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Full Episode
It's Wednesday, the 1st of January. Look at that, 2025. Here we are. Welcome to the President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. Coming to you today from, oh look, another airport somewhere in the United States. Okay, let's get briefed. Well, congratulations to us all, right? We've managed to survive 2024.
Now, not to completely bum you out, as they used to say back in the day, but let's do a quick recap of the year. A third year of the Ukraine conflict, imposed on the world by Vladimir Putin's vainglorious vision of reconstituting the Soviet Union in some fashion. There was that.
And then the Middle East, of course, in conflict, thanks to the Iranian regime and its Revolutionary Guard Corps with their ring of proxy puppets, all sharing a vision of the destruction of Israel. Then, of course, the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria after 50 plus years of a brutal family dynasty propped up, of course, by Moscow and Iran.
Then there was increased tensions in the Taiwan Strait as Xi Jinping's China, repeatedly demonstrated their ability to surround Taiwan during a series of increasingly large military exercises. And let's not forget Kim Jong-un in North Korea, with North Korea sending thousands of their soldiers to die on the battlefields of Ukraine in exchange for cash, oil, and weapons technology from Moscow.
And then, of course, there was what else? A fentanyl crisis in the United States that has to date killed more Americans than all those Americans who died in every war from World War II until now. And let's see, what else can we have for 2024? Again, I told you, I didn't want to bum you out. Political upheaval in a variety of countries around the globe. And of course, the U.S.
election that saw the return of Donald Trump in the U.S., there was violence and chaos in Haiti that has left that country in shambles, then the list keeps going, doesn't it? The increasing proliferation, let's not forget that, of disinformation by a host of state actors, as well as the rise of AI-enabled deepfakes designed to sow discord, distrust, and division.
And those are just some of the year's more significant developments. It was, as they say, a year to remember. And so, we approach 2025 perhaps with a bit more trepidation than hope. If this past year is any indicator, well, the new year will be a doozy. Hmm, doozy, which is not a term that you hear all that often, frankly. Fair enough. Maybe we can go with a humdinger.
It was a humdinger of a year or a barn burner. Regardless, you get my point. Now, it's unlikely that 2025 will somehow deliver a year of peace, of calm, of civility. On this first day of the new year, though, it doesn't seem like any exit ramps are within view for the major global conflicts.
Putin, for instance, doesn't seem interested in legitimate negotiations despite the growing loss of Russian life and damage to his economy. Hamas and their puppet masters in Iran seem to have scuttled the latest ceasefire talks, The new rebel leaders of Syria are implying that democratic elections may be several years in the distance.
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