For connoisseurs of world affairs, the year behind us offered a rich smörgåsbord with varied pickings. Here we present, chronologically, a dozen or so noteworthy events which are likely to have made some difference—for better or worse—to the world we live in.

The year started on a bizarre note, after Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin was hospitalized on New Year’s Day. Austin, 70, was admitted to an Intensive Care Unit at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for what the Pentagon eventually announced were “complications following a recent elective medical procedure.” It was only three days later that the White House was notified of this fact. Even Austin’s own top deputy was kept in the dark.

Since Austin is right behind Biden atop the chain of command of the U.S. military, it is just as well that the U.S. was not attacked (by North Korea, say) between Jan. 1 and Jan. 3, after 8 p.m. Eastern, an hour after which  the president—as we were to learn six months later—ceases to function.

The episode was frivolous rather than momentous, inconsequential in the greater scheme of things but indicative of the curious technical dysfunctionality of the U.S. government. 

On Jan. 13 in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party candidate Lai Ching-te won the country’s presidential election. Lai, a supporter of the island’s independence, won a three-way race with 40 percent of the vote. “The Taiwanese people have successfully resisted efforts from external forces to influence this election,” Lai said in his victory speech. It was a deliberate provocation, from Beijing’s point of view, to talk of “the Taiwanese people” as distinct from the Chinese.

After four decades of U.S. strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, the issue remains dangerously moot. Before the election, President Biden had stated on at least four occasions that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if attacked. With Lai’s election it has become more likely the resolve of the U.S. and its regional allies to defend Taiwan would be tested before Lai’s term expires in 2028. What is remarkable, however, is that America’s strategic calculus should be dependent on the vagaries of the electoral process in a faraway land of marginal importance to America’s security and well-being.

On Feb. 8, Tucker Carlson released his interviewed with Vladimir Putin, giving the Russian leader an opportunity to present his views to a huge global audience, including tens of millions of Americans and other denizens of the “collective West” who saw the two-hour interview. The Russian president started with a 35-minute discourse on Russian history harking back to the early Middle Ages. His notes-free presentation was articulate and penetrating, but too long-winded and tangential for the target audience.

For all his obvious intelligence, eloquence, and command of facts, it transpired that Putin does not know rhetoric. He missed an incredible opportunity to present his side of the story, succinctly and clearly, on a myriad of important issues. The interview nevertheless was a plus for him. No American could fail to notice the contrast between Putin’s command, for over two hours, of facts, dates, names, and events, versus the anointed “Leader of the Free World” who referred—on that same day—to Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the “President of Mexico.”

Five weeks later, on March 17, Putin secured another six years in power. His reelection was described as an undemocratic farce by a legion of Western officials, “experts,” and journalists. Since the commentariat is solidly antipathetic to Russia—any Russia—especially if it is cohesive internally and assertive externally, it is unsurprising that the machine acted on cue.

For as long as they repeat the mantra, Russia is on the right track. Any praise for its leaders from Washington, New York, or Brussels—such as heaped on Boris Yeltsin, Nikolai Kozyrev & Co. three decades ago—would be a cause for alarm, and a reminder of Russia’s calamitous state during the 1990s.

On April 13, Iran launched over 300 drones and missiles on Israel. This was the first time Iran carried out a direct attack against Israeli soil. It did not come as a surprise but was widely anticipated following an Israeli air strike that destroyed an Iranian consulate building in Damascus on March 31. Sporadic Iranian missile attacks continued for the rest of the year, notably after the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in an Israeli raid inside Iran on July 31. The attacks appear to have been a face-saving exercise by the Iranian government, devoid of military significance and effectively treated as a mere annoyance by the Israelis.

Undeterred, on May 6 Israel launched a ground offensive in Rafah. Israel’s offensive in the last designated “humanitarian safe zone” at the southern end of the Gaza Strip caused an international outcry. It likely contributed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant six months later. The vehement reaction of the U.S. political and media establishment to those warrants was in stark contrast with their delight after the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on March 17, 2023. The ICC became an illegitimate, politicized, and quasi-judicial body as soon as it deviated from the preapproved script.

This is not a dispute in which a sane person should pick sides. The Biden administration, of course, is an enemy of all that America traditionally stands for. On the other hand, the system of transnational criminal justice—of which the ICC is the flagship—is the antithesis of the system of checks and balances, of any recognizable constitutional design that delineates how laws are made, adjudicated, enforced, or made accountable. It embodies what Carl Schmitt characterized, regarding the League of Nations, as an “abyss of indeterminacy.” A plague on both their houses.

On June 27 came the U.S. presidential debate. “Dealing with everything we have to do with, ugh, look, if we finally beat Medicare…” was President Biden’s most memorable line. Three weeks later, his reelection campaign was over. It is still puzzling that his handlers thought that he could somehow survive the 90-minute ordeal. Of course, it may have been a Machiavellian ruse to force him out of the race. His replacement, anointed without any pretense of democratic procedure, turned out to be an inarticulate woman of low intelligence, low morals, and no visible ability.

As the French were celebrating Bastille Day on July 13, Donald Trump was shot in the ear by a young man at a rally in Pennsylvania. Thomas Matthew Crooks was able to climb—unimpeded, with a rifle apparently sticking out of his backpack—onto the roof of a building 130 yards from the speaker’s platform. That building had three police snipers stationed inside it. How and why this was allowed to happen is not known at the time of this writing, and may not be known six decades from now (as the Warren Commission never satisfactorily answered questions around the Kennedy assassination).

Two weeks later came the most memorable event of the summer. The opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 26 was the most brazenly blasphemous anti-Christian public manifestation in history. For three hours, phantasmagorical scenes followed one another at a frenetic pace, including a repulsive nude man painted blue and offered on a giant plate. The crude mockery of the Last Supper was presided over by a grotesquely obese woman, Barbara Butch, who describes herself as “a fat, Jewish, queer lesbian… really proud of all my identities.”

The spectacle was a grandiloquent celebration of the France rooted in the Jacobin Terror, of an authentically evil anti-France awash in Christian blood, which fits seamlessly into the U.S.-made straitjacket of wokedom and queerdom. It was a veritable satanic orgy, free from all limits yet strangely dull in its calculated effort to hurt, to shock, and to offend. On the plus side, it has finally revealed the collective West to the rest in all its disgusting degenerate decrepitude.

On Aug. 6, Ukraine made a sudden incursion into the Russian territory near Kursk. Limited in geographic scope and the number of troops involved, it was a bold tactical move intended to have a disproportionate psychological and propagandistic effect. The operation had a threefold purpose: to stifle foreign voices that have warned of a stalemate and called for negotiations, which would likely involve some territorial concessions to Russia; to bolster morale at home; and to embarrass Putin and perhaps undermine his domestic support.

The incursion has captured headlines. The fundamental dynamics of the conflict, five months later, invite the question of what will happen to Ukraine once the war does end. It should be accepted in the “collective West” that this war will not end in Russia’s defeat, and that Ukraine (minus the Crimea and the Donbas) can and should be a neutral buffer zone, in the EU one day perhaps, but not a NATO member. That is a reasonable solution. Willfully postponing its acceptance is irrational. That is the broad picture; the Kursk intrusion is but a footnote.

The 16^th annual BRICS summit was held on Oct. 22 to Oct. 24 in the southern Russian city of Kazan. It was the first gathering of the group to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates as members, following their accession a year earlier. The most important decision was the adoption of a payment system, BRICS Pay. It is designed to facilitate transactions between member countries and thus to bypass the Western interbank system SWIFT.

This was a backlash from the misnamed Global South after three successive administrations had used unilateral sanctions—based on U.S. laws or executive decrees—as a tool against political and economic rivals, most notably Russia and China. Foreign countries were penalized and restrained in their financial activities using SWIFT and the dollar, effectively treating them as subjects to American domestic legislation. Laws with extraterritorial scope, such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), allowed the U.S. government to sanction foreign entities and individuals at will.

The end of this anomalous system, heralded by the 16^th BRICS summit, will be good news for Americans, too, in the long run. For decades the dollar has been a key pillar of the U.S. regime’s strategy of global dominance. Denying the swamp this key instrument of inflationary financing of the ever-expanding warfare-welfare state is both desirable and necessary.

Donald Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 5, which was arguably the most important political event in the world in 2024. There may be less than meets the eye regarding the consequences of his victory in the field of foreign affairs and national security strategy, as we have elaborated in some detail elsewhere in these pages. The jury is still out at the time of this writing, but the signs—i.e. personnel appointments—are not encouraging for those of us who had hoped that Trump 2.0 would not bring Trojan horses into his MAGA-inspired team..

On Dec. 8, Bashar al Assad’s regime fell in Syria. The geopolitical significance of this event is difficult to summarize in a sentence or two. Russia has been humiliated, yet again, by Turkey’s president Erdogan, a wily opportunist and a seasoned political operative. Israel appears to have acted in coordination with the Ankara-sponsored “moderate rebels,” a motley crew led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) —formerly known as al-Nusra and designated a terrorist organization all over the Western world.

One likely consequence of the regime change is the eventual disappearance of the Christian remnant from Syria—a vibrant and resilient, mostly Eastern Orthodox community, which was safe under Bashar’s secularist regime. Its destiny under the Western-approved, suddenly no longer jihadist-terrorist, but “moderate rebel” etc. regime will be grim in the extreme. The same grim scenario we have seen in Iraq, and in Libya, and in Sarajevo. Whenever U.S.-approved jihadists win, Christians disappear.

As the year began to draw to a close, on Dec. 29, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter died. A decent man, yes, but way out of his depth. An innocent abroad, as well as at home. Likely a minor footnote in the greater scheme of things, but a major culprit in the tragic demise of the Shah—with its incalculable consequences. One of them, half a century later, may well be America’s next war in the Middle East. The Iranian quagmire is certain to be far more costly and bloody than the debacle in Iraq. Thank you, Jimmy; rest in peace.

As we enter 2025, the “collective West” led by the U.S. is laid bare as a political-military and cultural bloc based on a set of fraudulent claims and dysfunctional ideological assumptions. The first among them is that “we” (America, Britain, France, Germany, the European Union, etc.) are blessed by having “our democracy” as the basis of an exceptional political system, within which each citizen can fully exercise his allegedly inherent rights. The scandal of the judicial fiat in Romania, also in December, is more than sufficient to set the record straight.

“The West” is being turned by its rulers into an arid wasteland, culturally, intellectually, morally, and above all demographically. The ongoing crime of the Western ruling class is the greatest crime in all of history. Whether its masterminds and perpetrators deserve death here and now, and by what means, may well be debated. What their ultimate reward will be is clear.

The prospect of eternal damnation will not deter them, however, because they belong to the other, sulphuric team. They will go on doing their thing. By now, it is a matter of kto kogo.

Let us enter 2025 with the hope that while evil may seem victorious, it can never triumph.