For much of this year, international news has been breaking at such a pace it has left people scrambling to keep up – not just to find out what is going on but how it affects their lives and decisions. Even the title of this magazine – The World Today – always intended to invite an expansive reflection on the state of the world, has felt at times to fall short when what people, governments and businesses want to know is the world this minute.
All the same, at Chatham House we set out not just to discern the trends behind these dramatic shifts, but to take part in the decisions that shape them. That is how we pick the themes of our longer, deeper research and how we set about the convening that has been from the creation of Chatham House in 1920 one of our main contributions to the pursuit of international order.
I should say, perhaps, that the agitation of the times we are in now is prompting rapidly more demand for our gatherings under the Chatham House Rule where we bring together people and organizations who see the world very differently, often with clashing objectives, to try to extract common understanding and sometimes progress.
Superpower rivalry
On the themes guiding our work, top of the list is the question of what kind of country the United States chooses to be, along with the role it chooses to play in the world, with parallel questions about China. The rivalry between the two superpowers is the arc over all our other work; it is the defining tension of our times. It is hard to think of a comparable rise in a country’s power in the world outside wartime as that of China, nor of a comparable decline in relative power that the US has undergone.
That is before considering the unique features that Donald Trump has brought to the US presidency, amplified in his second term. The uncertainty that follows the speed of his decisions is inseparable from the impact of the policies themselves; it springs from his determination to act by executive order, avoiding checks by Congress and courts where possible (those limits yet to be determined). But the decisions themselves also rewrite the US’s role in the world: the deliberate removal of the US from post-Second World War institutions, such as the World Health Organization, and the questioning of NATO, a subject addressed in the following pages.
Some arguments President Trump has won, such as the decades-old protest by the US that it was bearing too much of the burden of NATO. European countries now accept they must pay more; Trump has achieved what his predecessors have not on that score. Some of the determination to restrict immigration and the tough language about government inefficiency is now reflected in European politicians’ speeches, including in the UK.
But other actions undermine the international order and the cultivation of the rule of law which the US itself helped forge after the Second World War. Prime examples are Trump’s declaration that Canada ought to become the 51st state of the US and his use of tariffs to advance that end – ripping up the deal between the US, Canada and Mexico, which he himself had crafted in his first term and declared exemplary – another subject addressed in this issue.
Role of ‘middle powers’
The same is true of his intentions towards Greenland and Panama: these dismiss the principle of sovereignty, one of the founding aspects of the United Nations Charter, to which almost every country has signed up and which celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. It has raised hopes for Russia that it can take over Ukrainian territory without reprisals from the US; it could obviously encourage others.
Even before Trump entered the Oval Office in January, Chatham House was analyzing these trends in global disorder and the contest over global governance. That is why at the start of 2025 we set up our Centre for Global Governance and Security, headed by Samir Puri. It brings together our work on international law (contested now more than it has been for years), health and security. In parallel, our Environment and Society Centre, headed by Ana Yang, looks at the global agreement (or otherwise) on combating climate change and the ill-considered use of resources, and the transition to better practices including the technical, political and economic obstacles to be overcome.
One of the main themes emerging, which I highlighted in my Director’s Lecture in January, is the role of ‘middle powers’ in shaping whatever order emerges. This is also the theme of our London Conference this year. While the definition of middle powers is tortuously discussed, in this context it means those who might have influence on future order or aspire to do so. As the leaders of many countries have said to us, countries that are neither the US nor China need rules and international order. Should the existing order decay or unravel, they will look to establish new ones, perhaps regional but otherwise orders which recognize common interest.
We are already seeing this in Europe’s defence of Ukraine, where Japan and South Korea have made clear their support for the principle of sovereignty being defended. The role that Turkey and the Gulf states have chosen to take in trying to mediate a resolution to the Israel–Hamas conflict in Gaza and the Russia–Ukraine conflict is not divorced from their own interest in regional stability but still offers a valuable alternative to a head-to-head conflict between antagonists.
Talking to big tech
Security is at the heart of our Global Governance and Security Centre’s work. Our focus is not just on the routes to resolution of current conflicts, but on the principles and agreements that can help prevent future ones, as well as on the attempts to shore up older treaties on arms control and the use of weapons where that is plausible and on the creation of agreements on new arms such as cyber-weapons.
While many of those agreements were written between governments, one of the main flanks of our governance work concerns the regulation of digital technology and there the tech companies themselves are an essential part of the discussion. We are conscious of the need for regulation – always more likely to be regional than global – to allow the potential of the technology to emerge and flourish while circumscribing its harms.