Mar-a-Lago has become the preferred place for president-elect Donald Trump to receive foreign dignitaries, as well as the place from which to make various political pronouncements.
The Palm Beach, Florida, resort was commissioned by the heiress of breakfast cereals company General Foods Corporation, who — inspired by imperial Russia art and culture — thought it could be the winter White House, just as the Romanovs had their Winter Palace in St Petersburg. It was bequeathed to the US government, which turned it down because of the expense entailed in looking after it, and the property was sold to Trump in 1985.
Since the November 2024 US elections the beach resort complex has seen a steady stream of sycophants, billionaires and politicians coming to kiss the Trumpian ring, seeking his blessing in this imperial splendour.
At the other end of the world — literally — another seismic geopolitical shift occurred last year: China and India decided to de-escalate along the 4,000km border the two states share in Eastern Ladakh.
A deadly clash on June 14 and 15 in 2000 saw scores of soldiers killed and the chilling of relations between the two countries for the next four years. Both sides had amassed up to 50,000 troops each along what is referred to as the Line of Actual Control (LAC), air travel was severely trimmed while India banned Chinese companies such as ByteDance, the firm behind TikTok, from operating on its territory.
Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri briefed the Indian media in October 2024 that “agreement has been arrived at on patrolling arrangements along the LAC leading to disengagement and a resolution of the issues that had arisen in these areas in 2020”.
Since then there has been rapid progress in thawing the bilateral relationship: troops were withdrawn from their eyeball-to-eyeball positions, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and Chinese president Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the 2024 Brics summit at Kazan, Russia, for the first time since 2019, and their foreign and defence ministers met subsequently.
The Chinese premier urged Sino-India co-operation as “two major developing countries and important members of the global south”, to unite and promote “the multipolarisation of the world and the democratisation of international relations”.
Elizabeth Roche of India’s Jindal School of International Affairs says that “the reasons behind the breakthrough are as unclear as the causes for the sudden Chinese mobilisation in 2020”. The following possible reasons have been offered by analysts:
- India’s growing closeness to the US under the Modi administration may have been a trigger for China.
- Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar indicated that a complicated situation was arising, with India and China rising economically and wanting to have an impact globally.
- China is India’s biggest source of imports, with a large trade deficit in Beijing’s favour. Pressure on New Delhi has been coming from commercial interests given that many critical components and products are imported from China. India’s Economic Survey 2023-24, a government document laying out the state of the economy, spoke of the economic imperative for getting Sino-Indian ties back on track.
- As India and China both face the possibility of punitive tariffs on exports to the US under the Trump administration, they will need to open their markets even more to each other.
- With uncertainty about the next Indian general election due to be held in 2029, the Chinese would rather deal with a strong leader such as Modi than one they are unsure of.
The next steps in this de-escalation will be critical.
Medium-term issues are the settling of other territorial and border disputes between the two states and the thorny issue of China’s closeness to Pakistan, with India having decades-long troubled relations with the latter.
The year 2025 could thus well see at least a strong Asian response to US designs on reshaping the global order. How Europe, South America and Africa respond to such plans will be critical in determining the direction of geopolitics for the next five years.
• Abba Omar is director of operations at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.
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