The year changes, and every change—even those invented by humans—comes accompanied by its fears.

By definition, it is something new. As always, it will be unpredictable. One hopes it will also be “better” than the previous one—a “happy new year,” whatever the components of happiness may be, however much optimism can fit into the wishes of these days.

How much room is there for optimism? The year changes, and every change, even those devised by human beings, is accompanied by its fears. You do not know what the future holds for you, not even the immediate future. But you do know what the recent past held for you—the one you have just lived through. And thus, the measure of optimism for the coming year is defined by the one that has just passed. 2026 enters carrying over from 2025 the burdens of a war, static on the battlefields, whose outcome, however, depends on a new type of diplomacy.

In the year that is ending, the way we wage war did not change all that much, even if drones replaced shells. What changed far more radically was the way we negotiate. One could add a new term to the vocabulary of the year: “transactional diplomacy.” One could also say that international law has largely been replaced, as far as our postwar norms are concerned, by the law of power. And one might recall that this combination—cynical transaction and brute force—has often proven deadly in the past.

This has happened again and again throughout history. The powerful divide among themselves, like spoils, things that do not belong to them—territories, resources, rare earths, and other geopolitical treasures. And when the limits of the division are exhausted, the moment arrives when they end up clashing. From this perspective, Ukraine is not merely a country defending itself against a powerful invader, but a testing ground for new transactional norms.

Or perhaps not so new. Rarely, in recent decades, has a year been perceived as a return to eras buried in a bloody past. 2025 was such a year—unique in the world that was born upon the ruins of World War II. Yet we are not speaking merely of a regression, but most likely of the beginning of the end of the world in which postwar generations lived, worked, and progressed.

The change is fundamental if one considers that the years of the 1960s, the 1970s, and even more so the 1980s and 1990s after the Cold War, changed roughly the way records changed on turntables. Time was measured by artistic movements, technological inventions, and the frames that held the generations of our loved ones in the living room. Rock and pop. Grandfathers, grandmothers, parents, and grandchildren.

Now it is not like that. Now a war, together with transactional diplomacy and the law of power, buries the holy grail of the postwar world, which was “stable borders.” And artificial intelligence becomes our new familiar presence—as a digital superpower that can create for us all the music of the world and even resurrect our dead grandfathers.

If in 2025 we lived through the dawn of this new world, in 2026 we will live through its sunrise—from our microcosm to the broader, larger world. The danger for the country would be to become trapped in its microcosm, as it once did when it changed years carefree, with its records and its frames. It would be to become ensnared in its internal weaknesses and thus be handed over, vulnerable, to its external threats, while the record of time keeps spinning.