Years often look easier to define in advance than as they end, for pre-fixed events can offer a framework that unreliable memory may not. And so it was that, as 2024 began, it became defined as ‘the year of elections’, simply because so many were scheduled to take place in so many of the world’s largest and most influential countries, including Taiwan, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the European Union, South Korea and, above all, the United States.

Unplanned elections also took place in France and Japan among others, with the result that more than 70 countries held national elections in which more than 1.6 billion ballots were cast. If democracy is supposedly in retreat in the face of populism and aggressive autocrats, an awful lot of voters still advanced to the polling booths to express their views, and transfers of power took place remarkably smoothly and peaceably.

That proliferation of elections does also help define the year as it is ending, especially as the most important vote of all has left Donald Trump preparing to be inaugurated on January 20th for a second term in the White House, an arrival that is sure to shape many people’s fears and hopes for 2025. His counts as an extraordinary and in some ways shocking political comeback, but in other respects the US election fitted a general trend for the year, of incumbents taking a pummelling, with new forces on the rise.

Yet if we were to see the year purely in terms of how democracies have handled their evolution we would be missing something important in politics and power more broadly. This has been a bad year for all kinds of political-powerholders, whether they are in democracies or in autocracies.

It has also been a bad year for forecasters, whether in the form of opinion polls predicting a big Modi victory in India, or an inconclusive and bitterly contested US election, analysts predicting a Ukrainian collapse in that country’s fight against the Russian invaders, commentators predicting a switch from globalisation to deglobalisation, or experts predicting that artificial intelligence would start to destroy jobs.

Some of these things that didn’t come to pass in 2024 might eventually do so. Yet these failed predictions may also reflect an undue, partly media-fuelled, incentive to convey certainty and clarity in a world that is highly uncertain and unclear. They might reflect an undue impatience about the speed with which an idea can become an actual trend. Above all, they may reflect a general difficulty in accepting or understanding that the world is a much larger and more complex place than powerholders, whether in politics, technology or other fields often seem to think, and that consequently its fate is not determined by just a small handful of countries.

President Joe Biden has, for much of his term in office, sought to frame this era as one featuring a battle between political systems, between democracies and autocracies. It was a very bad year for him personally, with Biden first breaking his pledge not to run for a second term in the White House, then being forced in July to withdraw ignominiously once it became clear that, at 82 years old, voters were likely to consider him too old to continue as president. But notwithstanding that, 2024 must count as a year in which those in charge in both sorts of system fared poorly, but to differing degrees.

Autocratic rulers in countries as disparate as Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Russia and even China ended the year in a worse state than they began it, even if in all those cases bar Syria the rulers remain in power. In many democracies where incumbents took a bashing they too remained in power, albeit in a weakened condition, including Narendra Modi in India, Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Shigeru Ishiba in Japan and Emmanuel Macron in France. Others had to retire more or less gracefully, including Biden in the US, Rishi Sunak in the UK and, the least graceful retiree of all, Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh.

Yet there, with the possible future exception of still-unstable Bangladesh, we see the systemic difference of which 2024 should remind. Democracies can be weak and indecisive because they are forever changing their leaderships, in electoral cycles too short to encourage long-term planning; but they are also resilient because there is always a new leadership competing to emerge, within a constitutional system that confers legitimacy. They can destroy themselves, but they also contain the seeds of renewal, a process that is built into the system. When elections bring dramatic changes, headlines often speak of ‘political earthquakes’, and yet the metaphor is strangely inapt. Politics itself may have been vigorously shaken, but generally no visible damage can be seen and, for most non-political folk, life goes on as before.

It is in autocracies that the real political earthquakes take place. Dictatorships can seem strong and decisive, but the systems the dictator relies on are readily corruptible and can prove more fragile than they seem. President Bashar al-Assad did not begin the year, or even perhaps the month of December, expecting to have to leave his palaces in Damascus and flee to Moscow, but that is what happened on 8 December.

This matters for philosophical reasons, certainly, but for practical ones, too. We live in a time of great-power rivalry: of contestation of the rules by which the world is, or might be, governed; and of violent aggression through which that rivalry is being expressed. Such periods of instability and fear tend to bring forth a form of inferiority complex, or at least sense of vulnerability, in liberal democracies, for our systems are designed to disperse power rather than to concentrate and deploy it, and times of war and associated aggression reward those who deploy power, not those who constrain it. This year has certainly not been one of triumph or even vindication for the liberal democracies of the West, but, as it ends, we should take some modest comfort in the fact that it has been even worse for our principal self-declared adversaries.

The idea that four authoritarian countries – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, known widely as ‘the axis of upheaval’ or less elegantly as the CRINKs – are ganging up together to fight the West, whether simply to undermine western dominance or actually to take over global leadership, is pretty terrifying. After all, three of those countries are nuclear states already, and Iran is on its way towards becoming one. All four are now directly or indirectly involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine, which serves as a justification for those who believe that World War Three might already have begun.

Historians will assign that label only in arrears. But the judgement we can make now is that the past 12 months have been terrible for Iran, bleak for Russia, mediocre for China and good for North Korea only in a very limited way. The Axis of Upheaval has featured the trading of weapons, ammunition, finance, technology and, in North Korea’s case, manpower, chiefly in support of Russia’s war, but the outcome so far has been decidedly adverse. Only if you think that the re-election of Donald Trump counts as progress for the Axis can you believe that they have had a good year. And while Trump’s return might evolve to their advantage, especially if he decides to open fire on the network of allies that in the past has been America’s great asset, 2024 means that he will enter office knowing that all of the Axis are weak, and getting weaker.

The worst setbacks have happened to Iran. While many in the West have focused on Israel’s aggression in Gaza, seeing the conflict that began on 7 October 2023 through the lens of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, the principal geopolitical as well as strategic development this year has been Israel’s successful destruction or severe diminution of all the forces that Iran has developed and deployed over many years so as to project its power in the region: Hamas, in Gaza; Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon; the Houthis in Yemen; and Iran’s own military installations in Syria. In addition, in July, Israel’s intelligence agencies showed by assassinating Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, while he was visiting Tehran, that they have penetrated deep into Iran’s own security system; and the exchanges of missile attacks between the two countries showed that Iran’s defences are poor while Israel’s are top class.

It was principally the severe weakening of Iran that paved the way for the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. Assad’s ability to hold on to power during Syria’s long civil war since 2011 had depended on military and financial assistance from Iran and Russia. Thanks to Israel, Iran could no longer afford to support Assad. Russia still had military bases in Syria, but beyond some token air strikes proved too overstretched by the war in Ukraine to be able to support its supplicant. The fall of Assad was a public humiliation for Russia. It showed how weakened Russia has become, but also now looks likely to mean that it loses its air and naval bases on the Mediterranean, which had been a useful logistical hub for operations in Africa as well as symbolising Russia’s claimed status as a global power.

The war in Ukraine has not gone well for Russia, either. Nor has it gone well for Ukraine, but the widespread expectation in the early summer that Russian forces were poised to exploit their numerical and artillery superiority to make major advances in the eastern Donbas region has been proved wrong. Russian forces have made some progress, but in territorial terms it has been minuscule – according to Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St Andrews, using data from the Institute for the Study of War, Russia had by early December seized 2,700 square kilometres of Ukraine this year, which is a big increase on the 465 square kilometres it seized in 2023, but represents a mere 0.4 per cent of Ukraine’s total land area. It has seized less than half a per cent of Ukraine at an estimated cost of 350,000 casualties. The UK Ministry of Defence has stated that in November Russia was losing 1,500 soldiers every day, a far worse casualty rate than it was suffering in either 2022 or 2023. It is little wonder that Russia has become so dependent on ammunition supplies from North Korea and drones and other missiles from Iran, nor that it has now recruited a reported 12,000 North Korean soldiers to fight alongside its own forces. The first reports have now come in of North Korean casualties.

Meanwhile, in August Ukraine’s forces succeeded in upending the narrative surrounding the war by making an invasion of their own, crossing the Russian border and taking a large swathe of the Kursk region. This forced the Russians to divert some of their forces away from Donbas in order to try to drive out the Ukrainians, and to recruit the North Koreans. While the area held by Ukraine has diminished, it remains large and embarrassing and would provide Ukraine with some bargaining leverage should negotiations take place next year over some form of ceasefire. Trump’s election victory brought with it new expectations of a Russian triumph given his opposition to further military aid to Ukraine and his campaign talk of ‘ending the war in 24 hours’. Yet Russia looks very far from entering any such talks in a strong position: it looks weak, has lost Syria, is suffering humiliating assassinations of senior military figures in Moscow by Ukrainian intelligence agents, and is suffering huge losses of military manpower.

Russia’s ‘axis’ allies continue to stand by it. Weakened Iran is making money by selling it weapons, while the isolated ‘Hermit Kingdom’ of North Korea is getting hold of Russian missile technology along with income. China, despite having signed a ‘Joint Declaration’ with Russia on 4 February 2022, three weeks before the full invasion, has never explicitly supported the war, has never admitted to providing any weapons, and continues to claim to be standing for peace. But its strategic partner’s continued failure to make either progress or peace must be causing it great anxiety. A Communist dictatorship can absorb anxiety, especially one of China’s size and economic power. Nonetheless, it has had a poor year on its own terms, with its economy continuing to be weighed down by a property and construction-industry collapse, and showing every sign of following Japan’s 1990s example of deflation, anaemic domestic demand and overall stagnation.

In recent years, what can grandly be called the ‘world order’ has been challenged by two sets of forces. One, of course, is the ‘Axis of Upheaval’. The other is the political pressure in the leading countries of the West, particularly the United States, for a specific move towards ‘de-risking’ from China, but also a general move towards protectionism and deglobalisation. The Biden administration has led a big move towards the subsidisation of domestic manufacturing industries, while both the US and Europe have used subsidies to accelerate the so-called green transition away from fossil fuels. Both, meanwhile, have used tariffs against imports from China, the US against a wide range of Chinese goods, the EU specifically against electric vehicles.

One big thing 2024 has shown, in simple terms, is that the world does not consist just of two economic giants, the US and China, nor even of the West and China. The most striking change in Asia has been that, after decades in which China led the region’s economic growth, a wide range of populous nations – including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines – are outpacing China by a considerable margin and are driving growth in trade, too. Nor do bilateral tariffs between the US and China, or the EU and China, bring globalisation to a halt: they may divert trade but they do not block it. This year, world trade continued to grow. Deglobalisation, rather as the Solow Paradox used to say about computers and productivity, can be seen everywhere except in the trade statistics.

This is the combined result of the widely dispersed nature of economic development in the world, with many countries having political agency and economic clout, and of the power of technology. Elon Musk has emerged in 2024 as America’s most politically powerful billionaire, not just because of his donations and campaigning but thanks to globalisation. His Tesla, Starlink, SpaceX and xAI are all businesses that depend on global markets for their fortunes.

The darkest shadow hanging over the world economy as 2024 comes to an end is not war, nor even geopolitical rivalry, dark though those undoubtedly are. It is the question of whether the Trump administration really plans to carry out his promise to levy a universal tariff on imports of goods of 10 per cent or even 20 per cent, or whether it will just use tariffs against specific countries as bargaining levers or punishments.

A universal raising of tariffs five or tenfold would probably bring retaliation from other major trading nations, including the EU, the UK and Japan. At that point, deglobalisation would indeed start to be seen in the trade statistics, at least for goods. And it could cause a serious rift among the traditional western allies, even as the Axis of Upheaval continues to weaken. But the use of tariffs merely as pressure tactics would not bring a contraction in trade, nor a fundamental breach between the old allies. In a multipolar world able to cope with a bullying America, trade and technology would still do their magic. After the year of elections, we can hope that 2025 will not in fact be the year of tariffs.