No More 2024 (December 27, 2024)
Welcome to this special edition of Home & Away—special in the sense that I will mostly look back on the year about to end rather than the week just passed.
First though, I will say a few things about this past week. I’ll start with Matt Gaetz: It turns out that everything we suspected about his conduct and then some was confirmed in the ethics report released—and yet Trump still nominated him to head the Department of Justice even though these findings were well-known when he did so. One has to hope Trump’s selection of Gaetz was done to either send a political signal meant to reassure the MAGA faithful or make good on a promise knowing he would never actually fulfill it. The fact that Gaetz’s replacement, Pam Bondi, was named as quickly as she was suggests there might be something to this theory.
And then you have the president-elect picking fights with Canada, Panama, and Greenland (and by extension Denmark), all in just one week. It is tempting to dismiss all this as unserious, and on one level it is. But there is also something dangerous about these comments, as, regardless of follow-through, they convey the message that the strong have the right to prey on the weak in their own neighborhoods, an approach to the world sure to be welcomed in Beijing and Moscow. I am beginning to think the Trump administration’s foreign policy will be guilty of simultaneous overreach and underreach.
There is much that could be said about 2024, from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and apparently blossoming relationship with Travis Kelce (who, like her, has demonstrated an ability to multitask). And Scottie Scheffler, who managed to win seven PGA Tour tournaments, including the Masters, as well as an Olympic gold medal, and still found time to get arrested. And most special of all, Francesca Haass getting married to a young man from Sydney at the ultimate destination wedding, namely, Bushwick, Brooklyn.
But I digress for a second time from what I intended to discuss. Here are ten takeaways from a year that proved in many ways to be extraordinary:
1. The year of elections proved terrible for most incumbents and their parties. Only Mexico and Taiwan seem to have bucked the trend. While the underlying reasons behind the outcomes varied—from reactions to corruption, poor economic performance, and/or simply a desire for something new—the results were largely consistent. The Conservatives in the UK were routed after 14 years in power. The Indian prime minister won but was humbled. French governments and prime ministers fell, and the German “traffic light” coalition will soon come to an inglorious end. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was also ousted, while the now less powerful LDP must govern through an unwieldy coalition. The ANC in South Africa got a comeuppance, losing an outright majority for the first time in the party’s history. And, of course, here at home Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump who, despite being a former president, was still widely perceived as the outsider promising change.
2. As the above suggests, it was quite a year for Donald Trump and his ever-present sidekick Elon Musk. Trump garnered 50% of the popular vote, winning all seven swing states and a clear Electoral College majority. Republicans also won the Senate and kept the House, giving them control of the federal government if you count an increasingly compliant Supreme Court. This shift away from the Democrats occurred despite President Joe Biden presiding over an economy that was and is the envy of much of the world. What hurt Democrats was a perception held by many Americans that the country’s economy was not working for them. Persistent inflation played a role in Trump’s victory, but the election turned on more than the economy, stupid. In this case it was an out-of-control border that allowed some eight million people to enter the country illegally. And out-of-control wokeness. And a president in obvious decline who should have declared his intention not to run after the 2022 mid-term elections but hung on for far too long, dropping out only after he had no choice following an epically bad debate performance and leaving insufficient time for his vice president to have any real chance at winning. Those in Joe Biden’s inner circle who chose to violate the tenth obligation—to put the country before person or party—did so at great cost. As for Musk, he is now worth well north of $400 billion, more than twice what he was a year ago. He also gave us one of the coolest moments of 2024 with the SpaceX booster capture. The problem is that his judgment doesn’t match his genius, as what can work in the engineering and business world doesn’t necessarily translate to politics. I also see his views on China and immigration are beginning to attract critical attention from the MAGA world and the likes of Steve Bannon. This is sure to be a space—or SpaceX or just X—worth watching.
3. Europe deserves special mention for two reasons. Let’s begin with the economic. The region continues to fall in absolute and relative terms alike. Its major economies (Germany and the U.K.) essentially flatlined in 2024; the EU overall grew at less than 1%. Europe continued to demonstrate it is better at regulating than innovating. Its share of global GDP is now under 15%. This decline will reduce Europe’s importance as an American ally and as a global actor.
4. Europe merits a mention for geopolitical reasons as well, namely, the war in Ukraine, soon to complete its third year. 2024 saw Russia beginning to grind Ukraine down, gaining some territory in the east despite Ukraine’s gains around Kursk, which Russia brought in North Korean soldiers to defend. By the year’s end though Ukraine’s president signaled a warming to the idea of accepting a ceasefire in place, setting the stage for 2025 to be the year when consultations between Washington and Kyiv as well as negotiations between Ukraine and Russia could become as important as developments on the battlefield. The biggest questions are whether Trump does enough to strengthen Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table, and, if U.S. military support for Ukraine does continue, whether it, combined with Russia’s fast deteriorating economy, leads Putin to meet Zelensky halfway.
5. My bet is historians will judge that the most notable events of 2024 took place in the Middle East. For much of the year the world’s attention was focused on Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023 attacks, which included relentless attacks in Gaza that devastated Hamas, killed its principal political and military leaders along with a large number of its foot soldiers, but also caused an additional estimated 25,000 Gazan civilian deaths and widespread humanitarian suffering amidst the rubble. Israel’s global reputation was a different sort of casualty. The year ended with no ceasefire, no return of the remaining hostages, and no mechanism in place for governing Gaza if and when such a ceasefire materializes.
6. But 2024 may well be remembered more for the way the region was reshaped. Israel decapitated Hezbollah, depriving Iran of its most powerful proxy force and providing a renewed opportunity for the long-beleaguered country of Lebanon to wrestle back control. Israel also broke whatever unwritten rules existed in its shadow war against Iran, assassinating a key Hamas leader while he was staying in Tehran and then hitting Iranian air defense and missile production facilities two separate times in response to previous Iranian attacks on Israel. In Syria, after a decade of civil war and just as many had come to conclude that Bashar al-Assad was here to stay, his government quickly collapsed and he fled to Moscow. Here a much-weakened Hezbollah, a distracted Russia, and a weakened Iran exposed Assad and contributed to his shocking ouster after more than a half-century of brutal single-family rule. Last, but far from least, was the weakening of Iran in just about every way imaginable, which facilitated many of the developments mentioned above. The Shia crescent is no more. Iran itself was shown to be totally vulnerable to Israeli aerial attack and unable to mount an efficient one of its own. The country’s president and foreign minister died in a helicopter crash; its economy crashed as well, and this energy-rich country ended 2024 unable to provide its people enough fuel to live and work. Now, Israel is ramping up attacks on yet another Iranian proxy, namely, the Houthis in Yemen. Ideally, they will suffer a fate similar to that of Hamas and Hezbollah but with far less collateral damage. Regardless, 2025 could well be the year of Iran as much as anything else.
7. The war in Gaza made its way to American campuses. Much of the reaction was both uninformed and one-sided. A good many schools failed to set clear guidelines (or back them up if they indeed existed) that protected free speech while simultaneously distinguishing between free speech and coercion, and failed to protect the ability of students to attend classes and have the college experience they signed up for. Several presidents, including those of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs as a result.
8. South Korea produced another one of the year’s political surprises, in this case, an unwarranted imposition of martial law by a frustrated president that was quickly overturned, leading to his impeachment and, at a minimum, temporary loss of power. The good news is that events in Seoul demonstrated the resilience of democracy in a country that is one of the world’s leading economies and a close U.S. ally that faces the threat of a North Korea armed to the teeth with, among other things, dozens of nuclear weapons. The not-so-good news is the subsequent impeachment of the acting president, a development that suggests South Korea’s politics have become as polarized and dysfunctional as our own.
9. 2024 was the year that an undeniable new alignment—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—emerged on the world scene. Some call it the Axis of Upheaval or the Axis of Autocracies; I prefer the new Gang of Four. I wrote about it a few months back. The four are finding all sorts of ways to help one another politically, economically, and militarily as they seek to challenge the interests of the United States and the West. Even so, it was still a bad year for China economically, for Russia not just economically but also in Syria, and for Iran in just about every way. That North Korea seems to have had the best year of all of them speaks volumes.
10. As for climate change, it progressed unabated this year but with extreme weather events that we have grown increasingly accustomed to, which in part is why so little gets done. Much like debt, climate change is a slow-motion crisis, something few governments are inclined to respond to, especially when their own sacrifice would not be enough to move the needle globally. Meanwhile, demand for energy and fossil fuels continues to grow. That 2024’s annual global climate confab was in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a country dependent on producing and exporting oil and gas, tells you much of what you need to know. 2024, like 2023, was the new hottest year on record.
Is there a bottom line to all of the above? Let me suggest three. First, we should never dismiss the capacity for surprise. What happened in the Middle East and South Korea was not on anyone’s bingo card when the year began. Second, we are, for obvious reasons, sensitive to the problem facing democracies, but authoritarian systems have their own political and economic troubles. We saw what took place in Syria and Iran; the economic woes of China and Russia could come to have all sorts of political consequences for their leadership and their foreign policies. And third, the fact that 2024 was a tough year for incumbents meant that yesterday’s outsiders have now become today’s insiders. Which means if they prove unable to turn things around, they too could well be turned out. History stops for no one.
Wishing you all a happy new year. Or failing that, an interesting one.
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Richard Haass in the news
Saturday, December 21: Wall Street Week
Sunday, December 22: Rosemary Barton Live (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
Sunday, December 22: Weekends With Alex Witt
Thursday, December 26: José Díaz-Balart (Israel Claims to Strike Houthi Targets in Yemen)
Thursday, December 26: José Díaz-Balart (The Biggest Problem with The Panama Canal Is a Lack of Water Caused by Climate Change)
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens