For President Donald Trump’s supporters, 2025 has been a year of transformation. For his opponents, it’s been nothing short of a long nightmare. The holiday season is a perfect time to look back, reflect and remember the consequential moments of the past year.
As human beings, we generally fixate on the negative. Indeed, there are a ton of things not to like on the foreign policy front during the first year of Trump’s second term. For one, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in June risked a regional war in the Middle East for the benefit of delaying Tehran’s nuclear program by a few years. (Readers might recall that Trump withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal that kept Iran’s nuclear capabilities in a box for at least 15 years, far longer than what the U.S. bombing mission accomplished.) The ongoing U.S. military campaign against drug boats in the southern Caribbean is a performative act tailor-made for the Pentagon’s social media accounts. The Trump administration is also picking cultural war fights with Europe, partly to cater to its own base.
Yet it wasn’t all bad this year. As erratic as Trump can be, there were a few policy moves that the White House can be proud of.
Perhaps the most significant was getting a freeze in the war in Gaza. I use the word “freeze” deliberately; despite Trump’s boasts that he ended the two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas and brought peace to the Middle East, the reality is that the fighting is only suspended. Even this might be too generous of an assessment. Since the so-called ceasefire went into effect in October, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed, as well as three Israeli soldiers. While the Israeli and foreign hostages have been released, the real hard work—getting an independent Palestinian administration set up to rule Gaza; constructing an international security force to help vetted Palestinian police take control of the territory; and disarming Hamas—has only just begun.
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