After a deeply chaotic 2024, is 2025 set to be a year of conflict and war?

After a deeply chaotic 2024, is 2025 set to be a year of conflict and war?

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Gaza to Damascus, Tehran to Beirut, in Jerusalem, Kyiv, Moscow, Dhaka and Washington… it was a year of chaos all around.

What then were the major events that set 2024 apart?

It was a year when virtually every nation (more than 70 of them, to be exact) held polls and a host of fresh new faces were elected to office or grabbed power.

It was also a year when war and conflict was a recurring and disturbing theme.

The United States certainly sprung a huge surprise by rejecting Democrat Kamala Harris and falling back on their controversial president from four years ago, who won by a landslide.

Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt – some may say not one but two – and is set to shake up not just America but the world. US power will be tested as Trump threatens not just a tariff war and a tax cut but a crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Tantalisingly, a shadow president in tech maven Elon Musk is set to play puppeteer on the world stage.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi - feted by the outgoing President Joe Biden at his home in Wilmington as a special ally - is also bracing for this Trumpian test.

Talking of India, our immediate challenge in 2024 didn't even come from arch-enemy Pakistan but from China, and a four-year-long border standoff, that is unlike any of the preceding clashes along the Line of Actual Control. Geospatial intelligence has lifted the lid off China's infrastructure blitz – roads, underground tunnels and airbases are redrawing the boundary while showing scant regard for India.

The peace agreement that India ultimately forged with China had the active encouragement of one of India's strongest allies, Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose growing closeness to the Chinese President Xi Jinping was a factor behind a show of unity at the BRICS summit in Kazan that Russia was hosting.

The October Border agreement between India and China after 24 rounds of talks went through in the year. But whether India can take China at its word is another matter.

2024 brought other challenges to India.

One was when the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's charge that India had sent its agents to assassinate a Khalistani leader was backed by the US and the 'Five Eyes'. India put up a strong defence but the debate continues to fester with the spectre of Khalistan separatism engaging Indian security experts.

Delhi also had to move swiftly to retain a modicum of influence over a Sri Lanka that was turning Left with the ascension to power of a former virulently anti-Indian party that swept aside entrenched political parties. President Anura Kumara Dissanayaka's victory was a major upset, but India has scrambled to build bridges with Sri Lanka's new dispensation.

That said, China's presence in Sri Lankan waters remains a source of major concern.

The year also saw Delhi tip-toe back into Kabul, despite deep reservations about the Mullahcracy's treatment of women and the Taliban Emirate's refusal to allow girls' education and provide healthcare. And days after India's seniormost official in charge of relations with Kabul met with senior members of the Taliban, a leading member of the Haqqani network – with once close ties to Pakistan’s counter-intelligence agency ISI - was bumped off by a suicide bomber.

Was this a message from Pakistan to its former protégé, the Haqqanis, for their outreach to the West and to India, for harbouring anti-Pakistan elements? Was it an internal rift within the Taliban? Is India going to pay a price for warming up to the new Kabul?

Far more shocking was India's failure to see the fall of its trusted ally in Dhaka, Prime Minister Shaikh Hasina Wajed. It was a monumental error of judgement.

The students' movement that led to Sheikh Hasina's ouster stands hijacked by violent radical Islamic elements that unleashed a string of attacks on Hindu monks, on churches and Sufi shrines. India, which has given Hasina refuge, is still scrambling to find a way to tackle the rise of a radical Islamic theocracy in its now vulnerable eastern flank.

Looking beyond India's borders, 2024 will be remembered for the major upheavals, the wars and conflicts that erupted.

The Middle East, where innocent Palestinians in Gaza continue to pay the price for an Iran working in tandem with its proxy Hamas to wage war on Israel, has stood out in its suffering.

The nuclear shadow loomed over the region - as Israel and Iran unleashed a tit-for tat missile attack on each other's territory that left Iran's missile shield exposed for what it was, and raised fears in Israel, despite its much vaunted Iron Dome, of its own vulnerability.

But the Middle East has seen Israel being given a free hand to re-arrange borders. And it's not just Gaza and the hapless Palestinians and Hamas and Hezbollah leaders who are facing Israeli hell-fire, but Lebanon as well and now Syria. The overnight exit of Syrian strongman Bashar al Assad from the capital Damascus is a body blow to Iran and to Russia, which has lost the use of both its bases in Syria.

The Kurdish enclave Rojava is facing Turkiye's wrath.

A major dam on the Euphrates river at risk. Multiple cities are falling, under the Turkish boot.

Israel is the clear winner. It has snapped the Shia crescent that ran from Syria through Iraq and Lebanon. Israel has taken over the Golan Heights. It is building a buffer against a nuclear Iran. That may or may not hold.

At The New Indian Express' Global Express, we've tracked the far more alarming rise in Syria of an Al Qaeda offshoot in the Hayat – Tahrir Al Sham that has taken power in the Syrian capital. Does it have the US blessing? Are they working in tandem with Israel and Turkiye's strongman Reccep Erdogan, who is the new man to watch – just as Russia's Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?

The Russia–Ukraine clash, meanwhile, put all of Europe at risk. Russia is waiting for a Trumpian solution.

2024 – This was the Chaos Theory at its best, laying the seeds for a ever-widening Global Disorder in 2025? A year of conflict, and war?