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.