Preparing for 2021

As seen from Earth, the planets Jupiter and Saturn will be close in the sky on the December solstice, closer than they have been for 400 years; an apt astrological coda, for a year of great change. Closer to home, Japanese probe Hayabusa2 brought back mineral samples from near-earth asteroid Ryugu, and Chinese probe Chang'e-5 brought back soil and rock from the near side of the moon. On Earth itself, the northern hemisphere winter has produced new waves of coronavirus, from Japan and South Korea to Europe and North America; but vaccines are now on the march too. 

India, the world's leading vaccine manufacturer and the only country other than the USA with over 10 million recorded cases of coronavirus, apparently plans to vaccinate all 250 million of its over-50s. It will be mass-producing Russia's Sputnik V vaccine and AstraZeneca's "Oxford vaccine", among others. Half of the latter will be for India, half for poor countries. 

In the wealthy countries, Pfizer's mRNA-based vaccine is the most popular choice, but currently requires expensive refrigerated storage. China's Sinovac vaccine is easier to distribute, with buyers in south-east Asia and the Middle East, and will also be made in Brazil. 

Along with their often severe economic consequences, the coronavirus lockdowns had political consequences too. It's plausible that without coronavirus, Trump would have had a second term in the USA (Pfizer delayed the announcement of successful tests until after the election; whether this affected the outcome, I can't say). In Ethiopia, elections were officially delayed but the Tigray region, formerly dominant in Ethiopian politics, held a vote anyway, leading to the occupation of Tigray by the Ethiopian national army. In Brazil, support for president Bolsonaro actually rose among the poor, thanks to an emergency voucher program. 

The world began to prepare for the restoration of Democratic Party rule in the USA. The RCEP economic treaty went ahead with China and without India. One of the architects of Brexit, Dominic Cummings, lost his position as adviser to the UK's prime minister. With the prospect of Obama's Iran nuclear deal being revived, the leader of Iran's nuclear program was assassinated. 

Turkey continued its new activism in old Ottoman territories, this time helping Azerbaijan to reclaim Armenian territories in a short war ended by the deployment of Russian peacekeepers. Along with allies Malaysia and Pakistan, Turkey also protested Macron's new campaign against Islamic radicalism inside France. 

In China, the 14th Five Year Plan (2021-2025) was unveiled, promoting a long-anticipated shift in economic strategy from exports to internal development. The Communist Party curbed the power of tech tycoon Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (China's Amazon), cancelling the stock market listing of his online payment platform, and raising the issue of Chinese youth getting into debt with online lenders. In India, Arnab Goswami, a top pro-Modi TV journalist, was briefly arrested in a power play by the Shiv Sena, a Hindu party with influence in Bollywood; and Sikh farmers from Punjab blockaded the national capital, to protest an agricultural reform bill. 

Economic blocs of the 2020s

A week after American media called the presidential election for Joe Biden, and foreign governments began to call him president-elect, fifteen Asian nations agreed to form the biggest trade bloc in the world, RCEP (the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership), at a virtual summit hosted by Vietnam. They were China, Japan, and South Korea; the ten southeast Asian nations of ASEAN; and Australia and New Zealand. 

This clarifies the economic structure of our multipolar world. North America (USA, Canada, Mexico) has USMCA, formerly NAFTA. Europe has the EU. Russia has its Eurasian Economic Union, which is integrated with China's Belt and Road Initiative. Belt and Road is a scheme for economic integration that is a product of China's own ideology, but RCEP now also gives China a trading bloc friendly to the neoliberal ideology of the west. 

India could have been part of RCEP, but didn't want to be in a bloc dominated by China. They will instead cultivate their own networks, like the BIMSTEC organization of nations bordering the Bay of Bengal (to India's east); and the North South Transportation Corridor that links India's west with Iran, Russia, and Europe; and One Sun, One World, One Grid (OSOWOG), a "solar alliance" that plans to share renewable energy across borders, by linking national power grids. 

Russia works with the Middle East oil producers in "OPEC Plus". China will assist the creation of a "continental free trade area" in Africa. The "D-8" organization links eight of the biggest Muslim countries, from Indonesia and Bangladesh in the east, to Egypt and Nigeria in Africa (actually, Nigeria is more half Muslim, half Christian). South America has the Mercosur common market. And perhaps the BRICS summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, weakened in an era when Brazil and India were aligning with America, will become important again. 

World trade, already rocked by America's trade war with China, declined even further during the coronavirus emergency. The virus is still spreading, but western pharmaceutical companies (Pfizer, Moderna) are now declaring that they have promising vaccines, finally rivaling Russia (Sputnik V) and China (Sinovac). Biden will likely make coronavirus his focus for the first half of 2021. The rest of the world will eventually join China in having vanquished the virus, and globalized life will resume, organized around the economic blocs. 

The big picture, again

I'm very busy, but it's just a few days until America votes, so I shall hurry to get down my current thoughts in advance. 

America will vote, but we may not know the outcome for a while. In 2000, it took them a month after the vote to decide... And who could have guessed that the 2020 election would be something more than a referendum on Trump's populism? It still is, but it's also the coronavirus election. 

What is the state of the world? I like to focus on four great powers here, though I remember there's more to the world. And let's think in terms of politics and economics, as well as the virus and its effects. 

Strategically, we can compare the present to the 1945-1990 cold war. In the cold war, it was America versus Russia. China started out on Russia's team, but diverged ideologically. India was nominally non-aligned, but it was always a democracy... After the cold war, there was a unipolar world for a generation, with America ascendant. But now we have a new polarity, between China and America, backed up by Russia and India respectively. 

For years, America has been pulling out of various cold-war-era arms control treaties (e.g. for nuclear weapons or missiles), most recently saying that they need to include China to be meaningful. Russia's response has been to develop new generations of weapons (e.g. their hypersonic missiles) to maintain 'deterrence', i.e. the ability to nuke America if America nukes Russia. As for the American desire to bring China into arms control, Putin has remarked, okay, but why just China, what about all the other nuclear powers in the world? As long ago as the 1980s, Trump was interested in nuclear arms reduction; and during the primaries, Democrat Tulsi Gabbard called reducing the nuclear threat her top priority; so there is some chance that whoever wins this week, there will be a return to arms control during the next presidential term. 

So that's Russia and America, the two nations with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals. Meanwhile, what are China and India doing? On the recent anniversary of China's intervention against America in the Korean war, Xi Jinping warned the American military against pressuring China. One presumes that such warnings pertain mostly to Taiwan. Meanwhile, we have had Chinese political scientists making proposals: Tsinghua's Yan Xuetong asked Putin about an overt military alliance between China and Russia, and Shanghai's Liu Zongyi said China should start treating India as simply an American ally. 

India itself hosted another '2+2' meeting of its defense and diplomacy chiefs with those from America, and national security advisor Ajit Doval declared that India would not just fight on its own territory, but would go after foreign threats at their source. One supposes that this refers mostly to Pakistan, supported by China; but it could also mean something in the calculus of India's border dispute with China itself. 

We therefore appear to be in a period, in which Russia and India are siding more overtly with China and America, respectively; increasing the polarization among the great powers, rather than building connections across the divide. It's China and Russia's 'Eurasia', versus America and India's 'Indo-Pacific'. 

But this is an economic competition as well as a military one. And while both sides have economic and military power, perhaps we can say that China's biggest strength is economic, while America's biggest strength is military. That suggests that the conflict can be conceptualized as the "Quad" - America's Indo-Pacific military alliance - versus the "New Silk Road" - China's Eurasian economic plan. The old order, trying to suppress the new. Sometimes the old order succeeds, sometimes it does not. 

This new polarity is the world order that Covid-19 unexpectedly invaded. On balance, I think coronavirus accelerated the breakdown of the liberal internationalism left over from the time of America's unipolar hegemony - itself already disintegrating since at least 2014, thanks to challenges from Putin, Xi, Modi, and Islamic State, and then challenged from within since 2016, by the reborn western populism of Brexit and Trump. The virus crisis re-energized the nation-state; and even if Trump's conservative nationalism is replaced by a warring coalition of liberal and progressive Democrats, I see the restoration of power to America's political and cultural establishment as mattering only for countries in the American bloc. The rest of the world will continue to go its own way, and the new polarity will continue, even as the fabric of the world economy is stitched back together. 

There's much more to say about world events and trends, always, but further commentary will have to wait until some time after the 2020 US election. 

Return of Rama

Worldwide, the virus is still spreading, but the vaccines are advancing. Logistical planning for vaccine manufacture and distribution is also now quite advanced, in Russia, China, America, and elsewhere. 

There also remains the question of whether the near-universal lockdowns were an overreaction, and if so, what should have replaced them. The panic at the start of 2020 was so great because the 2003 SARS coronavirus was highly lethal, killing about 10% of those who caught it. But Covid-19 seems to kill about 1%, and while we're still learning who the most vulnerable are, it seems to be people already weakened by old age or by conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. 

So far, Sweden has been the leading example of a country which didn't have a full lockdown. But in the longer run, India may be the biggest test case for herd immunity against coronavirus. Like most big countries, India is testing a number of vaccines, some made in India, others foreign. And as a major manufacturer of medical goods, it may become a supplier of vaccines to many developing countries. But an advisory task force recently said India should not base its national strategy on vaccination or on lockdowns - since vaccines will not soon be available in sufficient quantity, and lockdowns interfere too much with basic economic survival - and that the focus should be, not on preventing the spread, but rather on protecting and saving the vulnerable. 

One may also ask about the cultural impact of the lockdowns. In China, the culture and political system already allow a high degree of centralized surveillance and mass mobilization, so the national response to the emergency was perhaps not so shocking. In America, one can see that in general, liberals are in favor of locking down, conservatives are in favor of opening up. An essayist at "Brown Pundits" remarks that western liberalism was founded on values of freedom and equality, but has become less free as the importance of equality was elevated over freedom. In American liberalism, especially in its progressive neoliberal form, freedom is now mostly about economics and lifestyle, but there is enthusiasm for new moralities justified by science or social justice. The struggle over lockdowns has become part of the struggle over whether America will become a liberal version of Russia's conservative "managed democracy". 

Meanwhile, life goes on: 

In mid-September, Japan's ruling party will decide a successor to Shinzo Abe, scion of an old political family and the longest-serving prime minister in modern times, who reluctantly resigned for health reasons. The party favors his chief of staff, the public favors his rival, the former defense minister. Abe never got to change Article 9, the pacifist clause in Japan's constitution, but the country will likely maintain its strategic direction, attending meetings of the anti-China "Quadrilateral" (US, Japan, Australia, India) in the coming months. 

In India, a year after Kashmir's status was normalized, and centuries after the Mughal empire built a mosque on the alleged birthplace of Lord Rama, the foundation of a new temple to Rama was laid, in a ceremony of religious and national significance. Hindu nationalism and the revival of Hindu identity is now so strong that even the traditionally secular Congress party is now accused of "soft Hindutva". 

China is still advancing and vibrant - in the sedentary age of lockdowns, e-commerce giant Alibaba has been even more prosperous there, like Bezos's Amazon in America - but it's challenged on many fronts. A key consideration is access to computer chips. The world's leading chip manufacturer, TSMC, is in Taiwan, with fabrication plants in both America and China. A subtle struggle has been unfolding at least since the end of 2018. 

A new great-power region of vulnerability appeared. India has Kashmir, China has Xinjiang and Hong Kong, America has its anti-racist uprising and its porous southern border, Russia has its Ukraine vulnerability - and now steadfast ally Belarus has a mass movement calling for new elections. It seems that someone in Russia's ruling circles panicked and had Navalny, the leading anti-system politician in Russia (where the system consists of Putin's United Russia, and several other parties, like the Communists and Zhirinovsky's LDPR), poisoned before he could organize something similar, during this September's regional elections. 

The main port of Lebanon was destroyed by the explosion of a warehouse full of chemicals that had been confiscated from a ship six years before. In public, people treated this as a symptom of corruption and incompetence, strengthening calls to get rid of the country's dynastic political elites. Beneath the surface, the world asked if this was a secret Hezbollah bomb depot or an act of Israeli sabotage. It is reasonable to think that it was both - that Hezbollah kept the cargo in order to make bombs, and that Israel knew and blew it up, as part of a broader ongoing campaign against the Iranian-led 'axis of resistance'. At a still higher level, one could ask if Iran's ally Russia approved the deniable cargo delivery in the first place, and if America approved the port sabotage as a blow against the Eurasian trade network that China and Russia are building. 

Within the anti-Iranian axis of Israel and the Saudi-led Gulf Arab states, the small cosmopolitan United Arab Emirates announced diplomatic recognition of Israel, ostensibly in exchange for preventing formal Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory. But a US attempt to extend the UN embargo on arms exports to Iran failed. Iran announced that a 25-year strategic deal with China was near completion, and also that activities in the port city of Chahbahar would go ahead without Indian participation. India had wanted to assist the construction of Iran's Chahbahar port, in order to compete with Chinese investment in Pakistan's Gwadar port; but held back too long, out of fear of American sanctions. 

America's Democrats completed their election ticket, and thereby clarified how the November election would be fought. The social-democratic movement led by Sanders petered out during the virus lockdown, and liberal billionaire donors had their preferred candidates installed. It would again be Trump's autocratic conservative nationalism, against neoliberals with a "cultural Marxist" issue. In 2016, they said that only sexists oppose Hillary; in 2020, they say that only white supremacists oppose Biden and Harris. 

Beyond the second wave

Even though second waves are occurring all over the world, I feel that the end is now in sight for this coronavirus interlude, thanks to vaccine progress. Starting in the most advanced countries, millions of vaccine doses will be manufactured or bought, and they will allow a permanent "reopening" of national economies. (It will take longer to restore international openness.)

One theme of recent years has been the return of nationalism and the nation-state, after a quarter-century in which America administered a global empire. I have interpreted the world in terms of four great powers - America, China, Russia, India - and then the almost 200 other states. How does the period of the coronavirus pandemic look, within that framework?

I will first remark that the coronavirus did more to re-nationalize the world than any politician. International trade dropped off, diasporas returned to their home countries, each country looked to its national government for answers.

It's worth trying to understand the pandemic in a China-centric way. The era of Xi Jinping, beginning around 2013, has been one in which China asserted itself more, above all through its Belt and Road global economic plan, also through a strategic partnership with Russia that amplified after the pivotal year 2014, as well as asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere.

In the Trump era, beginning 2017, China at first profited from America's anti-globalism, becoming more influential in multilateral institutions, but after a while Trump's 'trade war' evolved into a broader confrontation, in which China was to be challenged and criticized on every front.

The year 2020 was supposed to be the year in which China beat poverty. But instead it began with a SARS 2.0 crisis. The new coronavirus was defeated within China, but it spread to the rest of the world, creating the planetary lockdown we are all still living through. In turn this gave America a big new talking point, in the new cold war with China - that China (or its ruling party) were to blame for the worldwide coronavirus crisis.

It's unclear to me how much China will be hurt by this, in the post-pandemic world. So far, the nations keenest to blame China, are the ones who were already inclined against China. I haven't seen any shift in the existing alignment whereby America and India are 'against' China, and Russia is 'for' China. And we may yet see a race between China and the west for influence, in the supply of vaccines to the world. So in the geopolitical big picture, the coronavirus may look like one chapter in the new cold war between China and America, in the re-nationalized post-2014 world.

To some extent, America's coronavirus experience resembles that of South America, perhaps underlining the 'Brazilification' of the USA - becoming a racially diverse but also racially stratified society, with a strongman nationalist president suppressing leftist (BLM) guerrillas. Since the USA has always been keen to keep other powers out of the western hemisphere, we can expect America to work with Brazil to be the chief supplier of vaccines to South America.

In 2016, the Democrats thought Trump had to lose the election, as he was just too outrageous. In 2020, they think he has to lose because of the pandemic. But he still has a few months left in which to announce a plan for imminent mass vaccination and economic restoration. Like every other aspect of life, everything to do with the pandemic - whether lockdowns are necessary, how bad the second wave is, what treatments are effective - is intensely politicized in America. Nonetheless, whoever wins, one should expect the virus to gradually be eradicated there, once vaccines are available, late this year or early next year.

As for the other two great powers of this era... Russia is rumored to be the first country that will authorize a vaccine, perhaps as early as this August. As for India, perhaps it can give us an idea of how things are in other developing countries too: over half of the urban poor have antibodies, but only a sixth of those living in the suburbs (according to a study in Mumbai). I have no idea what the spread is like, in rural India; probably it's a patchwork with wide regional variation.

In the world of Islam, the hajj this year is all but cancelled, less than 1% of its usual size and restricted to persons already within Saudi Arabia.

Corona spring

The viral interlude has turned out to be a historic disruption. For a while, an effective state of emergency reigned in almost every country on Earth. Whole national populations were told to stay home, and a biomedical police state sprang into being as national pandemic plans were dusted off and chief medical officers became celebrities.

Then the diverse national lockdowns were slowly relaxed. But the political life of the world was still frozen. This worldwide political stasis was challenged first by Hong Kong demonstrators, and then collapsed entirely with the revival of Black Lives Matter in America and allied countries.

The return of Hong Kong unrest was swiftly suppressed, and China's political consultative conference made Hong Kong security law a priority on a par with the national economy. But in America, economic frustration provided fuel, first for looting and burning, and then a highly politicized social-justice movement in which almost every business and public figure pledged allegiance to BLM. Most likely it was the unofficial beginning of the 2020 general election campaign, with the Democrats campaigning for police reform (or even to 'end white supremacy'), while the Republicans would prioritize the maintenance of law and order.

Coronavirus continued to spread in the developing world, in countries like Brazil and India. While dealing with a version of the double crisis of economy and public health facing every country, India had a border clash with China, and initiated a strategic partnership with Australia. Australia has for some time had to choose between its economic relationship with China and its political-security relationship with America, and perhaps the moment of de-globalization imposed by lockdown, was used to seek new economic and strategic ties. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the Bolsonaro government sought to celebrate the ethos of military rule in the 1960s, with more and more generals joining the cabinet.

Russia delayed BRICS and SCO summits and a constitutional referendum due in July (and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, a major figure of the Putin era, was given the new responsibility of overseeing genetic technology in Russia). America postponed a G7 summit due in June (and Trump proposed to expand the group to include Russia and India). The OECD predicted a global economic contraction of 6%. (Owing to population growth, annual economic growth of 3% is regarded as needed just to keep living standards the same.)

Viral interlude

I have been busy for months on a real-life mission and have truly not been keeping up. But let's have a go.

Right now the biggest thing in the world is still SARS 2.0, the new coronavirus. It showed up first in Wuhan, at the center of central China, and became a crisis during the Lunar New Year holiday. The experience of SARS 1.0 led China to mobilize in a people's war against this new virus, and after thousands of casualties and tens of thousands of cases, quarantine and economic lockdown and other measures seemed to have suppressed its spread inside China. Meanwhile, globalization has spread it everywhere else. The worst affected countries have been Italy, with its position as a trading hub and its ageing population; South Korea, perhaps the first country outside of China where the virus began spreading internally; and Iran, where (suspiciously, in my opinion) the outbreak is centered on the religious center Qom, and has affected many in the national leadership. But there is now panic within the west that the virus will spread exponentially there, leading to travel restrictions, campaigns urging public hygiene and even keeping away from other people, cancellation of large events, and market crashes.

What is a realistic scenario for the future? It seems that the majority of people who catch the virus, get better on their own. The ones who die are mostly aged or already sick. So an unrealistic worst-case scenario, in which the virus simply ran amok, unopposed, might lead to several percent of the population dying. The realistic scenario would be something less than this, and would include the impact of the measures that prevented the worst-case scenario, such as the middle and upper classes (the ones who can afford to hide away for months) becoming even more sedentary and shut-in than they already are. Meanwhile, one should eventually expect a vaccine, and for the virus to return seasonally for a few years to come.

What other news is there? The US assassinated the commander of Iranian special forces, General Qassem Suleimani, and a leader in an allied Iraqi militia, "Abu Mahdi the engineer", via a drone attack at Baghdad airport, after a series of attacks and counterattacks between Iraqi militias and US forces still in Iraq. Iran's immediate response was to send missiles against a US base in Iraq; expecting US retaliation inside Iran, they also accidentally shot down a Ukrainian plane carrying many Iranian-Canadian passengers. Iran declared that the real response to Suleimani's martyrdom would be to finally drive the US out of the region, a struggle that would be centered on Iraq, and indeed the Iraqi parliament voted that all foreign forces must leave the country, but political divisions have prevented this from being enforced yet.

Elsewhere, Syria's last jihadis were besieged in Idlib (where Islamic State's Baghdadi had made his last stand) by Syrian and Russian forces, but supported by Turkey, which threatened to open the gates to Europe again. But this threat came just as coronavirus panic hit Europe, so this time Europe is unlikely to tolerate border insecurity and uncontrolled border crossings this time... Turkey also got involved in Libya's civil war, on the opposite side to Russia, just as in Syria; but perhaps there was nonetheless coordination, also just as in Syria.

Russia planned nationalist, conservative constitutional reforms, and deployed its hypersonic nuclear missiles, in order to maintain deterrence against America. In India's capital New Delhi, Aam Aadmi Party ('common man') hung on against the BJP, Modi welcomed Trump, and there were communal riots. In America, the impeachment of Trump fizzled out, and the race for the Democratic presidential candidacy came down to a replay of 2016, the establishment-backed Biden and the populist insurgent Sanders. Devastating bushfires hit Australia, and Boris Johnson's landside victory in UK elections guaranteed that some form of Brexit from the EU would finally occur.