How Will 2026 Play Out?

It appears that 2025 left some unfinished global stories which will rumble on into 2026 and these include Keir Starmer's leadership of the country, the Russia/Ukraine War, the Epstein Files, Venezuela, China and Taiwan and Israel and Palestine so how do I expect these to play out over the next 12 months?

Keir Starmer is struggling and he must know it and the Labour Party certainly does because 2025 came to an end with some big figures in the Party maneuvering themselves into position should he fall or be pushed.
I don't think anything will happen and tinder will be kept dry until the Local Elections in May where a set of bad results, and nobody thinks they won't be awful, will probably see him and the Chancellor step down rather than be forcibly removed and hand the country over to a new pair who, hopefully, will be a bit more like the old Labour Party than they have been so far.
     
There is a reason why Vladimir Putin appears to be swerving the Europeans when it comes to talking peace because he knows that all the time Donald Trump is in charge of the peace talks, he can just string him along and play Trump who bizarrely seems to be coming down on Moscow's side despite them being the invaders and issuing demands of Ukraine to make peace but the Europeans are very much on the opposite side and are very keen to stop Trump bulldozing Zelenskyy out the way and rewarding Russia and I can't see that changing so I expect to still be talking about it next January.

The Epstein Files are not going anywhere and with millions of documents yet to be released, we are only at the start of it so this year will see us being drip fed photo's and documents which implicate some powerful people, including increasingly Donald Trump who will do his usual blustering of 'fake news' and 'conspiracy' but as even his own people are now turning against him as the evidence piles up he will either step down (unlikely) or try to deflect the attention by introducing even more Draconian laws in America or even starting a war.  

The USA military has now killed blown up over 30 small boats coming from Venezuela with no evidence shown that they are drug boats and so concerned are many nations that they have stopped supplying the USA with intelligence but the Trump Government are threatening to take a step forward from their current actions and attacking Venezueala itself to remove Nicolás Maduro and replace him with a much more America friendly Maria Corina Machado who, as Trump said himself, would hand out Oil Contracts to them like sweeties.
At some point in the next 12 months it will probably happen but as America found out in a lot of conflicts recently, removing a leader is easy but keeping the peace afterwards not so much.

China ended the last year militarily encircling Taiwan who they claim is part of China but the sticking point has always been the agreement made by the USA to help Taiwan defend itself but President Xi must be looking on at what is happening in Ukraine and Israel and seeing two nations invading and murdering scores of civilians and the USA actually backing them and Trump is making no noises about stopping China, he is even visiting Beijing in Spring and expect Xi to start leveraging pressure on the US to row back its allegiance to Taiwan in exchange for economic easing, particularly of the rare Earth Minerals America are so desperate for. We probably won't see Taiwan invaded this year which will be all about laying the ground for it next year.

Just like Putin in Russia, Netanyahu in Israel has found Trump to be very amiable in allowing it to do what it wants when it comes to Palestine where it has been committing a Genocide and Netanyahu knows that he can string Trump along and make promises he has no plan to keep while scrubbing the Palestinians out of their land but the fly in the particular ointment is that he has elections in October 2026 and he knows that the only thing keeping him out of prison on fraud charges is the Presidency which he is unlikely to win so nothing much will change, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine may actually be fast tracked, until late next year.