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Test of a Russian ICBM, launched on October 26, 2024. Since invading Ukraine, Russia has placed its nuclear forces on ready and has increased testing and development of its ICBMs.
Anyone who watches soccer — “football”, whatever — knows that the wildest part of the game is always the last five minutes.
That’s when both teams, knowing that the end is near, take bigger risks. They open up on the field. They make longer passes, attempt crazier shots. And they usually score more goals.
There’s actually data to support this. One guy ran the numbers on more than forty thousand goals scored in international matches since the 19th century and found that yes, there is more scoring in the final moments of a game. After all, with the whistle about to blow, what’s a team got to lose?
That’s what’s happening in Ukraine right now.
Just over a thousand days since Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale assault on the country, the whistle on this phase of the conflict will sound soon — and by soon, we mean on January 20, 2025. That’s when Donald Trump will be back in the White House.
Trump, of course, has questioned Washington’s massive support for Ukraine and promised to end the war in “24 hours.”
Nobody knows what that really means, but everybody understands that whatever the battlefield looks like in mid-January will be the baseline for whatever Trump tries to do.
That’s why the past week or so in the Ukraine war has felt so much like the 85th minute of a deadlocked World Cup match. All sides are pulling out the stops to maximize the territory they control and the deterrent fear that they instill in their opponents.
The US and UK have now — after months of cautious restraint — finally given permission to Ukraine to use Western made long-range missiles to knock out military installations deeper inside of Russia. Washington also began shipping anti-personnel landmines to Kyiv, so that Ukraine could mine the frontlines that Russian troops are gradually pushing back every day now.
The Ukrainians wasted no time trying out their new Western weapons, firing at least two barrages of the long range missiles at Russian military installations.
Not to be outdone, Russia fired an “experimental” new intermediate range missile of its own into Ukraine. There was some dispute about whether it might count as an “intercontinental” ballistic missile or not, but experts noted that whatever you call it, the weapon was far better suited to nuclear payloads than to the conventional ones that it carried into Dnipro.
The unspoken signal was clear: we didn’t split the atom on you this time, but we are readying the tools to do so in the future.
Later in the day, Putin also declared that Russia has “the right to use our weapons against the military facilities of countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities.”
Translation: we have the right to strike military facilities in NATO countries.
Since the earliest moments of the war, many in the West have wondered — with frequent reminders from the Kremlin — if a cornered or slighted Putin might in fact use a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine. And if so, wouldn’t that invite a response from NATO that could escalate to a more direct confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers?
A terrifying thought. And one that Putin revived this week by signing a new, looser nuclear weapons doctrine. Russia is now prepared to use its atomic arsenal in response even to certain conventional attacks.
The good news is: it’s hard to see anyone deliberately choosing the very worst and most radioactive outcomes right now. Putin is, after all, doing relatively well at the moment. Russia’s forces are advancing slowly but daily. A friendlier US president is about to take power. And breaking the nuclear taboo would risk a huge backlash, not only from Russia’s adversaries in the West, but from its friends in the Global South and China too. It just wouldn’t make sense.
The bad news is this: sense sometimes goes out the window in the final rush of a game. Miscalculations or miscommunications become more likely. When that’s on the soccer pitch, it means a turnover, a counterattack, a heartbreaking/exhilarating last minute goal.
But when it happens during a major war in Eastern Europe involving the world’s two largest nuclear powers, it can lead to a dangerous escalation that quickly takes on a life of its own.
The next two months are going to be the longest, and most dangerous, five minutes in the world.
World leaders assemble for a group photo at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on November 19, 2024. The gathering was overshadowed by Donald Trump's impending return to the White House.
At the G20 gathering this week in Brazil, a key question emerged: Has Donald Trump already cowed world leaders, two months before he even takes power? It certainly seems like it.
The G20 leaders arrived in Rio de Janeiro to deliver their best ideas for how, collectively, to solve urgent global problems like poverty, climate change, inequality, and war.
These summits are always a little about the old ultra-verbiage, sure, but they are also meant to burnish the legitimacy and importance of multilateral approaches to global challenges.
This time, the G20 got Trumped. Loudly. The president-elect’s America First 2.0 agenda hung over the proceedings like the fearsome black cloud in Don Dellilo’s novel White Noise.
How do we measure the Trump cloud’s impact? Just look at the summit’s final communiqué, the pre-negotiated summary these gabfests always release. They merit attention not only for what they say, but also for what they don’t. This time, what it didn’t say was a lot.
Take Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, for example. With Kyiv now using Western-made long-range missiles, and Putin responding by hinting at a nuclear response and flinging larger and larger missiles of his own, the communiqué’s authors played dentist, carefully extracting any teeth that might nip at the Russian leader, who of course did not attend.
“We highlight the human suffering and negative added impacts of the war with regard to global food and energy security, supply chains, macro-financial stability, inflation and growth,” it said, clearly using the secret diplomatic formula for verbal vanilla. If that alone weren’t enough for the toothless, it continued by calling for “the promotion of peaceful, friendly, and good neighborly relations among nations.”
No mention of Russia by name.
No mention of the illegal invasion.
No reminder that Putin continues to slaughter civilians and wreck critical infrastructure.
Nothing about human rights abuses.
This alone was a triumph for Putin as he eagerly awaits the return of Trump, who ran in part on questioning support for Ukraine and pledging to end the war in “24 hours.”
No one saw this more clearly than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“G20 countries are sitting in Brazil. Did they say something?” he asked. “Nothing.”
The impotence of the G20s Ukraine statement was probably best summed up by a man who is himself hanging by a thread politically these days: German Chancellor Olaf Sholz, who muttered, “It is too little when the G20 cannot find the words to make it clear Russia is responsible.”
Too little.
That might be the epitaph of this pre-Trump G20.
Knowing that Donald Trump will not continue support for Ukraine, and highlighting the truth that the Global South has never supported the US and EU’s hardline views of the Russian invasion, the G20 slinked away from calling out Moscow, just as they did last year. This signals that a Trump-brokered ceasefire, which will likely give Russia much of what it wants in terms of Ukrainian territory and neutrality, looks much more likely.
But Ukraine was just the start of the smallness.
The language on the Israel-Gaza war was a boilerplate call for a two-state solution and more humanitarian aid, without a mention either of the Hamas-held hostages, the Oct. 7 attack, or the 40,000 dead in Gaza. The statement on a global billionaire tax — a decades-old idea that was particularly dear to summit host and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — was equally eye-glazing: “We will seek to engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” OK … and then what?
Perhaps the only real positive was the launch of the Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, in order to deal with the stunning fact that over 733 million people face food shortages every year. That could mean microfinance, food programs, and investment in sustainable food production. It is a good thing to see countries sign on to this even if the failure to eradicate hunger and poverty is, sadly, perennial.
Watching the leaders try to spin the summit’s accomplishments was like watching Rafael Nadal retire from tennis: a once-powerful champion reduced to swatting at balls he can’t reach, limping off the court to applause not for what he just did, but for what he no longer can do.
Like Nadal, these leaders know they are ceding the world to a new champion for the next four years, and they still have no idea what to do about it, except duck, stall, evade, and suck up.
Was there any pushback from these multilateral champions against a world shifting toward strongman isolationism, tariffs, and an American president who will begin the great retreat from the global stage of cooperation?
Not much.
The next G20 will be very different from this one, where leaders gazed up to see Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking their meeting.
At the next one, they might need to find the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.
Donald Trump on a throne spinning a globe on his finger.
The global response to Donald Trump’s imminent return to power has been nothing short of remarkable.
From Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu hinting at a potential Lebanon cease-fire as a "gift" to the president-elect, to Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky saying the war will “end faster” under the incoming administration, to European and Asian leaders expressing Stockholm syndrome-levels of excitement to work with him, foreign leaders have been lining up to kiss the president-elect’s ring since his election victory two weeks ago.
To be sure, most US allies and adversaries still dislike and mistrust Trump. But with memories of the clashes, chaos, and unpredictability of his first term still fresh, they know that they get crosswise with Trump at their own peril. The president-elect still believes America is being taken for a ride, values are something other countries use to constrain US power, and allies are only as good as the money they spend on US goods and protection. And Trump is willing to flex Washington’s full military and economic muscle – whether in the form of high tariffs or the withdrawal of US security support – to extract gains from other nations.
World leaders are accordingly doing everything they can to avoid becoming a target of his wrath, using flattery and favor to appeal to Trump’s ego and transactional nature in the hopes of getting in his good graces. After all, they know Trump is nothing if not willing to sit down with anyone – whether a longstanding democratic ally or a brutal dictator – to try to cut a deal that makes him look good at home.
The upshot is that at least in the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump is poised to rack up far more foreign policy wins than many people appreciate. Not because he’s a “stable genius” or a particularly gifted negotiator, but because he’ll be running the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, with leverage over virtually every country and less aversion to wielding it than any US president that came before him.
But that’s table stakes for Trump. There are three reasons why his ability to get concessions from other countries and put points on the board early on will be greater than during his first term.
First, Trump is no longer isolated, with a growing number of world leaders eager to welcome him to the international arena. Eight years ago, the president-elect was an outlier, with few true friends on the global stage apart from Netanyahu, Gulf leaders, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and a handful of others. But things have changed since.
Italy's Giorgia Meloni, currently the most popular G7 leader, shares Trump's views on immigration, social policy, and economic nationalism. Argentina’s Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding “Trump of the Pampas,” was the first foreign leader to meet with him after the election. In Canada, the Conservative Party's Pierre Poilievre is poised to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, promising a much more Trump-aligned relationship. Germany’s Olaf Scholz will likewise soon be replaced, probably by the opposition conservative Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, a wealthy former businessman who is ideologically closer to the incoming American president. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is strategically positioning himself to become the new Shinzo Abe, going as far as taking up golf again to establish a closer relationship with Trump. The list goes on.
Trump is no more a fan of multilateralism than he was eight years ago. He remains mistrustful of alliances and indifferent to other countries’ values and political systems. But whenever he attends gatherings of the G7, G20, and NATO now, the president-elect will at least be surrounded by like-minded leaders who will be much more receptive to his “America First” agenda and inclined to play by his rules.
Second, the world is much more dangerous than it was in 2017, raising the stakes of misalignment with Trump. Major wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, heightened US-China tensions, and a more fragile global economy make the costs of being on the wrong side of the president-elect exponentially higher than they were during Trump’s first term.
And third, Trump’s domestic political power is significantly more consolidated this time around. The president-elect has unified control of Congress and a pliant Republican Party, knows his way around Washington, DC, and is surrounding himself with far more ideologically aligned loyalists than in his first term. Gone are the institutionalist career staffers and establishment Republicans who often checked Trump’s most disruptive impulses. For world leaders, this means alternative backchannels to get around the president-elect’s foreign policy preferences won’t be nearly as available or effective. Whether or not they like it, it’s Trump’s way or the highway now.
It’s no wonder that we’re seeing so many countries preemptively bend the knee, desperate to find common ground with Trump before he takes office. China, for instance, is floating potential concessions to avert an economically destabilizing trade war, from organizing a Ukraine peace conference to buying US Treasuries and increasing purchases of American goods. Iran granted a meeting to Trump advisor-extraordinaire Elon Musk in an apparent effort to facilitate a de-escalatory deal. Taiwan’s leadership is planning a massive new American arms purchase offer to show Trump they’re serious about paying more for US protection. Meanwhile, Ukraine is not only expressing readiness to negotiate a cease-fire but is also weighing several sweeteners – including potential business deals, access to the country’s natural resources, and Ukrainian troop deployments to replace US forces in Europe after the war – to convince Trump that continued US support is in his personal and political interests.
None of this means that every effort to appease Trump will succeed, or that Trump’s mere presence in the White House will end every war, de-escalate every conflict, and resolve every disagreement. If history is any guide, most attempts to strike a lasting deal with the president-elect will fail. In the long run, his approach will erode America’s influence on the global stage, deepen the G-Zero vacuum of leadership, and make the world a more dangerous place.
In the near term, however, Trump’s penchant for bilateral deal-making, disregard for longstanding American norms and values, reputation for unpredictability, and unrestrained leadership of the world’s sole superpower will increase the odds of improbable breakthroughs.
Welcome to Trump’s international honeymoon – it may not last long, but at least nobody’s having any fun.
People hold signs reading "Trump, we will not pay for the wall" and "Trump, stop the mass deportations" near the border fence between Mexico and the U.S., in Tijuana, Mexico March 13, 2018.
The president-elect has promised to deport between 15 and 20 million people, which is more than the roughly 13.3 million undocumented people estimated to be residing in the US. “There's a lot of uncertainty around how high deportations could go under Trump,” says Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “I'd roughly estimate he will deport between 500,000 and 600,000 in 2025.” That would mark an increase from the current number of approximately 200,000 annually. But, Daponte-Smith added, “there's room for that number to move upward.”
What are Trump’s immigration plans? On the campaign trail, he promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. So far, the president-elect has tapped immigration hardliners likeStephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Gov. Kristi Noem to serve as his deputy chief of staff, border czar, and chief of Homeland Security, respectfully – key positions for immigration and border security.
In a Fox News interview, Homan said deporations would prioritize “public safety and national security threats” as well those who disobeyed court orders to leave the country. For logistical ease, ICE would likely begin with single adults – although Homan defended Trump’s family separation policy and said that families “can be deported together.”
ICE would also likely prioritize immigrants from countries with Temporary Protected Status, because it has reliable biometric data on recipients, making them easier to find. TPS authorizes immigrants to live and work legally in the US when their home country has been deemed unsafe for return. Within TPS recipients, ICE would probably start with countries that accept the most return flights of deportees. However, Venezuela, which has the most people in the program, does not accept deportees. So Trump’s only option would be sending them to a third-party country, which would likely be met with legal battles. The TPS countries accepting the most removal flights are Haiti and Honduras.
Trump faces headwinds. On the logistics side, ICE already has 38,863 people in custody, and it “simply doesn’t have the capacity to handle one million deportations a year right now,” says Daponte-Smith. “If Republicans beef up funding for ICE and other enforcement agencies next year, that would help significantly,” and a united Congress will make this easier for them. But he also doesn’t buy that deploying the military would be much help picking up the slack. “The National Guard has no experience with deportations, and I doubt it would be easy to convert them to that purpose,” he says. Still, declaring a national emergency would also give the president more power to devote funds to the issue without congressional approval.
The other big headwind is political. “Mass deportations will create a huge political blowback, potentially involving large-scale street protests,” says Daponte-Smith. Even if Trump and his team are not responsive to this, it “could be an issue for congressional Republicans” ahead of the 2026 midterms.
This week, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping's new podcast, This Authoritarian Life, welcomes special guest Donald Trump to talk about a very (in)fertile issue. #PUPPETREGIME
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Sen. John Thune (R-SD) speaks to the media after being chosen to serve as Senate majority leader at the United States Capitol.
While the final margin is still being determined, the GOP cemented control after winning critical battleground seats in Arizona and California. Republicans, however, will likely have just a slight edge over the Democrats in the House, especially after GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz stepped down yesterday after being nominated to become Trump’s attorney general.
In the Senate on Wednesday, meanwhile, Republicans elected John Thune of South Dakota to serve as majority leader in the next Congress. He succeeds Mitch McConnell, who held the term for 18 years.
The appointment marks a continuation of a McConnell-like establishment Republican leading the Senate, and a pivot away from his MAGA-loyal opponent Rick Scott. Scott, who pitched himself as Trump’s closest ally in the race, came in third behind another traditional Republican, John Cornyn. Thune led after the first ballot, raking in 25 votes while Cornyn won 15 and Scott garnered 13 votes.
What’s first on Thune’s agenda? He will be under immense pressure to approve Trump’s growing list of cabinet picks. “The Senate will move as quickly as possible to confirm Trump’s appointees” says Eurasia Group’s US director Clayton Allen. “Thune recognizes that this will be a key point of (potential) contention with the White House and will work to avoid being pushed into a debate over recess appointments.”
Thune endorsed Trump’s picks to curry favor ahead of the majority leader race, but he “will bristle at actually giving up Senate authority or putting his moderate members in the difficult position of opposing an effort to force recess appointments.”
Beyond approving Trump’s cabinet picks, Republicans are expected to use their united government to expedite their legislative agenda, including tax cuts, loosening of regulations on domestic oil and gas production, and stringent border security measures.
To see all of Trump’s cabinet picks, read our run down here.
Donald Trump
America has spoken. Donald Trump will become president of the United States again. And I can’t say that I’m surprised.
This election comes at a time when people all over the world are unhappy with where their countries are going, and they don’t trust their political institutions to right the ship. Some of that is a product of the deepening geopolitical recession, which is in part driven by a backlash against globalization and the globalist elites who promoted their own economic and political interests at the expense of their populations. Some of it has to do with the economic and social disruption caused by post-pandemic surges in inflation and immigration.
As a result, what was historically an electoral advantage in democracies has become a liability in the current cycle: incumbency. Over the past year, most incumbents around the globe have either been forced out of office or seriously underperformed at the ballot box (e.g., in the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany, Austria, India, South Africa, etc.). Those who haven’t faced voters yet are deeply unpopular and expected to lose power soon (e.g., Canada, Germany, Norway, etc.).
The fact that Kamala Harris couldn’t escape this fate after four years as vice president to an unpopular administration was therefore hardly unexpected. No party has ever retained the White House when incumbent approval is as low as it is. Over 70% believe the country is on the wrong track, and Americans have little confidence in their government’s handling of the top issues they care about: inflation and immigration.
Sure, inflation – the average rate at which prices in the economy increase over time – has come way down from its pandemic-induced highs and is now near the Fed’s target. But prices themselves are still high owing to years of above-target inflation, and those prices aren’t coming down absent a recession (not to mention the fact that Trump’s plans promise to increase inflation). Fair or not, the party in power gets blamed for that. Similarly, illegal immigration has also been coming down, but crossings are still at elevated levels, and most illegal immigrants find ways to stay in the country. Many illegal immigrants also moved (or were moved) from red states to blue states, making the issue more important to more of the country than before.
Democrats had hoped to counter these headwinds with messages about access to abortion, the economy, and Trump’s threat to democracy and general unfitness for office. But a problem got in their way: a hyperpolarized information environment that makes it difficult for either side to reach across the aisle to the other half of the country. There are two radically different information spaces in the US, and the gap between these algorithmically boosted, media-driven bubbles is only growing. It’s increasingly difficult to have a single conversation on any policy issue, let alone to find compromise on solutions, when we don’t even agree on basic facts about what the problems are. That’s a very dysfunctional place to be for our civic democracy.
Ultimately, though, the American people looked at the two candidates and found Trump’s message more compelling, and they handed him as resounding a national victory as either candidate could’ve hoped for in today’s polarized environment. Trump shattered his previous ceiling of national support and made gains across the board relative to 2020. He is on track to sweep every swing state and become the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years on the back of a broad-based shift to the right in almost every geography – from rural areas to my very own New York City – and with nearly every demographic group, including young, female, Black, and Hispanic voters.
The Republican Party also took control of the Senate, with at least 52 and as many as 56 seats in the 100-seat chamber – enough to confirm Trump’s appointees, but not enough to get away with repealing the legislative filibuster or confirming obviously unqualified nominees. Republicans are favored to win a narrow House majority, too, though the exact margin may not be known for several weeks due to slow counting in states like California and close races elsewhere. A unified government – along with an already friendly judiciary – will make it significantly easier for Trump to enact his domestic policy priorities, from tax cuts and defense spending increases to immigration overhauls.
And if you think Trump’s return will have a profound impact on the United States (fact-check: true), it will matter even more for the rest of the world.
The biggest loser is Ukraine. Trump has repeatedly said he will end the war there in 24 hours. Of course, what he really means is that he wants to freeze the conflict along the current territorial lines, with Russia de facto getting to keep the land it has conquered. The war is already going badly for the Ukrainians, with Western military and economic support past its peak. Trump will try to unilaterally cut a cease-fire deal with Zelensky and President Vladimir Putin even before the lame-duck period ends, using military aid to Kyiv as leverage over both sides without coordinating with America’s European allies. If Trump calls Zelensky first and demands a cease-fire (and the de facto cession of territory), and Zelensky refuses, the ball will then shift to Putin’s court.
Regardless of the election outcome, Ukraine would have been forced to negotiate sooner or later. The difference is that Harris would have coordinated that negotiating position with Ukraine and the EU. Trump doesn’t want to be responsible for “losing” Ukraine, nor does he take issue with Ukrainian self-defense. But he thinks Ukraine’s defense should be paid for primarily by the countries that have the biggest stake in it: the Europeans. Trump’s bargaining approach may succeed at ending the war … or it may not.
Either way, Europe will have a big problem on its hands. Trump’s Ukraine policy will put a lot of strain on the trans-Atlantic relationship. The Europeans, many of whom are already struggling economically, will also be facing higher tariffs from the Trump administration. Will they take a stronger, more consolidated position on Ukraine, or will they fragment? Will they continue to align closely with the US on trade with China, or will they start to hedge more? Will the European Union crack under the pressure, or will it be galvanized by Trump to finally build a stronger, more strategically autonomous union? Those are all huge question marks.
Then there’s the Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was already riding high politically on the back of a string of military wins. He was a big winner yesterday as well, as he can expect greater support from Trump than he could have from Harris. The vice president was not going to end the special relationship with Israel, but Trump is going to make even more of a push to support the Israelis and the Gulf States – another group of winners. Trump and Netanyahu are also aligned in their enmity toward Iran. Will Trump’s blank check embolden Bibi to take even more aggressive actions in the region, potentially against Iranian nuclear facilities? That’s a very dangerous situation that bears close watching.
And let’s not forget China. The world’s second-largest economy is already underperforming, and Beijing is feeling increasingly defensive about the tariff threats coming from hawks like former Trump trade czar Robert Lighthizer. The Chinese are going to be frantically trying to establish back-channels to China-friendly Trump allies like Elon Musk, hoping they can facilitate a less confrontational relationship. Will Trump support that, or will his hawks get the upper hand and push for an even more confrontational approach? Beijing will move cautiously and slowly in this environment.
To be sure, just as he did in his first term, Trump will be able to get some foreign policy wins just by virtue of being the president of the most powerful country in the world. But the potential for things to go sideways is much greater in this environment. Geopolitics are in for a volatile and unpredictable ride, and the United States is about to become the epicenter of it.
So take a deep breath and strap in, folks. It’s going to get bumpy.