Augusto Manzanal Ciancaglini
Political scientist
During this overflowing annus horribilis of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its economic and social consequences at the domestic level, the powers and many partners, politically exposed in their eastern repression and western chaos, at the international level are having a less complicated year.
The United States, which polishes its wounded prestige with a vaccine in record time, surrounds Iran by achieving rapprochement between Arabs and Israelis, intends to corner China with India, Australia and Japan; while letting Turkey play dangerously between allies and rivals. Moreover, he reinforces the Monroe Doctrine through the Inter-American Development Bank and Joe Biden will presumably polish diplomacy with other satellites; this is the ambivalent Pax Americana on automatic.
Russia, entangled in the grand post-Soviet scenario, is content with the honor delivered by its action in the Caucasus and the survival of its allies. It could also be a politically fruitful year for Europe with a more redistributive management of resources, where a more central France is turning outward from its social problems and Germany seems to be encouraged to unshackle its historical image a little.
The European Union is becoming disenchanted, but it has even allowed size not to be a constraint to work: the Latins defend solidarity, the Netherlands firmly represented frugality, and Poland and Hungary did not renounce their “illiberalism”. For its part, the United Kingdom has just recovered its insular solitude in a world quite different from the one it left.
China, showing itself unstoppable, is trying to cloud its sanitary responsibilities and its authoritarianism: it has signed the world’s largest free trade agreement with 14 neighbors, an endorsement of multilateralism and trade liberalization, as it aims to lower tariffs by up to 90 percent. However, its final scope falls short of initial expectations, since India decided to withdraw from the negotiations and the approved text does not address investment or environmental and labor issues.
Japan, South Korea or the ASEAN countries could use this agreement as a counterweight and to order the benefits obtained, that is, to take advantage of the strength of the Asian giant as the shark does with the shark.
There is also hope that the trade war will change its current form. However, between a zero-sum game geopolitical cold war and a smoldering gradual geo-economic confrontation, a tepid competition will continue; the containment of part of Rimland by Rimland is here to stay.
Face masks, covering only half a face, symbolize a contradictory and peculiar era: a crash course to remind the Russians that the world is not a board with rules as fixed as in chess, the Chinese that nothing comes back as directly as the ball in ping-pong, the Americans that attempting too many touchdowns can be detrimental to the head, and the Europeans that they must continue to strengthen the midfield.
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