Or will 2024 simply slide into 2025? The world, after a poignant 2024 in which it was raked up at many levels, will be reaping the fruits of its labour or how gods willed it. Mostly of men's own making but that is how man and civilisations have turned pages over the history and begun the metamorphosis of what will be new and different. Some things have already established on this long scape of a changing universe - AI, climate, and man himself with his unbound adventurism laying the foundation of how the world will shape in next two to three decades, if not earlier. Surely, the world in three decades will be a different universe for those who still inhabit it; many may already have moved to safer havens on Mars or interstellar presence. Seems farfetched? Live on for the next three decades and experience it first-hand unless you shall be one of those blighted to live on an increasingly unlivable Earth.
But that is far into the future. We still live on Planet Earth despite the best attempts by people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to urge us to begin our journey to outer space when there is still room. But look at 2024 and see how mankind has been closing space on itself. What seemed like a perennial Israel-Iran war of annihilation turned out exactly so but without impacting adversely any of the two belligerents. The cover of an axis of resistance that Iran had nurtured over decades for itself was blown away while nations as far wide as Yemen, Syria, Gaza and Lebanon stood plastered. In 2025 these nations will need a new future and a new purpose. It is likely that the victors - Israel, the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia - will prescribe their future to them.
What will they look like as countries? What shall be their new geographical shape - with Golan or without it? What about Lebanon? Will it have a central government without any subdivisions of it under different militias? So, lots of the parts of the Middle East will need to be given a new structure. Trump will be busy making America great again, but he will in all probability lease the responsibility to Israel who was the executor of the mission to give the Middle East a new shape. A possible Saudi-Israel combine will ring in the structure in the new order and alignments turning the Middle East into a zone of peace. This will give Israel the requisite freedom of action to pursue its aim to dominate the region in company of its principal patron, the US, through innovations in technology and systems enabling the US continued control of the global financial and economic systems.
Call 2025 a year of operational pause and of consolidating gains. The distraction in Ukraine will slowly peter out and if that needed filtering people like Zelensky out - preferably through popular will - to open the way to a negotiated end to the war endowing Putin and his Russia with an enhanced perimeter of security and an assurance that his near abroad will stay exactly that, that is how it shall be emplaced. Putin will also get some of his SWITCH accounts back and not feel as isolated. A new government in Germany - neo-Right and independent of Europe's trappings will find its own solace with resuming its linkages with Russia for its own needs and give Russia the confidence and security of a peaceful neighbourhood. Trade between Russia and Europe will again resume as before, bestowing Russia with its own eminence and relevance.
This will open the space up for a resurging diplomatic push and a newer order in the oil producing regions of the middle east. If not exactly in 2025 sometime in the following months the Abraham Accords will find newer entrants as Iran will begin to feel the heat of a closing gauntlet around its borders. It will then be for Iran to adjust to these new realities. It could align itself with how the executors of the new order expect of it or it may choose the 'do or die' option as its final stand. My gut tells me that self-preservation will prevail, and hence relative calm will ensue. That should find Pakistan some peace too and the time to focus on its problem across its other half of the western border, with Afghanistan. Locally, Pakistan will find itself entangled and unnecessarily and unfortunately embroiled in a distraction it can do without. We shall have to be innovative in diplomacy, strategy and mechanisms to keep our north-western neighbour appeased. This is not the place we should be expending our energy on. If we must fight India or its growing influence in the region it must not be in Afghanistan or on the Afghan border.
We will need to reverse the tactic on India where reengagement after years of alienation and not really knowing how to proceed when so dislocated and distanced will be the first step to bringing attention back to the eastern border, hopefully for the better. We must change to a paradigm of coexistence and not be held back by legacy idealism even if we continue to voice the support that Muslims and Kashmiris need for their rights just as India will speak on Hindus in Pakistan. That is how Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru had envisioned anyway.
China remains a cautious giant. That is in the nature of the Giant. It is slow, deliberate and studied before it must act. It also has huge stakes in its relations with the USA and continues to be sensitive about its economy. It wants no wars and will not fight one regardless of how much it is pushed or enticed into one over Taiwan. It has the US slowly relegating into a laggard in numerous fields of technology - alternate energy and its applications, one amongst many - it is unlikely to slow down and permit US to catch up. The US and Trump too will remain obsessed with only China as most others would already stand strangled in submission. China hawks in the new administration will keep busy in somehow slaying the giant Dragon - without a war. Pakistan may feel some heat on this count for its closeness to China but will do well to remain evenly poised without being too callous in uncalled for bravado.
Domestically, Pakistan has a full plate of mostly uncalled for combos. It will do well to declutter its portfolio and prioritise for the state and its people what is of utmost importance in building cohesion and unity and a common purpose. All agree on the need for the economy to be resuscitated and sustaining but a profuse mix of rights and justice, that can be seen to be dispensed, will greatly add to optimism and hope. A deeper institution of reformative corrections in health and education and revenue collection can be the immediate steps to a better viability. Else the distractions are too many and the chasms too deep for the nation to fall through.
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