Despite a Covid surge in parts of south-east Asia and South America, and vaccine shortages in Africa, the success of national vaccination programs in reducing Covid, in those countries where a majority have been vaccinated, shows that the end of the pandemic is more conceivable than ever (though we do not yet know if it shall be a zero-covid world, or merely a low-covid world, in which there is always some new strain circulating somewhere on the planet). Even the great second wave in India is already in retreat, after taking hundreds of thousands of lives.
Thinking about outer space is a way to gently zoom in on the details of the reborn post-Covid world order of Covid-fortified nation-states, returning to their agendas of economic development and strategic competition... On Mars, after a seven-month journey from Earth, and three months inspecting the Martian surface from orbit, China's first interplanetary mission landed in Utopia Planitia, a giant plain in the north of Mars (visited 55 years before by an American Viking lander), and sent the five-ton solar-powered rover Zhurong (a fire god) out to explore; at a time when the latest American mission, Perseverance, was testing a small helicopter drone (blades half a meter long, total weight one kilogram), on the other side of the Martian northern hemisphere.
Closer to Earth, in mid-June, China will send up the first crew for its new (still under construction) Tiangong scientific space station. The commander of this mission, Nie Haisheng, has already been into orbit twice. Meanwhile, the old "International Space Station" has been up there for twenty years. It has primarily been a partnership of America's NASA and Russia's Roscosmos agency. But increasingly the private company SpaceX is being used to resupply the station, while Russia is also looking east, having signed a memorandum in March, to work with China on a lunar base. Roscosmos is also to land a European Union rover on Mars in 2022 or 2023; and India's first crewed mission to near space, Gaganyaan, may come near the end of this period too.
In terrestrial affairs, China approached yet another communist anniversary, the centenary of the party's founding, and announced that families could have up to three children now - though netizens complained that they could scarcely afford one child. In America, as Covid retreated, it was the first anniversary of Black Lives Matter 2.0, but it was unclear how far into "woke" territory the Biden administration would proceed, in its reversal of Trump-era policies that were themselves reversals of Obama-era policies.
In the Middle East, Trump's last year and Biden's first months saw a variety of diplomatic overtures. A Saudi-led blockade of rival Qatar (supported by Egypt and the Emirates, opposed by Turkey and Iran) was concluded. Bahrain and the Emirates recognized Israel. Turkey and Egypt reconciled, after supporting opposite sides in Libya. All this anticipated a revival of the nuclear deal between America and Iran, agreed by Obama in 2015, but abandoned by Trump in 2018.
The deal itself (called Borjam or Barjam, or JCPOA in English) was the product of a reformist era in Iran, the Rouhani presidency that began in 2013. With presidential elections due in mid-2021, Rouhani could not run again, but his vice president Jahangiri was eligible. Rouhani's diplomats met with Biden's in Switzerland, originally aiming for a deal by June.
But events moved against the reformists. In April, a long, secret recording of foreign minister Zarif was leaked, in which he complained that his diplomats were kept in the dark about military activities, and that Russia had wanted the deal to fail, in order to keep Iran in the anti-American bloc. Rouhani's opponents, the "principlists", accused his team of selling out the revolution. In May, an asymmetric battle between Israel and Palestinian Gaza erupted for two weeks, something that has occurred every few years since Hamas replaced Israel as the de facto government of Gaza, but now accompanied by serious Arab demonstrations within Israel itself; the new head of Iranian special forces, Suleimani's successor Salami, considered this a victory of their policy, of creating problems for American influence in as many separate locations (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen) as possible.
Then, at the end of May, Rouhani's vice president was ruled ineligible to run for president, leaving principlist favorite, and runner-up in 2017, the judge Ebrahim Raisi, as the most likely winner. Many other candidates, notably principlist-turned-centrist Ali Larijani, were also ruled out; but perhaps this was meant to mask the Iranian deep state's true priority, of ending this latest reformist period. Among reformists, Raisi was notorious for playing a part in prison purges carried out in 1988, as Iran brokered a ceasefire with Saddam's Iraq, after a decade of war; tens of thousands of leftist prisoners were executed so that they could not subvert the Islamic republic in its moment of weakness. Raisi is said to have helped administer this process, and later rose to high positions in Iran's judicial system.
One may therefore predict that the true powers in Iran, such as supreme leader Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards, have already decided that the country is strong enough to not compromise with the west. China, Russia and the European powers, as well as Iran itself, never abandoned the terms of the nuclear deal, unlike America; they consider it to still be valid, and regard America as the absconder. So Iran will take an economic populist line at home, building up its economy through its own efforts, and through trade with China and anyone else willing to defy America; and they will maintain their militant regional policy, aimed at eventually expelling American forces and delegitimizing Israel; and it will be up to America to either make concessions if they want to reenter the deal, or remain out of step with the other great powers.
The situation will be clarified soon. On June 14, NATO will meet, and will have to deal with issues like Russian sales of arms to Turkey and natural gas to Germany. On June 16, Biden and Putin will meet in Switzerland. On June 18, Iran will vote... Meanwhile, Biden has promised that American troops will leave Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the Al Qaeda terrorist strike that sent them there; and perhaps a week later, Russians will vote on deputies for the Duma, the national parliament. There is some possibility that the communists - one of the leading opposition parties in the Putin era - will make common cause with nationalists like Navalny; not enough to displace Putin's party, but something that would change the tenor of Russian politics.
