The geopolitical plates have shifted. We’ll see fallout for years to come

Few years recently have seen such dramatic changes as 2024 — changes which will resonate well into the future.

Even up until the final weeks of the year hugely consequential change came at pace. 

The geopolitical plates of the Middle East shifted with the unexpected end of the 54-year dictatorship of the Assad family in Syria.

The collapse of that regime came after decades of barbarity — a regime which had used chemical weapons against its own people during a civil war that led to an estimated 500,000 people disappearing or being killed and a refugee crisis across Europe.

In that one political earthquake, the influence that Iran and Russia had over Syria was banished and new kingmakers arrived in the heart of the Middle East — Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Türkiye, and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni rebel army that Erdogan backed.

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In the US, Donald Trump defied the expectations of many — including many of his fellow Republicans when he lost office in 2020 — and was re-elected president. Trump delivered an emphatic victory — the grand slam of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

While the Democrats ran a campaign heavy on identity politics, Trump’s campaign was relentlessly focused on two issues: border security and cost of living.

Democracy’s shaky year

It was a year in which the fragility of democracy was shown — even in France and South Korea, two countries normally regarded as stable. 

French prime minister Michel Barnier was forced from office after he used his executive powers to try to reduce France’s chronic budget deficit. After three months in office he was gone — but France’s increasingly unsustainable reliance on paying for its lifestyle by taking money from future generations remained in tact.

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In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law without telling either his own parliament or the country’s security backer, the United States. Even members of his own party joined a successful motion to impeach him. Yoon argued that the declaration of martial law was necessary to try to counter covert efforts by North Korean agents to undermine South Korea.

The self-inflicted political chaos added to growing instability on the Korean Peninsula. Earlier in the year, North Korea sent an estimated 10,000 soldiers to Russia — the first foreign deployment ever of North Korean troops — at the urging of Russia’s Vladimir Putin to try to help Russia re-claim from Ukrainian soldiers the Kursk region.

Gaza and Ukraine wars dominated 

Through 2024, two major wars raged — one in Ukraine and one in Gaza. Donald Trump, set to return to the White House on January 20, 2025, declared that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours and that Israel should be allowed to “finish the job” in Gaza.

When the year began, Iran and Russia were major influences in the Middle East. At year’s end — after the lightning raid of HTS — both had lost influence.

Iran had an appalling year. Its “arc of resistance” — Iran’s network of Shia militia groups from Iran, through parts of Iraq, Syria and Lebanon — was disrupted with the fall of the Syrian government. Assad’s Alawite-Shia regime was replaced by HTS — a Sunni enemy of Iran and its Shia militias.

On top of this, Iran’s major proxy, Hezbollah, was dealt repeated blows.

The defeats for Hezbollah began when it was hit by a hostile covert operation under which its communications system was disabled by exploding pagers. While Israel did not claim responsibility, it’s widely believed in intelligence circles that Israel’s secret service, Mossad, managed to take control of a huge shipment of pagers and install in them explosives which detonated when Mossad activated the explosives.

That set off a horror stretch for Hezbollah — including the killing of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the man who built “The Party of God” into one of the most powerful non-state armies in the world.

The day after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel, in which they killed 1,200 people and kidnapped 250 others, Hezbollah began firing missiles into Israel. On September 30 Israel launched a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

Heavy bombing of southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley and Beirut over several weeks further weakened Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran.

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Can Trump end a war in 24 hours?

So what might 2025 bring? At this point it appears that many roads will lead to Donald Trump.

Few presidents have had such an impact before they walk (back) into the White House. The anticipatory effect of Donald Trump is remarkable. The Trump Factor will dominate many key international events and relationships during 2025.

This is most pertinent to Ukraine. If there’s one prediction that on the basis of publicly-available material it’s reasonably safe to make for 2025 is that the Ukraine war will come to an end — or change its form — one way or another.

Trump is unlikely to be able to end the war within in 24 hours — but he may well bring it to a speedy end.

That’s not to say that either side will be pleased with the outcome, but Trump has huge leverage over Ukraine and its leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That leverage comes from the money that the US contributes to Ukraine’s war effort and Washington’s influence in NATO.

Although Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the organisation is effectively bankrolling Ukraine’s war into a third year. The reality is that Ukraine would not be able to fend off Russia without funding from the US and European Union, which comes via NATO.

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy knows that without external help he cannot indefinitely keep fending off Russia — Putin is clearly content to keep pouring young men and women onto the front line as cannon fodder. While Europe may try to make up any reduction if the US winds back funding, Europe also does not want to inherit a fight against Russia without US money and arms.

If Trump forces an end to the Ukraine war, Ukrainians are likely to be angry with the outcome.

But while Trump can strong-arm Ukraine, the only way he can convince Vladimir Putin that Russia should put down its weapons is to agree that it can keep whatever land it currently has and that Ukraine will not be admitted to NATO.

Which would mean, in turn, that Russia keeps the 20 per cent or so that it has taken since the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Aggression would have been rewarded — richly. The map of Europe would have been re-drawn.

The reason the war in Ukraine has escalated in recent weeks is that both sides are expecting Trump to demand that the war ends: so both sides are jostling to capture — or hold — as much land as possible.

This was the strategic reason behind Ukraine’s audacious effort to enter Russia and capture Kursk, and the reason Russia has flown the 10,000 soldiers from North Korea as part of the Kursk effort.

A forced deal under which Russia keeps what it has taken with violence would be a cruel and unfair outcome for Ukraine. It would mean rewarding Russia with one-fifth of a sovereign country which it has illegally invaded.

But based on all available indications, that’s real politic in the age of Trump and Putin.

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Xi and Trump jostling to be winner

China will — yet again — be a key player in 2025. If Trump does what he has said he would do, he will use tariffs both as punishments and as trade levers. He’s already made clear to Canada and Mexico that he will hit them with 10 per cent tariffs to punish them for not being more effective in restricting the flow of fentanyl into the US.

Trump has raised the prospect of imposing tariffs of up to 60 per cent on China. Which in turn would spark a trade war.

The US-China relationship will depend largely on the personal relationship between Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping — the two most powerful men in the world and two men clearly versed in power and mind games.

Both of these men are used to winning. Neither wants to be runner-up in anything.

It’s impossible to predict how that relationship will go, but an early act of the drama came when Trump extended a personal invitation to Xi to attend his inauguration. It would be unusual for a Chinese leader to attend, as it was unusual for a US president to extend a personal invitation.

Xi declined, instead opting to send China’s Ambassador to Washington — which fits with usual protocols.

As with many things Trump does, it can be interpreted in more than one way. Was the invitation a genuine olive branch suggesting that Trump wants a warm relationship with his biggest competitor? 

Or was it an act of narcissism, Trump wanting Xi to sit as one of thousands looking on at what will be a Festival of Trump?

CNN saw it through the latter lens. “Getting Xi to fly across the world would be an enormous coup for the president-elect — a fact that would make it politically unfeasible for the Chinese leader,” CNN reported. 

“Such a visit would put the Chinese president in the position of paying homage to Trump and American might — which would conflict with his vision for China’s assumption of a rightful role as a pre-eminent global power. At the inaugural ceremony, Xi would be forced to sit and listen to Trump without having any control over what the new president might say while lacking a right of reply. Xi’s presence would also be seen as endorsing a democratic transfer of power — anathema for an autocrat in a one-party state obsessed with crushing individual expression.”

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Gaza looms large into another year

Once he sits behind his desk in the Oval Office, Trump will not be able to avoid the Israel-Hamas war. Trump has made clear his support for Israel. He stated during his election campaign that Israel should be allowed to “finish the job”, although it’s not clear what that means.

One of the biggest challenges for 2025 will be to try to stabilise and then bring peace to the Middle East.

Gaza, for one, will need to be rebuilt. As Slovenia’s Ambassador to the United Nations said recently: “Gaza doesn’t exist anymore. It is destroyed.”

Gaza’s destruction is extraordinary. Israel has banned foreign media from entering Gaza since the war began, but international agencies are painting an increasingly catastrophic picture.

The Norwegian Refugee Council’s secretary general Jan Egeland recently toured Gaza and reported: “This is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of ‘self defence’ to dismantle armed groups or warfare consistent with humanitarian law. What Israel is doing here, with western-supplied arms, is rendering a densely populated area uninhabitable for almost two million civilians. 

“The families, widows and children I have spoken to are enduring suffering almost unparalleled anywhere in recent history.” 

(In response to this the Israeli Defense Forces told me they are targeting military targets exclusively and that such strikes are subject to relevant international law, including the taking of “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian casualties”.)

Israeli newspaper Haaretz recently spoke to Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza who alleged that in Gaza anyone who crosses an imaginary line in the Neztarim corridor is shot to death, “with every Palestinian casualty counting as a terrorist — even if they were just a child”. 

The paper quoted an IDF commander saying: “The forces in the field call it ‘the line of dead bodies’. After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.” 

(The IDF told the ABC all activities conducted by the IDF in Gaza, including in the Netzarim corridor, were carried out in accordance with “structured combat procedures, plans and operational orders approved by the highest ranks in the IDF”.)

And Amnesty International, in a report Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, said since October 7, 2023, Israel had carried out “relentless aerial and ground attacks, many of them with large explosive weapons, which have caused massive damage and flattened entire neighbourhoods and cities across Gaza, along with their life-supporting infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites and symbols deeply ingrained in Palestinians’ collective memory.”

Amnesty concluded that “there is sufficient evidence to believe that Israel’s conduct in Gaza following October 7, 2023, amounts to genocide.” 

(The IDF said the report’s allegations of genocide and intentional harm were “not only unfounded but also ignore Hamas’s violations of international law, including its use of civilians as human shields and its deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians.”)

While Israel disputes Amnesty’s allegations, what is not in dispute is that the physical re-building of Gaza will be a major international challenge. 

The enclave’s 2.3 million people cannot live in rubble and squalor permanently.

Apart from the humanitarian consequence of that, that would create one of the world’s largest incubators of would-be terrorists.

As Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s security service Shin Bet told me in Israel for Four Corners in March: “You cannot deter a person or a group of people if they believe that they have nothing to lose. We Israelis, we shall have security only when they (Palestinians) will have hope.”

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A challenge at home

The rebuilding of Gaza and the search for peace in the Middle East will present real challenges for Australia.

Few conflicts evoke such emotional responses in Australia as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Given these emotions, it’s worth re-visiting some of Australia’s basic tenets of foreign policy.

While the Coalition and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have tried to suggest that Australia’s renewed support for a two-state solution at the United Nations is a change of position, Australia has been a leading supporter of a two-state solution since the Chifley Labor government led the push for such a solution at the United Nations in 1947.

As Liberal Party prime minister, John Howard saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the “root cause” for conflicts in the Middle East. In 2006, he said: “Australians want the fighting to stop and Australia also wants everybody to address the root cause of the problem, and the root cause of the problem is still, in the whole of the Middle East, is still the settlement of the Palestinian issue.” 

Howard’s long-time support for a two-state solution was echoed in 2023 by six former prime ministers — Howard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. 

They signed a letter condemning Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, urged sustained humanitarian access for Gaza, called for the unconditional release of the hostages in Gaza and re-affirmed “the Australian government’s enduring support for a two-state solution”.

Few conflicts have the potential to lead to such death and destruction as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

‘No man is an island’

The world has many conflicts, many of which are getting worse.

If 2024 has taught the world anything, it’s that more efforts need to go into political rather than military solutions.

Rarely has John Donne’s famous 1624 poem For Whom the Bell Tolls, stressing human connectedness, been more relevant than today: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

When Hamas killed 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7 and kidnapped 250 others it was a devastating event for humanity. When Israel subsequently killed tens of thousands of children and women, that too was a devastating event for humanity.

Unless there is a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many more thousands of civilians will likely die, both Israeli and Palestinian.

Amid all the problems facing the world in 2025, the world’s most intractable conflict can be solved. It simply requires the political will of all key players to choose a political solution over a military one.