Intrigue’s 2025 in review

1. Don’t F with Gen Z

It’s easy to diss the Gen Zs, what with their Adidas Sambas, relaxed silhouettes, and bedazzled early-2000s accessories. But maybe this is the year we learned to look past the crochet bucket cap and sustainable statement bags, and listen to the folks wearing them.

Whether it’s in Asia, Africa, the Americas, or beyond, irked youths have filled the streets and even ousted governments over corruption, inequality, and stagnation. And to put things in perspective, in a broader world fretting about declining birth rates, almost half of Southeast Asia's population is now under 30 — that’s 320 million people (aka a ~USA).

So while the contours of this social-media-mobilised phenomenon keep evolving, the basic message seems pretty clear: this generation refuses to inherit the world as it is.

2. Tariffic or tarrifying?

In amongst the jokes about tariffing penguins (sucked in Heard Island), or dunking on tiny Lesotho until it buys more Salesforce seats, a massive shift unfolded when China hit back so hard it almost crashed the world’s safest market (US Treasury bonds).

That’s how Trump learned President Xi had spent the inter-regnum doubling down on self-sufficiency, bringing us to today’s eerie truce — two powers grabbing one another by the painful bits (rare earths and chips) while they plot their next move.

Meanwhile, with the US pulling up its dam wall and deflecting China’s export wave elsewhere, the rest of the world suddenly realised it was in the arena, too, with a growing list of markets quietly putting up their own trade barriers in response.

3. Speak loudly and carry a big stick

Trump 2.0’s initial jabs at Greenland, Panama, and even the world’s Ned Flanders of dream neighbours (Canada) hinted at a new ‘Donroe’ Doctrine: 47’s revival of Monroe’s declaration that the US would be pre-eminent in the Western Hemisphere.

And as if further proof were needed, the US leader has now deployed a historic armada against Venezuela’s dictator, and literally spelled it out in his National Security Strategy as “The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” (surely “Donroe” would’ve been punchier?).

But as for the US elsewhere, it’s been a mix: foreshadowing a Europe drawdown then Congress tapping the brakes; seeking Middle East disentanglement then leading Gaza’s post-war process; and all while using the kiddie gloves on the Kremlin’s latest imperialist.

As for Trump 2.0’s approach to China? Things now look more transactional, but DC is still hustling to beef up the Indo-Pacific in hopes of deterring any shock moves by Beijing. Just take a look at that massive arms sale the US waved through to Taiwan on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the world is busy reaching its own conclusions about where the US is headed — Germany’s Merz might’ve made history when he declared, “Pax Americana is over.”

4. Bad neighbours

As US power shifts, age-old neighbourhood spats burst up through the pavement cracks — like May’s four-day war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, culminating in a historic dogfight between ~125 fighter jets. The real winner seems to have been China’s arms industry, given evidence its J-10Cs outperformed France’s Rafales.

Meanwhile, any winners seem less clear further east in the continued Thailand-Cambodia skirmishes, though maybe a loser here could be the notion that strong-arming these two ancient neighbours into signing an incomplete peace deal was ever the answer.

Perhaps the brightest spot is between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with August’s historic US-brokered accord getting them as close to peace as we’ve seen. Though even that only became possible after Azerbaijan’s shock 2023 offensive ‘resolved’ their dispute by force.

5. Bargaining chips

China’s year of the snake links 2025 with being more intelligent, mysterious, and strategic. And darnnit, but isn’t that a pretty apt description for our tech of the year?

Think of the examples, whether ChatGPT as the app of the year, or AI’s architects as Time’s Person of the Year, or American chipmaker Nvidia not just becoming history’s first firm to reach a $4T valuation, but then a $5T valuation just four months later!

Inevitably, something that powerful and moving that rapidly will have huge geopolitical ramifications. As the US just put it (semi-clunkily) in its Pax Silica, “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it.”

You can see it playing out in just one leather-clad 62-year-old, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, navigating not only the geopolitical Bermuda Triangle that is China-US-Taiwan ties, but also the tensions at the heart of the tech: how fast you go versus who you hurt; private profit versus national interest; and hook China on US tech, versus ice it out and race.

In the end, Trump backed Huang’s hook strategy, approving powerful chips for China.

6. Fortress Europe?

Nobody likes a told-you-so, but Intrigue’s 2024 review warned our world was “bracing for more protectionism”, and we’re here in 2025 warning you to brace for even more ahead.

One of the biggest questions is how that plays out in Europe, where its massive single market risks shifting from asset to liability: one day, Renault executives in Boulogne-Billancourt convince Brussels to probe China’s EV subsidies. The next, China hits back at Hennessy executives in Cognac, or pork fatteners in Aragón, or dairy farmers in Cork.

But eventually, Europe’s survival instincts might drown out any executives squabbling over a pie that China is now shrinking via industrial policy (ie, to make stuff, not import it).

You can see that survival instinct reawakening already, whether in the continent’s historic ~tripling of its arms factory expansion, its re-issuance of eurobonds to back Ukraine, or the easing of Germany’s infamous debt brake to unshackled Europe’s largest economy.

And through it all is something we’ve not seen in a long, long time: a Germany out front.

Remember when…

Flag of the year

Getting the obvious out of the way, this is not a country’s flag. Actually, no countries appear to have changed their flag this year (we’re counting Syria’s switch as a 2024 event).

Rather, per our Gen Z snippet above, this pirate from Japanese anime One Piece began to pop up in youth-led protests everywhere from Indonesia and Madagascar to Nepal and the Philippines, emerging as a new rallying symbol for the world’s angry young’ns.

A few of our favourite things from 2025

📖 Read…

• Breakneck by Dan Wang, exploring China's seismic progress, the human costs, and what it might all mean for America.

• This NYT reflection on what Silicon Valley thinks about Beijing’s AI take, and how China’s tech bro ambitions differ from their Western counterparts.

• Mother Mary Comes to Me by India’s Arundhati Roy, a memoir exploring the author’s complicated, layered, bracing relationship with her mother.

• Murder Most Foul by one of Britain’s best-loved screenwriters (Guy Jenkin), a historical mystery novel with Shakespeare himself in the role of detective.

• How Narcotraffickers Captured the British Virgin Islands, a fascinating long read from Britain’s Edward Siddons on crime, politics, and Hurricane Irma.

🎧 Listen to…

• Ndonwabile, an Amapiano track by South African producer Kelvin Momo, featuring vocalists Raspy and Babalwa M.

• The Great Northern War by ‘The Rest is History’, chronicling the 18th C war between Russia’s Peter the Great and Sweden’s Charles XII — a source for much of today’s Russian revanchism.

• The Outlaw Ocean podcast, exploring our world’s most lawless place: the vast, unpoliceable ocean.

• Francesca and the entirety of ‘Ismatricule ou l'Odyssée du Groove’, a groovy, funky, feel-good album by Moroccan-born artist Ismatricule.

• Superagency by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato — it's definitely AI-optimist pilled, but still a great take on a rosy future of AI for humanity.

📺 Watch…

• Black Bag, arguably the espionage thriller of the year, starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married British intelligence officers.

• Made in the EU, a Bulgarian film following a female factory worker who becomes the first in her town to contract Covid-19.

• The Mastermind, a funny heist tale set in the 1970s and starring one of our favourite actors these days, Britain’s Josh O’Connor.

• The Voice of Hind Rajab by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania, who won the second-highest honour at this year’s Venice Film Festival for her Gaza docudrama.

• The American Revolution by Ken Burns, on how 13 colonies won independence and formed a government that reshaped the continent (and the world).

Your end-of-year quiz

Were you paying attention in 2025?

(Here’s the link to our diplomat salary report in case you missed it!)