As the second half of 2021 began, the world took a new turn towards hard times: the Delta strain spread, the northern hemisphere burned, and the Taliban returned to power throughout Afghanistan.
The fast-spreading Delta strain, born in India, gave new life to the pandemic worldwide. There was some evidence that Delta outbreaks subside quickly too, perhaps through a combination of vaccination (a quarter of the world has now had at least one shot of anti-Covid vaccine), natural herd immunity, and renewed public caution. But for now it was still spreading in numerous countries, like Mexico, Russia, and Indonesia, and even the United States, where infections and deaths were mostly among the unvaccinated. Nonetheless, many in Europe and elsewhere protested against new "vaccine passports" that would limit the freedoms of those without proof of vaccination.
The 2020 Asian miracle of low Covid was a distant memory. Israel and South Korea did a vaccine swap, Israel sending expiring Pfizer doses now, in return for Korean-made Pfizer later in the year. Japan held its delayed Olympics under tightly controlled conditions. Taiwan struggled to obtain Pfizer since a Shanghai company held distribution rights. Delta even made it into mainland China... Meanwhile, the US intelligence community was due to report on the likely source of the original, Wuhan-derived strain of the virus by the end of August.
In time for a new round of climate diplomacy, the northern hemisphere summer broke numerous records, with major fires in North America, Russia, and the Mediterranean, and major floods in Germany, central China, and India. Seven years after its last report, IPCC, the UN's panel on climate change, issued its updated review of the scientific literature, ahead of a November world summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
For at least a century the world has run on fossil fuel - coal and oil. Access to these energy-rich resources has been vital for economic advancement, and control of supply has been central to geopolitics. Wars were fought to see who would dominate the Middle East because of this. The whole modern era of Islamic militance, born in Iran and Afghanistan, was midwifed by the conspiratorial competition of the Cold War superpowers; and even now, China and Japan keep a wary eye on the constant progress of the oil tankers, through the straits of Iran, then the straits of southeast Asia, and north to their own ports, vigilant for any interruption to the flow of energy.
But fear that a world warmed by the accumulated CO2 emissions of the industrial age, will be one of drought, famine, and enormous mass migrations, has driven the west to seek new energy sources. Meanwhile, the rising powers of the world, newer to the hungers of machine civilization, are seeking energy wherever they can find it, including nuclear power and solar power. So grand deals will be proposed and made, to develop, share, and promote new energy sources, while cutting back on the old.
History, however, is not so easily left behind. Ancient, mountainous Afghanistan, formerly part of Greek and Persian empires, then a source of Muslim raiders into medieval India, then fought over by Britain and Russia, and most recently occupied by America since the beginning of the "war against terror", is rapidly succumbing to the forces of the Taliban, the reactionary militia who provided Al Qaeda with its safe haven in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
For twenty years after 9/11, while focus shifted to the invasion of Iraq, then the Iranian nuclear program, then the Arab spring and the terrorist "Islamic State", American forces stayed in support of the new government they installed in Afghanistan. This year, they were supposed to return home, while the democratic Afghan government carried on the battle against Taliban guerrillas, who fled into rural Afghanistan when the Americans came. But once America was truly on its way out, the Taliban came out of hiding and the cities of Afghanistan began surrendering rapidly.
The return of the Taliban is an enormous concern for their neighbors, who are afraid the country will again become a center of jihad. China welcomed a Taliban delegation and said, we can work with you, just don't support Uighur terrorists. Russia engaged in preparatory military drills with its former Central Asian colonies. The Indian foreign minister conferred with Iran's new president; they were supposed to open a trade route via Afghanistan, but now the Taliban control it.
India accuses the Taliban of being a puppet of Pakistan. Certainly the Taliban have a deep relationship to Pakistan. They are based among the Pashtun people, who live on both sides of the border. Pakistan prefers an Islamic Afghanistan that might support it against India, rather than a nationalist Afghanistan that might support Pashtun separation from Pakistan. But support for Taliban backfired on Pakistan, emboldening its own religious extremists to bloody and costly insurrections... Just as Pakistan's Taliban policy reflects its own social division over fundamentalist Islam, Afghanistan's other neighbors face their own dilemma. China, Russia, and Iran are all happy to see one less American base in Central Asia - but they don't want to see the power vacuum filled this way.
Other things happened in the world. Zulus in South Africa ransacked supermarkets when former president Zuma agreed to go to jail. Along with Iran, Israel got a new government. China was accused of hacking the Microsoft databases of numerous corporations, and Israel was accused of selling mobile-phone spyware to numerous other countries... Two billionaires - Bezos and Branson - traveled to near space in separate suborbital flights. Today they promote space tourism; tomorrow, perhaps they'll promote geoengineering, sprinkling dust in the stratosphere to cool the overheated Earth.
