into the battlefield meat grinder with seemingly no regard for casualties.  At the same time, Ukraine increased its attacks on military and economic targets deep within Russia, seriously damaging its oil industry in particular.  The June drone attack on Russia's long-range nuclear bombers, hitting targets all over the country, was a devastating and humiliating blow -- and directly reduced Russia's power to harm the West.  However the war ultimately ends, Russia seems certain to emerge seriously weakened.

At the same time, Israel's retaliatory campaign for the October 7 atrocities has wiped out most of Hamas's leadership and wrecked its infrastructure in Gaza, while Hezbollah remains weakened after the 2024 pager attack which killed or crippled thousands of its terrorists.  Israel's twelve-day June attack on the Iranian theocracy's nuclear program probably did substantial damage, though it's always difficult to know with such a secretive and well-protected project.  The attack could have been even more effective if Trump had not pressured Israel into stopping before the job was done (Trump's own strikes on a few Iranian targets at the end of the war probably had little effect).  Much of the Gaza strip has been left looking like Dresden and Berlin did at the end of World War II, and it seems fairly likely that Israel will end up permanently taking some "Palestinian" territory, as Poland did with some German territory in 1945 -- a dire warning to others who might be considering allowing jihadists to operate from their land.

2.  Progress against global warming.  While much of the US right wing absurdly continues to deny the very existence of the problem, the rest of the world is dealing with reality.  The global energy transformation is happening incredibly fast.  Advancing technology has now made clean energy cheaper than fossil-fuel energy, even without government subsidies or other assistance.  As a result, use of solar power is growing rapidly throughout the less-developed world, where most of the human population is, because it's less expensive.  Several major countries' greenhouse-gas emissions have already peaked and begun to decline slightly, and China -- by far the world's largest greenhouse-gas emitter -- is clearly approaching that point.  (This video sums up the situation well.)  In India, too, fossil-fuel use is dropping rapidly as clean energy grows.  The EU has reduced emissions by 37% since 1990, while its economy grew by 70%, showing that progress on this issue need not mean a fall in living standards.  Even in the US, 92% of the new power-generating capacity added in 2025 was clean energy.  There's still a lot of work to do, but we are beating this thing.

3.  Trump's impact on international relations.  His first term might have been dismissed as a fluke, but his re-election has made it clear that the US is an unreliable partner.  As a result, many allies are rapidly working on becoming more self-reliant.  Germany is re-arming on a massive scale, with Poland doing the same.  Japan has elected a strongly nationalistic prime minister who is taking a tougher line on China.  There is persistent talk of Poland possibly building its own nuclear arsenal, and it would be astonishing if Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and even Germany were not at least thinking about doing the same.  Even the UK has stopped sharing Caribbean drug-smuggling intelligence with the US because it doesn't want to be implicated in the US's random attacks on Venezuelan boats.  On the economic front, China is investing billions in trade infrastructure in South America, indicating that it intends to permanently shift to importing from there the agricultural products it used to buy from the US, in response to Trump's tariff warfare.  Even after Trump is gone, there will be no "back to normal" on the global scene.

4.  US mass resistance to Trumpism.  This post provides a good overview.  The No Kings protests included some of the largest nationwide rallies in US history.  Local groups arose in several cities to disrupt ICE operations and protect potential targets.  The Tesla Takedown rallies and boycotts punished Elon Musk for the depredations of DOGE, while a wave of cancellations of Disney+ forced the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel.  Most of this activity happened spontaneously, without the involvement of politicians and with little leadership of any kind.  It was a true grassroots mass movement.

5.  The backlash against "AI".  Public rejection of this intrusive, plagiaristic, and environmentally-destructive technology reached the boiling point in 2025.  With growing desperation, corporations tried to force "AI" into every possible gadget and program, while more and more people refused to use it and popular tech sites spread the word on how to remove or disable it.  Awareness grew of how error-prone it is, while companies which replaced human workers with "AI" quickly learned that it couldn't do the job.

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The future is always uncertain, but here are two important events which are more likely than not to happen during 2026:

1.  The death of Trump.  His increasingly incoherent and deranged social-media posts and public speeches make it clear that his dementia has grown substantially worse over the last year, and there are signs of failing physical health as well.  At 79, he's obese, eats a horribly unhealthy diet, refuses to exercise, and reacts to crises in a way that subjects him to frequent high stress.  I will be surprised if he is still alive when the 2026 election arrives.  The country needs to be prepared for a Vance presidency soon, not as a remote possibility in 2029.

2.  The collapse of the "AI" bubble.  This video gives a good overview of the problem.  "AI" companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars while generating very little revenue, and this is unlikely to change -- "AI" doesn't work reliably enough to be used for anything really important, and the public increasingly doesn't want it and certainly doesn't want to pay for it.  However, absurd hype has grossly over-inflated the stock prices of these companies, accounting for almost all the rise of the stock market in the last year or two.  When it finally dawns on investors that these companies will never make a profit and that their stocks are in fact worth almost nothing, the stock market will crash and those entities which have been investing hundreds of billions in the "AI" companies to support their spending will be ruined.  The resulting economic collapse will probably not be as bad as the Great Depression, but it will certainly be far worse than the 2008 crash or the dot-com collapse.

Even if both of these things happen, the impact of the "AI" crash will be much greater than that of Trump's death.  It will dominate the 2026 and 2028 elections, outweighing all other issues.  The party which convinces the public it has the best plan for recovery will sweep the board.

[Image at top:  One of the numerous Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure]