2024 proved to be an extremely turbulent year, with political developments unpredictable, sometimes illogical and inexplicable. Obviously a result of the new times, new morals and new peculiar conditions that have prevailed on the international stage in the last several years.
The two major war fronts, her and hers, remained active and yielded decisive events for the continuation. The many uncertainties of the evolving geopolitical realignments remained intact and sufficiently threatening to both global security and international economic stability.
The end of 2024 found Ukraine retreating in the face of Russian aggression and supremacy. Its summer counteroffensive on Russian soil, in the Kursk zone, did not yield the expected territorial gains that would have strengthened its negotiating position, but, on the contrary, made Russia more aggressive, which hastened to test new intercontinental weapons and to declare to the whole world that threatened will not even hesitate to attack Kiev unthinkably with nuclear weapons.
Now Western aid is not unlimited, Americans and Europeans are hesitant, as a result of which the endurance of the Ukrainian leadership is tested and everything hangs by a thread.
Despite the many fears of Eastern Europeans and Scandinavians who assess Russian aggression as particularly important and threatening, the most likely possibility is that the Ukrainian leadership will be dragged in 2025, willingly or not, into a heavy-handed negotiation, with all that this implies for the territories who will lose.
On the other front in the Middle East, developments were defined by the extreme in scope, intensity and persistence of its aggression. Its superior, in weapons, intelligence and espionage networks, war machine Netanyahu insisted from the beginning on the almost total demolition of Gaza and the extermination of Hamas, then succeeded in the first phase by undermining the communication buzzers to immobilize thousands of fighters of Hezbollah of Lebanon and then to exterminate its entire leadership, thereby freeing the fighting Assad jihadist rebel forces and hasten its almost bloodless overthrow.
The end of 2024 found the jihadist rebels of the 2014 Arab Spring dominant in Damascus, the trophy, the Turkish allies of the “moderate” Jolani to treat Syria as their protectorate and claim the liquidation of the Kurdish militias and ultimately control of the maritime zone between Cyprus and Syria through the expected EEZ delimitation agreement with the new transitional government in Damascus.
From these stormy developments the theocratic Iran lost all its investment in the Middle East. Of its infamous “Axis of Resistance” only the brazen Houthis of Yemen remained active, and even they, isolated as they are, are in danger of being destroyed very soon.
Israel is now on its way to Gaza, tends to secure its northern borders by deploying its forces in southern Lebanon and Syria, and together with its American allies is trying to keep active the prospect of a Kurdish state in the intermediate zone between Syria , Iraq and Turkey so as to be covered as much as possible from future risks.
2025 is expected to be dominated by these countervailing pursuits between Israel and Turkey and is likely to provide many more events in the still volatile and volatile Middle East and Southeast Mediterranean region.
It is indicative that in the last days of 2024, on the occasion of developments in Syria, doubts were raised about the viability of the regime Sissy in Egypt. Be that as it may, this wider zone seems capable of giving during the new year a new round of changes and geopolitical shifts, which will probably affect Greek affairs as well, particularly in terms of relations with the intensely assertive Turkey, which imagines that they have come the confirmation times of her neo-Ottoman dreams.
In these peculiar and highly variable geopolitical conditions, Europe has remained largely inactive and caught between the possibility of a generalization of the war and the perpetuating effects of the energy crisis created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Its economy continued to suffer and struggle with the almost utopian plan of the green transition, its competitiveness receded against its major competitors and its productive capacity as well, putting unbearable pressure on once prosperous and tolerant societies. And its influence on international developments is limited, if not non-existent.
Most of the European governments, especially Germany and France, face multiple crises, political, economic and social, as a result of which they are strongly contested, the previous majorities collapse and new forms besiege the old ones, demanding changes and reversals that refer to the dark years of the interwar period.
Last November also saw the victory of his neoconservatives and his eccentric multimillionaire partner in the US to further complicate the situation. As the “Economist” often repeats, the newly elected American leadership, with the new, sometimes illogical and anti-systemic ideas that accompany it, will have an impact everywhere in the world and especially in the Old Continent.
This amalgam of protectionism and assertiveness, as defined by Trump’s “America First” doctrine, will test geopolitical conditions and international economic relations.
In all probability, Europe in 2025 will be faced with the defense gap and with the equally significant deficit of competitiveness and productivity. Covering both will require infinite resources, which, as pointed out by policy.
The misfortune is, as we mentioned above, that the current leaderships in Europe are weak and most of the governments are challenged by ethno-populist formations and forces that enjoy support from Donald Trump and support from the powerful communication networks and media multi-millionaire Elon Musk, who is recently intervening directly into the political affairs of powerful European countries, such as Great Britain and Germany.
In this changing geopolitical and unstable economic environment, Greece, which is more stable than in the past, but always vulnerable to external effects and influences, will be forced to move.
In this sense, there can be no safe predictions for the upcoming happy 2025. The truth is that our country will enter the new year endowed with the performance of 2024, but nothing guarantees continuity.
As a friend used to say, “the world now moves irrationally, as if its constants have collapsed, the available interpretive tools are not sufficient, they are not capable of offering safe predictions and that is why our times are uncertain and largely unpredictable ».
