Reviewing 2025, Anticipating 2026
A look back on a year that made everyone uneasy.
I am not sure if anyone liked 2025. For those who find rightist populist politics in the United States to be anathema, the reasons are obvious: the uptick in extralegal detentions, the market uncertainty created by arbitrary tariffs, the overt racism in officialdom, the damage inflicted on U.S. alliances and partnerships, the cynical back-and-forths on Ukraine—all of these things have contributed to a deep sense of unease about the state of the world. Yet even those who are inclined to take MAGA’s perspective have their own reasons to look back on 2025 with dismay. Persistent inflation, the economic damage wrought by ongoing trade disputes, a clumsy cover-up over the Epstein files, and growing discord within the Republican Party have eroded support for President Donald Trump. No one seems happy these days.
2025 bore some challenges for me personally, but, on the whole, the year was positive. It was at least a productive one that featured a lot of travel, including a family trip to Spain. Much of the work output released in 2025 was the result of many years of effort:
In terms of peer-reviewed publications, a seven-year-and-counting project on the interwar period finally yielded an article on non-aggression pacts in International Theory. Lauren Sukin, Stephen Herzog, and I published an article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution that drew on a survey fielded in June 2023. Perhaps most gratifyingly, a former student of mine—Finn Hunter O’Connor—and I were able to convert his undergraduate thesis, completed in 2024, on non-state actors and drone warfare into a piece that we placed in Defence Studies.
It was also a year of many op-eds and reports. Richard Shimooka, Balkan Devlen, and I had a fruitful year in publishing a series of columns that tackled contemporary U.S. foreign policy and Canadian defence policy in such outlets as The National Post, The Globe and Mail, and The Hub. War on the Rocks invited Michael Hunzeker and I to reflect on our 2018 piece on permanent U.S. basing in Poland. Lauren, Stephen, and I also succeeded in placing an essay for Foreign Policy that summarized our JCR article.
I published a slew of other essays, including one contribution to an International Studies Review forum and another to a series of pieces curated by Wojciech Michnik and Adam Reichardt at New Eastern Europe. I also wrote several essays for the Council on Geostrategy’s Britain’s World as well as pieces in Le Rubicon and, with another former student of mine Jacob Tuckey, for the Network of Strategic Analysis (Réseau d’analyse stratégique [RAS]), which I otherwise co-direct.
Speaking of RAS, Jonathan Paquin and I organized a publication workshop at Laval University in Quebec City where we solicited and reviewed many essays that went onto appear on the network’s website. Jonathan and I also finalized a co-edited volume that Routledge will publish in 2026 on the Russo-Ukrainian War and how that conflict may revise our understanding of key international relations concepts.
Last but not least, leading the Master of Public Service program at the University of Waterloo has been a career highlight. The students are strong, resilient, and keen to serve society. I learned lot so far in my time as director. Even before we have had to reckon with the disruption caused by generative arficial intelligence, leading the program and teaching within it has also forced me to rethink my own pedagogy in a way that has been extraordinarily refreshing.
My goal for the new year is to focus more on bigger, book-length projects rather than on smaller pieces. However, that was also my objective in 2025. Not that I am complaining, but it did not quite work out as I had intended.
Late last December I made several predictions for the upcoming year. For the sake of keeping myself honest, I thought it would be useful to reflect on them.
2024 Prediction for 2025 1: A new government in Ottawa will lead to better U.S.-Canada relations
The prediction that I deemed to be the safest turned out to be the most wrong. The Conservative Party of Canada snatched defeat from the jaws of victory because of bad leadership and a poorly run campaign. The Liberal Party of Canada got a second lease of life with a new leader who promised to use his economic expertise and policy experience to navigate what many correctly anticipated would be a very choppy 2025. Mark Carney has so far been a satisfactory prime minister, but much of the new government looks a lot like the old one, especially as regards to cabinet composition. Though the Liberals and the Conservatives are statistically in a dead heat in national polling, Carney to date has been much more popular than his own party, to say nothing of Conservative leader Pierre Poillievre.
U.S.-Canada relations are probably at their lowest ebb in my lifetime. As evidence, land crossings and air travel between the two countries have seen sharp year-on-year reductions. Nevertheless, one must not exaggerate just how bad things are. The vast majority of trade between the two countries is tariff-free, which is better than what we can say about pretty much every other trading relationship that the United States has at the moment around the world. Defence cooperation persists, albeit quietly. Canada still buys from the United States and has even created new formats for defence/industrial cooperation with it.
Had Poilievre been elected, I am not as confident as before that his prime ministerial would have improved bilateral relations. The standard view is that Conservatives have an ideological affinity with the Republican Party. There is good evidence for this perspective. However, ridings most exposed to the trade dispute (like my own in Windsor) tended to vote Conservative, and so there would be expectations for him to have negotiated hard on their behalf. Carney seems to play for time, which may be sensible considering that the constraints on Trump look to tighten. Still, there is a risk that it might be the wrong strategy if the Trump administration decides to repudiate its own trade agreement by failing to renew CUSMA upon its review. That repudiation would, of course, be puzzling and self-defeating because of the economic damage and political risks it would create just ahead of an already unpromising midterm campaign. Alas, the possibility cannot be precluded simply because it does not make sense. That would be too 2015 in mindset.
Prediction 2: The political power of Donald Trump will fall short of expectations
Many readers may argue that Trump has exercised enormous influence in his capacity of president. Aside from a flurry of executive orders intended to reshape the federal government, he imposed large tariffs on close allies while recalibrating bilateral relations with both China and Russia on a friendlier footing. The logic of great power competition that nominally guided his first administration’s foreign policy is conspicuously absent. Instead, we have a foreign policy that is nativist and oriented towards the western hemisphere. This radical change saw its most articulate expression in the otherwise clumsily formulated National Security Strategy.
That all said, I feel good about this prediction one year later. Indeed, I will double down on it. Even with all the gerrymandering, I would not be optimistic about the 2026 midterms if I were a GOP strategist. Of course, I do think Trump has done, and can still do, a lot of damage. His approval ratings are not falling because he is successful at governing. To the contrary. Not unlike Joe Biden before him, he has overinterpreted his electoral mandate. Moreover, Trump has pursued broadly unpopular policies that are out of step with what most voters want. I thus do not share the perspective of many friends and colleagues who believe that he is leading the United States down some economically ruinous path of irreversible autocracy. The United States is arguably the most dynamic country in the world. It is perhaps too dynamic for its own good, and so we can expect major policy swings in U.S. domestic and foreign policy alike for the foreseeable future.
Prediction 3: The Russo-Ukrainian War will continue but problems will mount for Russia
This prediction appears accurate. However, I would caveat my assessment of it with the observation that problems have mounted for Ukraine as well. Russia may be incurring massive casualties as it encroaches deeper into Ukrainian territory, especially in the Donbas, but it is encroaching deeper all the same. Its sustained air campaign continues to impose much hardship and destruction, whatever dubious strategic gains it makes. The Trump administration appears unbothered. More and more members of various European publics have themselves grown disinterested, whereas surveys indicate that Ukrainians themselves express more and more support for some sort of resolution.
The problem is that any resolution requires both sides to agree, and I suspect that the Kremlin now senses vulnerability. As such, I still do not think the military conflict will end anytime soon. The Russian state is too intent on waging war whatever the costs it generates for its own people and economy. Indeed, Russian society has largely bought into it so as to make nonsense of the idea that this war is exclusively that of President Vladimir Putin. The intensity of the war may attenuate out of a feeling of mutual exhaustion, but violence will likely continue.
I could offer more predictions for 2026 but despite going a soft two for three as regards to what I made this time last year, I have become too diffident when it comes to forecasting. Though I worry that things will get worse before they get better, I do hope 2026 would be a more positive year for the world.
I wish everyone a happy new year.