As we near the end of 2025, it feels like cracks are appearing in the fabric of everything, everywhere. It’s genuinely hard to remember a time when the global outlook looked more challenging.
In a special year-ending essay for Guardian Weekly, diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour charts how the long period of order since the second world war appears to be unravelling, marked by a crisis of legitimacy for international law and the rise of ‘mobster diplomacy’ driven by Donald Trump. It’s a world that western leaders fear is now in a transitional moment, or an interregnum, where accountability is being lost and norms are increasingly violated.
