[Politics] John Simpson: 2025 could be year for the history books as Trump shreds global norms

[TheWild ™]

 

Just occasionally, there are years when the world goes through some fundamental, convulsive change. 1968, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Paris riots and the anti-Vietnam War protests in America, was one of them. 1989, the year of the Tiananmen massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the implosion of the Soviet empire, was another.

I was on hand to see each of these things happen, and from that perspective it seems to me that, only seven weeks in, 2025 could be a year like that: a time when the basic assumptions about the way our world works are fed into the shredder.

The basic reason, of course, is Donald Trump.

Since the end of the World War Two, each one of the 13 US presidents before Trump's current term in office has at least paid lip service to a set of key geopolitical principles: that America's own security depended on protecting Europe from Russia, and the non-Communist countries of Asia against China.

Trump has up-ended this approach. He says he's putting American interests first, way before everything else. Mostly that comes down to the single question of how much it costs the US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0ng4eyr3xo