Why 2026 Could Prove as Important as 1989

If its first days are anything to go by, 2026 may end up the most pivotal year in geopolitics since 1989, a hinge point that began in a moment of geopolitical calm but ended with the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Within a few years the Soviet Union had fallen, the European Union had been born, and an era of hyper-globalized trade took off on the wings of NAFTA and the WTO (World Trade Organization). This year could be equally pivotal—only this time with a vaster range of possible outcomes for world order.

It is possible to hear echoes of the late Cold War, and imagine regime change in Tehran, Caracas and Havana—which would strike a heavy blow to the ambitions of Beijing and Moscow. It is also possible Donald Trump will detonate NATO unity by coercively annexing Greenland, and that Beijing will wage war to subjugate Taiwan and seize its semiconductor plants, toppling a century of American-led Western technological dominance.

The events of 1989 weren’t inevitable, of course, any more than we can know now where the turmoil at the beginning of 2026 will take us. But this is shaping up to be a year of enormous consequence, and it is worth looking at some of its possible outcomes—not in a spirit of prophecy, but preparedness.

Though Trump is driving events according to a 19th century–style, spheres-of-influence view of the world rather than in the name of freedom, sovereignty, or other appealing values, his embrace of the politics of raw power over lofty ideas means he might end up destabilizing several autocracies and opening the door to greater freedom in Latin America and the Middle East. In that sense, 2026 wears a perfume of irony.

A second irony: While Trump’s ambitions are hemispheric and transactional, Beijing’s are global and highly ideological. Chinese strongman Xi Jinping and his aggressive junior partner Vladimir Putin appear far less inclined to settle for the compromises and fiefdoms the White House seems to imagine. Only time will tell whether their ideological rigidity, like their internal commitment to absolute autocracy, will have staying power or prove their ultimate undoing, as it did for the Soviet Union.

The year 1989 started smoothly enough, with the inauguration of U.S. president George H.W. Bush, a patrician Yankee with a steady hand. Relations between Washington and Moscow were thawing. The Soviets withdrew their last troops from Afghanistan in February. Strategic stability felt almost like a given.

But history had other plans.

“Round Table” negotiations between Poland’s Communist rulers and the pro-democratic Solidarity movement ended in an agreement in April 1989 to hold partially free elections by the summer. It would turn out to be a watershed moment for the Communist world.

Chinese students, inspired in part by the news in Poland, filled Tiananmen Square in mid-April to mourn the death of the deposed reformist leader Hu Yaobang. On June 4, the same day the Polish opposition won a large bloc of seats in their country’s parliament, the People’s Liberation Army gunned down Chinese demonstrators on orders from paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. But the bloodshed in China didn’t deter the political tsunami that would surge across eastern and central Europe for the remainder of 1989.

Hungary dissolved Communist rule in October that year. Then, on November 9, the Berlin Wall fell. Within days, the Communist governments of East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia collapsed peacefully. Romania, in the only non-peaceful revolution that year in Europe, closed out 1989 by executing its leader and his wife by firing squad in a freezing courtyard on Christmas Day.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev captured the scale of transformation at an early December summit with President Bush in Malta. “We stated, both of us, that the world leaves one epoch of cold war and enters another epoch.”

America’s “unipolar moment” was born. Bush invaded Panama to restore democracy that same month. In January 1991, he led a multinational military campaign to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, demonstrating such overwhelming American military might that Beijing embraced a multi-decade strategy of cultivating close trade and technological ties (and avoiding direct confrontation) with Washington. By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had imploded. In 1993 the European Union was born. NAFTA and the WTO came into being in 1994 and 1995, respectively, and a new era of Pax Americana, free-trade globalism, and U.S. hyperpower had arrived.

When that “unipolar moment” ended is a matter of considerable debate. (We would argue it lasted 25 years, until 2014—the year Putin took Crimea, Xi fully launched his “One Belt, One Road” global development and influence program, and NATO officially ended its combat mission in Afghanistan, leaving behind an unstable government that the Taliban would topple in 2021.) But the contours of the next “epoch,” to borrow Gorbachev’s word, may emerge in 2026.

Ayatollah Khamenei: Supreme Loser?

It’s anyone’s guess how the current protests in Iran will play out. Autocracies are organized around the principle of sustaining their monopoly on power at any cost—a point underscored in a new report by the group Human Rights Activists in Iran that around 500 protesters have died in the demonstrations that started two weeks ago.

Yet protests have continued even as the regime has enacted internet blackouts, cut electricity, silenced phone networks, and killed protesters. The regime has rarely seemed weaker following its spectacular defeat last year in the multifront war it waged against Israel, starting with Hamas’s terrorist rampage on Israeli civilians and soldiers in October 2023.

It’s unclear what effect U.S. air strikes on the regime, which Trump has threatened if Tehran mows down demonstrators, might have on this combustible situation. But Trump’s threat to intervene should be taken seriously. Much of the world has forgotten that Tehran organized plots to assassinate Trump while he was running for president in 2024. Those plots were foiled, but Trump has a long memory.

Besides a possible desire for payback, and a frequently repeated pledge to prevent a nuclear Iran, Trump is clearly feeling gung-ho following successful military raids to bomb Iran’s nuclear program in June and capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro last weekend. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Saturday.

Can Peking Duck the Consequences?

The fall of the Iranian regime would deal a major setback to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s geostrategic ambitions. Xi and Putin lost useful allies with the December 2024 fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and last weekend’s dramatic arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

The end of the Iranian regime would be more seismic. Iran is the de facto proxy for Beijing and Moscow in the Middle East, harnessed to exhaust and discredit American power. Xi and Putin have provided significant direct material support to Iran, as well as diplomatic, propaganda, and intelligence support for several of Iran’s own proxies following the start of the war on Israel. (Moscow and Beijing reportedly provided satellite intelligence to support Houthi rebel attacks on U.S. warships and international shipping in the Red Sea.)

Iran, in turn, has been a key supplier of the Shahed kamikaze drones that Russia uses to wreak devastation on Ukraine. The majority of Iran’s oil exports go to China, at heavily discounted prices. As recently as October, 41 percent of China’s oil imports came from fellow Axis members Russia, Venezuela, and Iran.

In short, China’s Middle East strategy could end in tatters. At a minimum, the fall of Tehran would afflict Beijing with the sort of chronic migraine that has tormented Washington since militant mullahs first took power in Iran in 1979.

For years leading up to 1979, Washington pursued a “twin pillars” Middle East strategy consisting of friendly relations with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. Washington and Tehran’s post-1979 hostility benefited Beijing, which, over time, developed its own two-pillars approach to the region, cultivating close ties with Iran and Saudi Arabia. (Beijing even fostered friendly ties with Israel, forming almost a third pillar of its regional strategy. That pillar has since crumbled, due to Beijing’s support for Hamas and its fueling of rabid antisemitism through TikTok starting in 2023.) In short, losing Iran as an ally would cost Beijing its primary source of leverage over the security of Gulf Arab states, Israel, and the United States.

There is the slightest chance the fall of Iran might even trigger a true supernova: the destabilization of Beijing itself. Iran’s problems mirror some of China’s own—high youth unemployment and a struggling economy beyond China’s booming technology sector. Beijing’s neo-Orwellian, AI-enabled domestic security apparatus, which receives more funding than even the Chinese military, gives Xi perhaps the most fearsome ability of any ruler in the world to police the thoughts of his subjects and forestall or suppress public demonstrations. Yet the situation in Iran shows how efforts to prevent protests can be quickly overwhelmed.

Trump Strains NATO Unity in Greenland

Trump has said Greenland matters to the United States as a potential source of rare earths and other key resources, and as a national security bulwark against the Arctic encroachments of China and Russia.

Yet minerals can be exploited and adversaries kept at bay without the need for Denmark to surrender its sovereignty over the massive, but sparsely populated, island. Which is why Europeans can be forgiven for questioning Trump’s motives. In his January 8 interview with The New York Times, Trump suggested he’s out for full American ownership. “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success,” he said. “Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.” The idea of a “Trump Purchase” featuring in U.S. history textbooks may be too much for Trump to resist.

The real cost, however, won’t be in dollars but in the damage it might wreak on NATO unity. Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen cut to the chase: “[I]f the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Several NATO allies have publicly defended Denmark’s position. A coercive annexation of Greenland by the U.S. would destabilize the transatlantic alliance just as Russia has begun testing NATO’s resolve with incursions into Polish and Finnish airspace and a spate of undersea cable cuttings. Any compromise to NATO’s credibility would be read in Moscow as an invitation to take military action beyond Ukraine.

Will cooler heads prevail in Washington and Europe? Any European ultimatum that challenges Washington to choose between Greenland or NATO will be seen by Trump for what it is: Europe negotiating with a gun to its own head. We don’t sense that Trump is intentionally trying to harm NATO. NATO leaders “are all my friends” Trump wrote in a January 7 Truth Social post. “We will always be there for NATO, even if they won’t be there for us.” Thus, Greenland will be a defining test of Europe’s strategic aptitude and its storied diplomacy. Do Western European leaders have it in them to treat Trump as accommodatingly as they treat Xi Jinping? Trump, after all, is still helping protect Europe from Russia; Xi is the decisive backer of Russia’s war in Europe.

Taiwan: Linchpin of American Power

The Venezuela raid earlier this month is a dramatic demonstration of Trump’s willingness to use military force in pursuit of his goals. This will be food for thought for smaller U.S. adversaries like Iran and Cuba, the latter of which is also in Trump’s crosshairs. (“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA,” he posted on Sunday.)

Whether the raid has moved the needle in favor of deterring Xi from annexing Taiwan is a different story. Beijing’s December military exercise around Taiwan was the latest in a campaign of ever-tightening pressure on the democratically governed island. Xi will keep applying his ratchet in 2026.

The December exercise featured a blockade simulation that came within five miles of Taiwan’s coast and rehearsal for a “decapitation” of Taiwan’s government, according to state media. Beijing is also employing more menacing forms of psychological warfare. The Chinese military recently published an image of Taipei’s skyline purportedly snapped by a covert Chinese drone (Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense denied the claim). It has also released satellite images of the residence and office of a Taiwanese legislator who Beijing doesn’t like. All this is designed to reinforce the message Xi delivered in his new year’s address: that unification with Taiwan is “unstoppable.”

It’s perhaps more likely that Xi refrains from acts of war this year to await the January 2028 Taiwan presidential election in the hope he ends up with a more pliant negotiating partner. But if Taiwan does fall, the economic and geopolitical shock to world order would be immense. Taiwan’s fate is directly intertwined with the future of American power and influence across the Indo-Pacific region. The security of major democracies, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and much of Southeast Asia, rests on that power.

Taiwan’s fate is also tied to American technological dominance, owing to the fact nearly all the world’s most advanced chips are made in Taiwan. If Beijing seizes control of that supply chain, it will effectively hold a “kill switch” on American ambitions to lead the AI revolution as well as its ability to compete economically and militarily.

Thus, a U.S. strategy focused purely on expanding American power and influence in the Western Hemisphere would fall short of keeping America safe and prosperous. With his 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt pursued interventionist policies in the Western Hemisphere not only to drive out nosy European powers, but to set the table for America to become a global power, which it most certainly became. As one of us wrote in The Free Press a year ago, “Trump should resist any urge to pull a ‘reverse Teddy’—throwing our weight around in the Americas in order to retrench into a merely hemispheric power.”

Time will tell how the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine shapes up in practice—and it may tell the story quickly, judging by the speed of events so far in 2026. The demonstrators in Iran, at least, suggest that the ideals of liberty that have illuminated the American experience, however fitfully and imperfectly, still inspire people worldwide, and carry the flame of history.

Failing that, we can hope that a saying often attributed to Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, still holds: “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

Matt Pottinger was deputy national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. He chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and is CEO of research and advisory firm Garnaut Global LLC. Roy Eakin is an analyst at Garnaut Global LLC specializing in trade and geopolitics.