2025 Prediction: Is G3 In The Making? – OpEd
2025 promises to be a tumultuous year in many parts of the world. But will the status quo remain? Will the more things change, the more they remain the same? Will we see changes for a better or worse world?
Merriam-Webster recently chose polarization as its word of the year for 2024. This word was selected because it appeared to perfectly describe the state of politics, economics and culture that dominates in the United States and some countries of the west.
According to the definition, there is an increasing division between two sharply distinct opposites resulting in a situation in which the opinions, beliefs, or interests of a group or society no longer range along a continuum but become concentrated at opposing extremes. We can add to this societal division the polarization between nation states driving and defining geopolitics around the world in 2024 and earlier.
In 2025, much of what will happen in the US, and by extension, its allies, will depend on what and how President Donald Trump’s new term of office will achieve.
For now it appears that his policy plans within the US will focus on restoring the conservative conception of American society; dismantling the Democratic Party control of what he sees as the deep state; and defending the borders through immigration restrictions and mass deportation.
The economic policy of the first Trump administration was characterized by individual and corporate tax cuts, trade protectionism, and deregulation in the energy and financial sectors. These are likely to continue and be fine tuned.
On foreign policy, what’s clear is that Trump, despite his latest blustering on Mexico, Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, and pronouncement that tariff is his favourite word and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”, will find it impossible to fight wars on both home and external fronts.
Some of his war belligerent administration members may want to double down on Joe Biden’s policy of using allies to maintain the US’s leading position in the political and economic sectors but Trump himself may not favour this strategy.
Predictions for the World Order for 2025
Looking into the crystal ball, here are predictions for what lies ahead in the world for 2025 …
- The US attempts to alternately bully and sweet talk allies and the non west will encounter resistance and pushback undermining the US dominant position in global geopolitics. Mexico and Panama are already showing that, despite their lightweight in the global economy, they will be no pushovers. Other countries will show that they have a stronger spine in dealing with the US on key geopolitical controversies.
- European Union (EU) countries will have to deal with a resurgent Russia following a widely expected Ukraine peace settlement which is likely to end with the Crimea region joining the Russian federation.
- Countries will find greater agreement with Henry Kissinger’s much quoted warning on international relations: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy but to be America’s friend is fatal.” The huge costs of reconstruction and knowledge that money and bloodshed are the inevitable price to pay for being proxies in the US concept of ‘rule of law and global order’ will see a reshaping of European public opinion on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Its impact on peace and security issues will have ripple effects in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
- In the Middle East, Israel’s military victories have brought temporary euphoria to the Zionist camp. But they have only taken the country further away from peace and security. Expect Israel’s public to realise that only a political solution and the creation of a Palestine state can provide the elusive peace settlement for the region that number of battlefield victories can bring.
- In the Asia Pacific region, the recent demonstration by China of cutting edge advances in its air, naval and land based military power has given rise to what some see as a tectonic shift in global military power. This development, together with what appears to be China’s irrepressible global economic clout, will influence regional and global alliances and accelerate the more rapid arrival of BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as countervailing forces in politics and economics.
Emergence of G3?
The intriguing question for 2025 is how Trump will deal with China whose economic and military ascendency has grown, despite President Joe Biden’s warning in 2022 that “if we (the US) don’t get our act together, they (China) will eat our lunch”.
Add to this a victorious Russia whose formidable military power and natural resources endowment make it a dangerous countervailing force against any enemy, and we have a potent cocktail to challenge US and western dominance of the present world order.
Will Biden’s strategy to push back and bring down China with an array of trade, economic and Cold War style confrontation policies be hardened or moderated? Or will Trump, seen as the realist and transactionist par excellence, reach compromises with China and Russia, the two enemies identified by the foremost US think-tanks as standing in the way of making America great again in global geopolitics?
Trump knows that in 2009 China played a key but little publicised role in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and stock market crash by helping the US and world economy recover from the resultant global financial crisis.
The Chinese response in enabling the world economy to escape from a potential global depression had, at that time, led to suggestions that the US and China should agree between themselves on how they would share influence and power for the benefit of the world.
Is it possible that Trump, who is not a fan of NATO or G7, may see the US’s best interest in a geopolitical configuration borrowing from the experience of the earlier crisis – perhaps a G3 comprising the US, Russia and China?
This will buy him time to make America great again as well as help preserve American primacy of any new world order. And if that were to happen perhaps it can pave the way to a more multipolar world in which BRICs principles of openness, equality, cooperation, mutual benefit and peaceful coexistence can be the main drivers of change.
Trump must face the fact that unipolar world and US hegemony is over. Multipolar world is here to stay. Yes the world needs G3. Together they can bring world peace and harmony. Trump must enlist G3 to help him to MAGA. The new G3 can establish a world currency together with a new world order and harmony. There is no other way out for the US and Trump.
G3 is what the world needs. Only then can the world have real peace and harmony. Otherwise it would be the end of the world.