Taking the Pulse: This Year’s Good and the Coming Bad and Ugly

Pol Morillas, director at CIDOB, reflects on the positives of 2024 and share his concerns for 2025 at Carnegie Europe’s blog ‘Strategic Europe’. “With Donald Trump’s reelection and the consolidation of nationalist leaderships in many countries, two particularly challenging developments will shape international politics. Diplomacy will be increasingly portrayed as a one-man show pretending to represent national interests. Ego-politics and individualism will be the basis on which foreign policy priorities are built. This will come at the expense of the nuances and complexities of exercising world politics. Second, declaratory and grandiloquent objectives will take precedence over just and consensual peace agreements. Ceasefires or truces in conflicts will not be matched with durable peace solutions. At best, negative peace—or the absence of open conflict—will be achieved, but positive peace frameworks, seeking justice, reparation, durable solutions, or even socioeconomic reparation will not find adequate and comprehensive diplomatic efforts. 2025 will be a year of diplomatic fireworks, not so much of new and sustainable peace architectures”.