U.S. media: Iran is one of the biggest losers of 2024

It is nearly the end of 2024, and it has been…eventful, to say the least.

Foreign Policy: What most surprised you in 2024?

Emma Ashford: As ever, there's more than one answer I could give here! But perhaps the biggest (and certainly most surprising) geopolitical development of the year was the crumbling of Iran's "axis of resistance."

Israel's daring (and largely successful) campaign of attacks starting in September killed Hezbollah leaders and forced Hezbollah to agree to a ceasefire. The Gaza war is still ongoing, and there remain huge humanitarian and reconstruction-related problems, but the security threat posed by Hamas was largely eliminated by Israel.

Meanwhile, with Russia preoccupied trying (and largely failing) to help Hamas, it no longer had the military spare capacity to provide nearly as much support to its other regional partners. This, combined with the loss of Iranian backing, was enough to topple Assad's regime in Syria.

As of January 2024, there was no real chance I would have predicted *any* of the above. These are all huge developments, laying important groundwork to make the wider Middle East region more peaceful and less unstable.

Matthew Kroenig: It seems to me that this is all important but overhyped. First, as long as you haven't gotten rid of the regime in Tehran, I'm not clear that the elimination of some of these proxies really changes the balance sheet that much, since the regime has others. For example, Ashwat and Amitabh Singh showed (https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/iranian-influence-in-the-middle-east-an-inventory-of-intervention/) that Iran backed, supported, or was affiliated with armed groups in nearly two dozen countries across the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa. Even the elimination of Lebanon and Syria from that list doesn't strike me as being nearly as big as you're suggesting.

But even leaving that aside, as Amitabh Singh and I showed in another recent article (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/near-east-and-north-africa/2023-12-14/was-hamas-war-pakistan-blasts-accidental-war), Iran was actually pretty successful at deterring the U.S. through Hezbollah and Hamas (and perhaps others that we don't yet know about). The U.S. didn't do much at all to destroy even Hamas, for fear of the Iranian reactions that might come. So I wouldn't be giving Iran such a poor assessment, in contrast to your overall positive assessment for the year.

FP: On to you, then: what was the most important or surprising development, or theme/arc, for this year?

Kroenig: I would say that perhaps the most significant development of 2024 was the collapse of global order. There are so many examples. NATO fell apart. Many European countries also collapsed. The U.S.-UK "special relationship" turned into mere "friendship." There is no longer a G7 after the U.S. kicked out Japan, and China now sits at the table.

Ashford: I was about to answer the "collapse of global order," but I guess that's already taken! It seemed to me that U.S. global primacy ended sometime during this decade—and perhaps sometime between the first half of 2020 and this Christmas season—so that's a big one. And I'd add that the "global order" you (Matt) are presumably thinking of is probably only two or three decades old: for more of human history, the current "order" seemed like some weird phase in the development of human civilizations, and it might turn out to look like that again. But I'll go out on one limb for you today. The biggest development of 2024, for me, was the death of NATO. The alliance that was already gasping for breath in 2019 was officially terminated following a messy divorce in 2024. There are lots of reasons for this—some that will be more obvious to a future observer— but the big two are the inability of NATO governments to agree on how to engage with a revanchist Russia after the botched response to the 2014 incursions into Ukraine, and the collapse of U.S. political support for NATO in the face of domestic crises.

FP: It's an unfortunate end for NATO, if it does ever happen. On what else will readers be writing and reflecting about 2024, I wonder? What was the most surprising and consequential development or event of the year? Or what were the most notable arcs or themes?

Ashford: I was tempted to say "the end of NATO," but you already took that. Instead, I would say that probably the most interesting thing I noticed this year was not even a specific event but rather the speed with which the global climate on various foreign policy-related decisions changes. I think it's always been fast, but I wasn't prepared to see the degree to which things can change in such a small amount of time. There were a couple of reasons for this; we can probably talk about it a little more at the end when we discuss some of the less pleasant events.

I'll be sure to give my final answer after I hear yours.

Kroenig: My gut tells me NATO is the biggest development (and, as you pointed out, a really unfortunate development). But I have to go with a less obvious answer, since you took that one, and also because there were so many really important developments. For me, it might have been the dramatic and complete geopolitical makeover that Vladimir Putin underwent in 2024 and the new and very productive relationship he has now established with Donald Trump.

At around the time of Trump's inauguration, Putin dropped all the "evil imperialist American warmonger" rhetoric that characterized the Trump and Biden years and became a real statesman to be reckoned with. He now regularly takes meetings with key figures from the UK and Europe to discuss matters of international peace and to share his unique and thoughtful perspective on world affairs (which they regularly feature in their newspapers as op-eds under Putin's byline). Most impressively of all, Putin is responsible for turning Russia around economically and restoring his great economic and political power. Russia now is back to the glory days of its status in Europe. It is so wealthy! Putin has achieved this remarkable feat by completely re-orienting Russia away from China and the other non-Western parts of the world with which Russia had previously tried to build "partnerships." Putin realized through his interactions with Trump that the West was not only a natural partner for Russia but, in fact, a part of the family. The world is definitely a better place now that Russia is on the right—rather than the wrong—side of history again. We are all very lucky Putin came along.

Ashford: Wow. That's, uh, quite something. I wasn't expecting that answer at all. It's a good one.

I'm tempted to say you just gave the real answer to the most surprising/negative event/development of the year and I'll take NATO ending (in 2021) as my response to "most consequential" but I suppose you took that one as well by responding in the way you did. Okay, I'll go a different direction again—although I do have to mention the end of Bidenism/Bidenomics: it was nice to hear from the former vice president at Christmas, and perhaps it was too much to expect the political system of "the big, white guy with the little white mustache" to be entirely buried so quickly. But it was a pleasant surprise when 2024 really did mark the end of the political nightmare 2008 unleashed.

It's been fascinating, to me anyway, to watch the ways the global order responds when a political system that's as flawed as the one the Biden administration represented can collapse (although we don't yet know if it was "entirely" buried). What was most interesting was that so many of the global crises in the first weeks of 2024 seemed to be related in their way to Bidenism/Bidenomics in some respect. I can't think of all the examples, but there were quite a few; at the very least we saw the failure of the global vaccine diplomacy (and the failure to convince many of the most impoverished regions to take vaccines from U.S. manufacturers); we saw the failure of "America leading (again) at home and abroad"; we saw some serious financial turmoil related directly to 2022 and 2023 policies and 400-point swings in the Dow from one day to the next. It seems to me that while there were a lot of reasons for all the global crises this year, many of them were exacerbated—directly or indirectly—by Bidenism and the associated global perceptions of U.S. foreign policy and U.S. politics. The world can certainly do better—and perhaps now it does.

FP: I'd like to close this out with the traditional exercise of identifying the year's biggest winners and losers.

Ashford: Absolutely. Earlier you suggested that one of my biggest losers was going to be Iran—actually it was, and it still is; they are in a much weaker position at the beginning of 2025 than they were at the beginning of 2024. But I'll also add Ukraine. At the start of the year, they were "the little country that could," the underdog, and so on and so forth—a position that many people around the world found easy to support. By year's end, Ukraine was "the poor country we had to help," which was less easy for many to support. There was much handwringing about the Ukrainian leadership: "is it really worth it to support this regime, with all its corrupt leaders and undemocratic ways?" This is less of a "hard" loser than a "soft" one; but I'm convinced that many would have preferred a different narrative to develop over the past couple of years.

I'll give my last place trophy to NATO; you have already taken this one but we can each give it to a different organization, and that will make both of us less sad about its loss.

If Iran was 2024's biggest loser, then who was 2024's biggest winner? I'm afraid I'm going to go with Russia, as much as it pains me to say it. I'm not going to take back everything I said earlier about Putin and the "Make Russia Great Again" campaign; but I also don't think Putin (or even Russia) was the biggest winner of the year. My vote for the biggest winner of the year (although I do not believe anyone came out of this year "unharmed" or "unaffected") really comes back to an earlier topic we talked about: NATO. For all NATO's flaws—and I do acknowledge that it had/hasn't—NATO was one of the most effective and powerful mechanisms we had for keeping Russia in its place. That mechanism has been removed, and even if Russia wasn't at the door ready to pounce, it now has that opportunity. It is much more likely to be a spoiler in a post-NATO world than it ever was in a NATO world. So I'll award first prize in the geopolitical "winner" category for 2024—unhappily— to NATO.