In 2025, FP’s readers kept coming back to stories about U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy moves since his return to office and his administration’s effects on the world. They also gravitated toward essays that examined the post-Cold War era, what has succeeded it, and what the geopolitical landscape looks like now.
These are 10 of 2025’s most read stories, as measured by website traffic among subscribers.
In 2025, FP’s readers kept coming back to stories about U.S. President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy moves since his return to office and his administration’s effects on the world. They also gravitated toward essays that examined the post-Cold War era, what has succeeded it, and what the geopolitical landscape looks like now.
These are 10 of 2025’s most read stories, as measured by website traffic among subscribers.
The End of Development
By Adam Tooze, Sept. 8
Two of FP columnist Adam Tooze’s print magazine articles are among this year’s most read. In this first one, Tooze examines development economics at a time of crisis for our Fall 2025 issue, reviewing the recent history of global development and competing visions for its future.
Samuel Huntington Is Getting His Revenge
By Nils Gilman, Feb. 21
“We stand at the cusp of a reordering moment in international relations as significant as 1989, 1945, or 1919—a generational event,” historian Nils Gilman wrote in February.
According to Gilman, “the new post-Cold War hegemony that emerged in the 1990s rested on several normative pillars”—and each pillar has been increasingly challenged since. In this essay, Gilman revisits previous debates in international relations on the nature of the global order and considers what a new order might look like.
The Periodic Table of States
By Parag Khanna, March 13
In March, global strategist Parag Khanna presented a “periodic table of states”—a meta-index based on more than two dozen metrics, with the goal of comparing states’ overall stability. In addition to the table itself, readers can explore country data and graphics mapping diplomatic bodies, nonstate actors, and more throughout the article.
The End of Modernity
By Christopher Clark, June 30
Sara Gironi Carnevale illustration for Foreign Policy
“As the global blocs of the 20th century dissolve, we are witnessing a return to the more mobile and unpredictable world of the 19th century,” historian Christopher Clark wrote in FP’s Summer 2025 issue. Citing the recent history of political parties and systems as well as global economics, Clark argues that uncertainty and polarization are defining characteristics of the post-Cold War era.
When the Threat Is Inside the White House
By Tim Weiner, July 11
In an adapted essay from his latest book on the Central Intelligence Agency, The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century, journalist Tim Weiner talks to agency insiders to understand paradigm shifts in intelligence ahead of the Russia-Ukraine war, how the CIA began “to peer inside the Kremlin,” and deep division between the U.S. executive branch and national security establishment.
America Is Locked in a New Class War
By Adam Tooze, Jan. 7
In FP’s winter print issue, Tooze pointed out that exit polls from the 2024 U.S. presidential election found that low-income income voters shifted to the right, while the most affluent Americans swung left. This data, he writes, suggests that “in analyzing the U.S. political scene, we have to allow for a three-class rather than a two-class model.” Such an approach, Tooze argues, is key to understanding “class forces around Trump.”
Is America a Kleptocracy?
By Jodi Vittori, March 25
According to scholar Jodi Vittori, anti-corruption institutions and norms are coming under pressure in the United States. In an essay for our Spring 2025 issue, Vittori examines and compares global examples of the development and consequences of corruption and kleptocracy.
It’s Time for Europe to Do the Unthinkable
By Kishore Mahbubani, Feb. 18
Europe has found itself on the back foot as it grapples with the ongoing war in Ukraine and its relationship with the United States, Singaporean statesman Kishore Mahbubani writes. Now, he argues that Europe should consider “three unthinkable options” to advance its own geopolitical interests.
Why Beijing Thinks It Can Beat Trump
By Scott Kennedy, April 10
Writing after U.S. tariffs on China were announced in April, Scott Kennedy examined why Chinese elites had renewed resolve. Negative perceptions of the United States under Trump “have become an imperceptible mirror in which Chinese look to reevaluate their own country’s present and future,” Kennedy writes.
Four Explanatory Models for Trump’s Chaos
By Emma Ashford, April 24
In April, FP columnist Emma Ashford weighed in on the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency, writing that it’s clear that his administration is “aiming for change—not inertia—in U.S. foreign policy, though the direction of that change is unclear.” Ashford presents four possible explanatory models for Trump’s decisions, from a return to realpolitik to a Republican foreign-policy showdown.
