Most times I approach the new year with a mixture of high hopes and low expectations. I am rarely disappointed.
This year, expectations are lower than ever; and, consequently, I have had to adjust the high hopes in a downward direction too.
I am old enough to know that dashed hopes are part of the human condition. As a species we are pretty good at disappointing ourselves, and others. But this year reading the runes is a particularly gruesome affair.
Overshadowing it all is the inauguration next month of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
It’s not just his phoenix-like rise from the ashes – undoubtedly one of the most spectacular political comebacks of modern history. It’s everything that flows from it.
Let us set aside for a moment the man himself – morally bankrupt, self-serving and narcissistic – and focus instead on the political agenda he represents.
Let us also remember that the impact of his policies will not be confined to the boundaries of the United States, but will have repercussions which will resound around the globe.
And they will be amplified by the tin-pot dictators who take their script from him – suppressing freedom of speech and the press, demonising political opponents, and aggrandising themselves and their backers at the expense of the poor.
Trump’s stated intention to impose tariffs on imports to the United States threatens the global economy – his target is primarily China, but both Ireland and Britain are in the line of fire, alongside other important trading partners.
Northern Ireland, already hampered by being wedded to a failing United Kingdom, will feel the pinch as Keir Starmer’s policies of austerity by stealth kick in.
Having cut itself off from the European market, Britain is particularly vulnerable to global economic shocks, and Trump will ensure Starmer’s so-called push for growth is pretty well dead in the water.
On the climate, the Make America Great Again crowd still have not twigged that the increasingly unstable climate, and multiple natural disasters close to home, are linked to their determination to exploit the earth’s natural resources.
The science is clear. But if populists don’t like what they are being told, they dismiss it. Expect a bonfire of Joe Biden’s pledges on climate change; and expect more extreme weather here and around the world as a result.
In Ireland the Kennedy name is still revered, but the brand is about to take a battering if Robert F Kennedy Junior is confirmed as Trump’s Secretary of Health and Social Services.
The arch-conspiracist and anti-vaxer’s policies will kill the vulnerable at home and threaten global health – including attempts to control HIV-AIDS, eradicate diseases which prey on children, and build international action to prevent future pandemics.
Women’s freedom to make decisions about their own health has already been massively eroded. Kennedy will make matters worse.
Staying with global issues, Trump’s arrival also threatens the fight for peace in the middle east.
His unflinching support for Benjamin Netanyahu will give Israel’s genocidal prime minister a free hand over Gaza.
His bromance with Vladimir Putin will have profound implications for Ukraine where Trump appears determined to force it into an unjust peace with Russia.
And, whatever your view of Nato, Trump’s hostility to it will further embolden Putin whose imperial ambitions will not stop at the suppression of Ukraine.
It must also be said that Trump’s crude and misogynistic world view, his othering of people from the LGBTQ+ community, and his brutal attacks on vulnerable people seeking asylum, and on migrants fleeing poverty, will introduce a poison into the global discourse that we could well do without.
From history we know that tyrants build their empires on policies of ‘divide and conquer’, that they target marginalised groups and use that manufactured hatred to mobilise their own supporters, that they demonise the press and suppress freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
They curtail human rights. They amass wealth for themselves and impoverish others. They take control of the key arms of state – the parliament, the courts, and the media.
The MAGA movement has already done that in the United States – and from a position where it was not in power. Now that it is in power, the prospects are truly dark.
But we also know that tyrants fall, that eventually people get sick of the graft, the lies, and the limitations on their freedom.
So my hope this new year’s eve is that Trump will over-reach himself, and that this is the year – at the moment of its greatest peril – that America wakes up and saves itself from the tyranny its founders feared and which their outdated constitution has failed to check.
Happy New Year.