Can Europe ever unify in a way that would make "500 million Europeans" a practical reality? (Getty Images)
Lowy Institute staff nominate the most notable books, trends, ideas, and people of 2025.
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2025 in review: Trump, Substack, Europe, and fertility2025 in review: Trump, Substack, Europe, and fertility
Maybe this is recency bias because I read the article only a few weeks ago, but David Runciman's Are We Doomed?, published in the London Review of Books, has unnerved me. It is the most plausible case I have read for extreme pessimism (and I do mean extreme; as in, extinction-level) about the global decline of fertility. Merry Christmas.
It's a tie between Adam Tooze's Chartbook and Brian Potter's Construction Physics. Tooze is an economic historian of remarkable range, though his biggest contribution is to centre China in our thinking about the trajectory of the global economy. He said in July that China's rise represents “the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history”, a line I now quote often. And if you're thinking about China's place in the world, you need to be thinking about manufacturing, which is where Potter's Substack comes in. I know of no better source for understanding how stuff gets made.
This is a parochial selection, but I would nominate the success of Australian diplomacy in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The government has signed security agreements with Nauru, Tuvalu, and Papua New Guinea. A deal with Indonesia has been negotiated and awaits signature; one with Vanuatu had been negotiated but now looks to be in limbo. I have argued that Australia's commitment to AUKUS would make this kind of diplomacy harder, but evidently not. Still, what these regional deals offer the government is the outlines of its own foreign policy "narrative" as the United States becomes a more parochial power.
I doubt I will be alone in nominating US President Donald Trump, so let me at least offer a novel reason: it's because, over the course of 2025, he has begun to get the American people used to the idea that China is an equal. This is a vital step towards building a stable and peaceful balance of power between them. When Trump refers to a meeting with Xi Jinping as a "G2", he is ranking China alongside the United States. And is he the first American president since Nixon to regard the Chinese Communist Party as entirely legitimate? I think he might be.
Europe. I have become much more pessimistic about its prospects. At the beginning of this year, I would have endorsed Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk's sentiment: "Russia will be helpless against united Europe...Right now, 500 million Europeans are begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians." He's right about the arithmetic, but it's only arithmetic. I now have much less confidence that Europe can ever unify in a way that would make "500 million Europeans" a practical reality. But that's for a longer article.
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
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