When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Over the past couple weeks, everyone in Washington and the world has published their geopolitical forecast for 2025. The beauty of these predictions is that you can simultaneously make fun of the vague ones for being vague and the clear ones for being wrong.I really do admire the humility and wisdom of pundits who try to play it safe. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to pay for someone to tell me that Bashar al Assad’s fall will “probably increase instability” and that the Middle East will “remain the world’s hotspot” in 2025. Likewise, I admire the bravado of everyone who spurned this cautious approach and, back in March, confidently predicted that Joe Biden would win in November. But then why not be even bolder and declare him the running favorite for 2028?Thankfully, there’s an extensive intellectual tradition devoted to making precise and actionable predictions about the future: mundane astrology.While personal horoscopes remain popular, mundane astrology — the practice of using stars and planets to divine the fortunes of states — has gradually lost currency. But for much of human history, this was astrologers’ main focus. What’s more, this wasn’t some marginal or disreputable endeavor. Historians of science have argued that, before the 17th century, it’s meaningless to distinguish between the fields of chemistry and alchemy. To a lesser extent, the same could be said of astrology’s relationship to astronomy, geography, and cartography. From Ptolemy to Gerardus Mercator, some of history’s most innovative and important map-makers were also in the astrology business. As a result, the history of political astrology refracts — in some odd and unexpected ways — the broader history of human thought.Much as Ptolemy’s maps influenced the course of cartography for over a millennium, his astrological work, known as the Tetrabiblos, did the same for its field.