Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Danny Postel, Lisa Goldman and Kareem Shaheen
Produced by Finbar Anderson
Listen to and follow The Lede
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Podbean
It was far from a quiet year in 2024, with numerous elections, conflicts and political earthquakes keeping many newsrooms — including New Lines’ — busy. Nevertheless, as The Lede host Faisal Al Yafai suggests on this week’s episode of the podcast, it feels as though many of 2024’s biggest stories have not yet reached their conclusion. And so what should we expect of 2025, he asks New Lines’ Politics Editor Danny Postel, Europe Editor Lisa Goldman and Middle East Editor Kareem Shaheen.
Postel, with an eye firmly on the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president later in January, believes one issue will be at the forefront of the incoming president’s policy agenda. “He has a long litany of issues that he brings up,” says Postel. “The one through line, the most consistent theme that he drills on is immigration. … The scale of the [deportation] operation that they’ve discussed is so vast that it will take many months, if not years to fully execute it, but I think that there’s no question that they’re going to begin on day one.”
“For me, it’s very useful to look at Trump as someone who has no ideology and who’s strictly transactional, and there are only two things he cares about: money and power.”
While he doubts Trump’s moral impetus for doing so, Shaheen hopes the new American president will successfully follow through on a declared objective of ending the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, noting that, “his stated desire to do these grand foreign policy adventures are interesting because they force people into a position of trying to contemplate an end to conflicts that seem insurmountable or that seem without end.”
Goldman, however, is unsure whether those conflicts — particularly Gaza — will register on Trump’s to-do list. “For me, it’s very useful to look at Trump as someone who has no ideology and who’s strictly transactional, and there are only two things he cares about: money and power. I don’t think he particularly cares what happens in Gaza.”
As a result, Goldman’s predictions for Gaza are not hopeful. “I think that there’s unending bleak violence [in 2025],” she says. “There’s no plan [for the Israeli army] to withdraw, and I don’t think there’s a way to withdraw.”
Following up on one of the more surprising stories of 2024, Shaheen suggests there will be cause for greater optimism in Syria, where the long-standing regime of authoritarian ruler Bashar Al-Assad collapsed suddenly in December. “The important thing about Syria is that over the course of 14 years, an actual grassroots civil society thrived. … I really do think that Syrians have developed a political consciousness over the past almost decade and a half of conflict that other Arab countries have not been able to because of an arrested development in their political evolution.”
Further listening:
Survival and Statehood in Ukraine — with Yaroslav Trofimov