At the blog of the Council on Foreign Relations James Lindsay predicts the five big foreign policy stories of 2021:
- COVID-19
- Joe Biden
- An increasingly aggressive China
- The global economy
- The decline of democracies
He could be right and those are all important stories but something tells me that only the first will make it into the top five foreign policy stories. Among the things that list ignores are
- The likelihood of a major war, civil or otherwise, breaking out
- Further developments in the Middle East
- Major terrorist attack in a developed country
- A resurgence of mass migration into the developed world
- China or some other country lands a human being on the moon
- North Korea or some other country detonates a nuclear weapon
- Natural disaster
- Other man-made disaster, e.g. famine
any of which would push other stories out of the news.
Yogi Berra may not have said it but the Danish politician Karl Kristian Steincke certainly did: prediction is hard, especially about the future. What will the big foreign policy stories of 2021 be?
I think the big story will be the continued political, economic, and possibly military integration of Eurasia. SCO, BRI/OBOR, RCEP, Eurasian Union, and all that. The grand project of Russia-China. Mackinder’s World Island.
China has formed a free(r) trade zone with 14 East Asian/East Indies/South Pacific countries, including five US military allies. Recently, a fast train service opened from Prague to Xi’an China, providing a second trans-Eurasian rail route to complement the Trans-Siberian railroad.
And then there is the dance between Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The US recently imposed sanctions on some Turks and Turkish countries over the S-400 purchase. And now the EU is going to impose sanctions on Turkey over oil exploration near Cyprus. How long before Turkey formally leaves NATO and forms an alliance with Russia? What would a Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, and Pakistani military alliance mean?
I think China keeps pushing.
That’s not a story until someone calls their bluff.
If they’re not bluffing, bigger story.
WIW is will they trade punches with the US over Taiwan in the Pacific without going nuclear.
They may believe they can take out our carriers and neuter us in the region while holding back the doomsday missilery.