The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is parasocialwhich means “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.” Over at the Collins Dictionary, which monitors suddenly popular words, among this year’s winners is clanker. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s used to express “people’s frustrations with, and distrust of, AI chatbots and platforms.” Germany’s renowned Langenscheidt dictionary has selected das crazy as its youth word of the year, which is not a noun but a phrase whose meaning I will let you discern on your own. And I won’t even dignify Dictionary.com’s word of the year—67—with a comment. The least we can expect from the dictionary business is the ability to distinguish between letters and numbers, even when a particular number is insanely trendy among children.
Fortunately, in the world of geopolitics we don’t have to ponder relationships with chatbots and similarly thorny issues. Instead, I have the privilege to present the new (or newly popular) geopolitical words that defined 2025.
The Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year is parasocialwhich means “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence.” Over at the Collins Dictionary, which monitors suddenly popular words, among this year’s winners is clanker. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s used to express “people’s frustrations with, and distrust of, AI chatbots and platforms.” Germany’s renowned Langenscheidt dictionary has selected das crazy as its youth word of the year, which is not a noun but a phrase whose meaning I will let you discern on your own. And I won’t even dignify Dictionary.com’s word of the year—67—with a comment. The least we can expect from the dictionary business is the ability to distinguish between letters and numbers, even when a particular number is insanely trendy among children.
Fortunately, in the world of geopolitics we don’t have to ponder relationships with chatbots and similarly thorny issues. Instead, I have the privilege to present the new (or newly popular) geopolitical words that defined 2025.
The year 2025 would not be 2025 if the list didn’t begin with something related to U.S. President Donald Trump. Over the course of this year, he has used many words and terms, especially of the pejorative kind. But one that he has definitely not used is TACO. As of 2025, the all-caps version of the Mexican dish has nothing to do with food and everything to do with Trump’s habit of imposing tariffs and then walking them back. The acronym, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, was coined by Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong, who explained that “the US administration does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain.” The most recent case: Brazil, on which Trump imposed 40 percent tariffs earlier this year, bringing the total rate to 50 percent. That has made coffee, beef, and fruit so expensive in the United States that Trump removed the 40 percent markup on coffee, beef, fruit, and other staples in November.
You’ve thought and talked about drones, but until earlier this year, had you discussed drone walls? I’m pretty sure you had not. Drone walls, in fact, only became a major geopolitical term when Russian drones crossed into Poland and Romania this autumn and unidentified drones violated the airspace around several major European airports a short while later. Such disruptions are costly and dangerous, and they prompted several European leaders to float the idea of a drone wall, a combination of technologies that detect and disable suspicious drones. Because a drone wall is far less impenetrable than the Berlin Wall, the concept will continue to be the subject of many a heated dispute.
In 2024, I published Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided Worldwhich chronicles the rise and fall of globalization and the world’s separation into different trading blocs. At the time, a few professors claimed that I was mistaken and that globalization was in rude health. But business executives—the practitioners of globalization—saw the writing on the wall. Since then, we’ve seen the world split into different, increasingly fractious economic and political blocs. Russia has been attempting to construct a grouping with itself as the leader, while its on-again, off-again friend China is building a sphere of influence for itself. So are, respectively, ambitious Middle Eastern nations led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And then there’s the fracturing relationship between the United States and its Western allies. All that grants multipolarization a place of honor as a 2025 geopolitical word of the year. One can only speculate what order, or disorder, such an arrangement will generate in 2026.
Narcoterrorism has been around for years. “The involvement of terrorist organizations and insurgent groups in drug trafficking, has become a problem with international implications,” the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin noted in an article about the issue in 1987. That brief sentence highlights why the decades-old term deserves to be called a 2025 geopolitical word of the year. In the past, narcoterrorism most frequently referred to traditional terrorist organizations engaging in narcotics trafficking. “Two recent cases, one involving the Provisional Irish Republican Army and a known trafficker and the other involving the sale of narcotics to finance an assassination attempt, illustrate how each group used the criminal networks of the other to fulfill their own specific objectives,” the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin explained. But this year, the Trump administration has embraced a different use of the termfocused on the terrorist-like activities of drug gangs. Now, the administration has decided to designate certain drug gangs as terrorist organizations, which—it insists in the face of all established legal opinion—allows the U.S. government to fight them using military means. Cue attacks on drug boats off the coast of Venezuela.
“Those arriving on small boats or overstaying visas face up to a 30-year wait for settlement,” British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood posted on X in November. Mahmood is on a mission to reduce the number of asylum-seekers arriving in the U.K.—because the government knows that’s what voters want. “While some are refugees, others are economic migrants seeking to use, and abuse, our asylum system. […] To the British public, who foot the bill, the system feels out of control and unfair,” Mahmood said on the Home Office’s website. Britain is far from the only country experiencing asylum fatigue: On the contrary, this year, asylum fatigue has spread across the West. It is also not a new concept; in recent decades, the world has seen several rounds of it. Was it inevitable that Welcoming culture—a 2015 phenomenon—would lead to asylum fatigue? You decide.
You may think that a persistent objector is a person who persistently objects to military service. It isn’t. However obscure the term may be, the activity that it describes has become crucial this year. Under international law, persistent objector refers to the idea that “a State which persistently objects to a rule of customary international law during the formative stages of that rule will not be bound by it when it becomes established.” This year, the United States has flouted the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) with an executive order giving U.S.-based companies the right to conduct seabed mining in international waters. The United States has not ratified UNCLOS, but key tenets of the convention are customary international law. Is the United States a persistent objector? Either way, the term has become ever more pertinent.
Supply chains are the kind of boring cogs in the wheel of globalization that we ordinary citizens never used to worry about. Then came COVID-19 and China’s decision to slash personal protective equipment (PPE) exports to Western countries. Some countries were cut off while a few favored ones, such as Serbia, received the much-needed and desired supplies. And it wasn’t just PPE: China’s zero-COVID policy caused disruption in its factories, which then caused disruption to global supply chains. Today, the risk that countries will weaponize supply chains to harm other nations is so real that supply chain sovereignty has gone from a nerdy term to a political priority.
With that, all good wishes for 2026. One can only wonder—and fear—what geopolitical words will join the geopolitical parlance over the next 12 months.
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An illustration of geopolitical words from 2024: Anchor-dragging-ATACMS, Lavender, P&I clubs, Autogolpe, gallium and germanium. An illustration of geopolitical words from 2024: Anchor-dragging-ATACMS, Lavender, P&I clubs, Autogolpe, gallium and germanium. New Geopolitical Words We Learned in 2024
Lavender is sinister, not sweet—and if you can’t join the P&I club, you can ghost it.
