Bill Emmott
2025 was defined by AI exuberance and America First, as technological advances gathered momentum while the Trump administration sought to radically reshape the international order.
A storm rolls in over the Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc.
It has been a dark and stormy year, although not in as benign a sense as the much-mocked melodrama by Edward Bulwer-Litton from which this paraphrase of his opening line derives, nor as funny as the Peanuts cartoons that played on it. The year has blended dangerous geopolitical turmoil and extraordinary political destructiveness with a powerful surge of technological development that could presage either prosperity or calamity – or perhaps both.
As such, for this author the year’s principal themes are best evoked not by the purple prose of Victorian gothic fiction but by one famous quotation from an Ancient Greek historian and two famous book titles from past eras.
The Greek historian is Thucydides (who else?) and the quotation his poignant description of the might-is-right era of the Peloponnesian War, nearly 2,500 years ago. That was a time, as he wrote, when some felt that ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’.
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