Geopolitics in 2022

Whether it is hard to accept the reality, we waltz into 2022, at last. The question is with certain cataclysmic events in 2021, are the times ahead pointing to the end or, the beginning of how things will shape up in the 21st century?

For one thing, democracy has been tested in the country that carried its banner in the 20th century. Jan 6, 2021, witnessed something horrific to the stalwarts of democracy — the attack on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. Meanwhile, in continental Europe, France felt betrayed by shifting the alliance between the US and Australia for submarines.

The year witnessed the division in polemics between the United States and China, with China coming out of the red corner with its boxing gloves firmly tightening on media controls in Hong Kong.

COP-26 came off with much to fret over, the Chinese and Indian governments respectively not yielding their positions on concessions towards carbon reduction targets.

Ironically, the race to space and to intergalactic universes has heated up with the US, Europe and China to boot sending ambitious missions short term and long-range.

Are the military manoeuvres by Russia toward Ukraine a provocation, or shades of how negotiations will emerge in the future of sanctioned countries feeling the economic pinch and impeding social uprisings?

All this amid the surge of the Covid-19 virus mutating from the Delta strain to the current Omicron, which has sent world governments and their medical services into frenzied action to contain the spread, while diplomatically ignoring the causes of global climate change, of unmitigated floods, droughts, soil erosion and deforestation.

What world would we like to live in? Or what are we making of the world we have to exist in? Will we have the remainder of the 21st century to fix things or force a fracas on life?

GLEN CHATELIER