World Leaders Who Were Winners and Losers in 2025 |
It would be an understatement to say President Donald Trump was active on the world stage in 2025.
Trump’s national security strategy is reshaping geopolitics in real time. Meanwhile, his trade policies are remaking the global economy.
While the Trump administration boasts the fact that it has brokered nearly 10 peace agreements and ceasefires in conflicts around the globe, some major objectives remain elusive—namely, an end to the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
While the administration has helped cooler heads prevail in several conflicts, tensions between the United States and Venezuela are reaching a breaking point and 2026 will prove critical for the future of Trump’s trade policy.
While the experts love to say geopolitics is not a zero-sum game, there were definitely winners and losers in 2025.
Claudia Sheinbaum
Large swaths of the American right mocked Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s oath of office speech in October 2024 for its “Mexican Humanism”—and that her left-wing rhetoric caused a more than 10% drop in the value of the Mexican Peso in the immediate aftermath of the speech.
Some on the American right, however, saw Sheinbaum more clearly: a female politician tough enough to overcome the machismo and violent undercurrent of Mexican politics, a rhetorician talented enough to deliver a speech that surreptitiously reframed Mexican history as a story of left-wing progress, and a figure popular enough to take up the mantle of her predecessor’s populism without his corny theatrics.
Throughout 2025, Sheinbaum managed to maintain her popularity born out of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s (AMLO) populist coalition while steering the ship of state on her own course. Many polls have her approval rating over 70%.
Sheinbaum had refrained from using AMLO’s infamous “hugs, not bullets” slogan to deal with cartel violence, but now she has essentially abandoned that touchy-feely framework used by her predecessor to justify a slew of government programs—in no small part thanks to pressure from Trump.
She stationed Mexican National Guardsmen at hotspots along the U.S.-Mexico border, increased border enforcement, and handed dozens of high-ranking cartel members to the United States.
The Mexican president had bigger things in mind, however. Over the summer, Sheinbaum’s plan to remake Mexico’s national security apparatus sailed through the legislature. The legislation authorized Sheinbaum to reorganize the Mexican National Guard, reinvent the National System of Public Security, which increases federal control over several law enforcement functions, and increase intelligence gathering and effectiveness through the creation of the National System of Investigation and Intelligence.
Of course, Sheinbaum has faced setbacks in the form of scandals and political assassinations—and homicides remain a persistent problem—but such is Mexico.
Mexico City’s cooperation, however, has kept Trump’s tariff ire at bay, as opposed to Ottawa’s more aggressive........