As the year ends, Russian air strikes continue to pummel Ukraine with Moscow controlling about 75% of the Donetsk region and some 99% of the neighbouring
Luhansk even as talks to end the war seem to have gathered pace. Meanwhile, on Christmas day, the United States of America launched strikes against militants linked to the Islamic State in northwestern Nigeria. Earlier this month, Donald Trump had ordered a naval blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, accusing Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, of leading a drugs cartel.
In other parts of the world, military force continues to be the dominant instrument of inter-state engagement. Two months after a ceasefire imposed by the US, Gaza remains frozen in the first phase of Donald Trump’s peace plan: its territory split between rival forces, its population still displaced, and vast stretches reduced to rubble. Trump's peace plan envisions an International Stabilisation Force and a newly-trained Palestinian police force to secure Gaza as the next steps but different militias are now dominating the Gazan territory.
Despite a tenuous ceasefire agreement, Thailand and Cambodia continue to target each other’s forces along the border.
China continues to use a mix of military pressure to compel Taiwan towards
political submission without triggering full conflict. This year saw Chinese coast
guard and PLA ships attempting to block or harass vessels from other countries, such as the Philippines, to underline coercive enforcement of Beijing’s territorial claims. Fast- growing PLA capabilities in the form of stealth fighters, carriers, and amphibious craft are rapidly enhancing China’s ability to undertake coercive operations in contested regions.
In 2025, India and Pakistan too faced off militarily, sparked by a terror attack in Pahalgam and followed by reciprocal strikes across their border before a ceasefire was agreed to.
The world is spending significantly more on defence due to escalating conflicts and geopolitical shifts. The state of NATO today and the tensions in trans-Atlantic ties underline how military power remains central to alliance politics as collective defence commitments continue to structure global alignments.
In recent years, some parts of the world have tried to marginalise their militaries in strategic decision-making. But the persistence of armed conflict and strategic rivalry underlined the centrality of military power as a tool of coercion as well as a foundation for deterrence. The shift away from American unipolarity to a multipolar global order has weakened extended deterrence frameworks and is pushing nation-states to seek their own security paradigms.
Today, military power is rarely exercised in isolation; it is increasingly embedded within a broader toolkit of statecraft. Through calibrated troop deployments, joint exercises, and arms transfers, states seek to reassure allies and shape adversaries’ calculations without incurring the escalatory costs of an outright war. This pattern has elevated the
salience of grey-zone strategies where the controlled application of military
pressure stays below conventional thresholds of conflict, nonetheless reshaping political and strategic realities. In this environment, diplomacy is no longer distinct from force but is instead conditioned by it.
The use of force has remained integral to both the theory and the practise of
international relations. Even as global institutions and legal frameworks have expanded in their ambition to regulate or restrain violence, force continues to function as a decisive instrument of statecraft. In this sense, the use of force retains particular salience as a means of coercion and compellence, underscoring its enduring relevance in contemporary geopolitics. This year reinforced, with unmistakable clarity, the fact that the use of force remains a crucial mechanism through which states define and renegotiate the terms of their engagement with one another.
Harsh V. Pant is Professor of International Relations, King’s College London