Personal matters, and the rise of artificial intelligence, held me back from updating this blog. But let's see if I can say something meaningful about the state of the world.
America is still the military and financial superpower of the world, first among equals in Europe's NATO; dominating the Indian and Pacific oceans via its "Quad" partnership with India, Japan, and Australia; and working through regional allies in South America, Africa, and the Middle East.
China is still the manufacturing superpower of the world, still trading with the West despite ideological and geopolitical tensions, but also working with Russia to create blocs and institutions - the BRICS economic alliance, the SCO security alliance - independent of Euro-American power.
Russia has long lost its economic rivalry with America, but it still has its military might, and it now proposes to be the armory of a multipolar world, and a defender of traditional values and civilizational autonomy worldwide, against the border-dissolving individualism of the West.
India is arguably the newcomer among great powers, economy still only a fifth of China's, but population already greater; building the new institutions of the global "East" and "South", but also with a deep and growing presence in the Anglo countries of the West.
Russia has been led by the same man since 2012, China since 2013, India since 2014; but America saw the populist nationalism of Trump in power from 2016 to 2020, before Biden managed to restore the liberal progressivism of the Obama years.
This restoration took place against the backdrop of the worldwide Covid pandemic, which from 2020 to 2022 killed millions, and saw a state of emergency involving mass vaccinations, lockdowns of daily life, and massive economic disruptions, in most countries of the world.
In the two Internet superpowers, America and China, the pandemic left its mark on the digitalization of daily life. In the West, the big tech companies grew even richer, as the upper classes preferred to work from home, until the public health emergency was gradually retired throughout 2022; while in China, a strict Zero-Covid policy was maintained for three years, adding a new layer to the state's close cyber-management of society, until the policy was suddenly abandoned at the end of 2022.
The Chinese change of policy may have produced the last big wave of Covid anywhere in the world. In a few months, there were 100 million cases, and life was very difficult for a few weeks. But then it died out, just like the mid-2021 outbreak in India that produced a few weeks of national crisis, and resulted in the Delta strain.
For most of the world, Covid itself slowly faded away, but the economic repercussions remained, with price rises, and unpredictable shortages of goods and workers, all around the world; and they continued with the next big event of the 2020s, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.
According to the former prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, who was in Moscow when the invasion began, Putin estimated that it might take a month to win the war. 16 months later, tens of thousands are dead, millions have fled Ukraine, and the war is still going, fed by Ukrainian resistance, NATO weapons, and Russian refusal to give up annexed territories or allow NATO into Ukraine.
The comprehensive severance of economic ties between Russia and the West is of a piece with the more selective tariffs and sanctions directed at China, first under Trump, and then continued under Biden when Xi's third term as president was confirmed. America wants to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, and to keep China in second place technologically. Russia hopes to win in Ukraine by hanging on until America loses interest, and China intends to master 21st-century technologies on its own, e.g. making its own advanced computer chips, if it is denied access to those made in Taiwan.
America's close allies in Europe (the countries of the European Union) and East Asia (Japan and South Korea) have, more or less, gone along with the ever-sharper policies directed at Russia and China; but the rest of the world has declined to take sides. India is the exemplar here, dealing with both sides according to independent national interest; but the long queues of countries eager to join SCO and BRICS show that outside the West, there is a lot of enthusiasm for the multipolar world.
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