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.
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