The year of Schröendinger

As in the famous paradox of the Austrian physical laureate, 2020 has remained until the last day in an ambivalent state between to be or not to be or between being and not being, if you prefer. Nevertheless, this year has earned the passage to the great book of history on its own merits, along with other recent landmark dates, such as 1917, 1945, 1968 and 1989. 

This year opened with a rising tension between Iran and the United States, which culminated in the assassination by the United States of Qassem Soleimani, military leader of the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard, on January 3. Despite abundant apocalyptic headlines, the affair ended with the launch of Iranian missiles against US bases in Iraq and the placing of an Iranian military satellite in orbit, together with the acceleration of Teheran's efforts to develop the atomic weapon, which were undermined by the assassination in November of Mohsen Fajrizadeh, the chief technical officer of Iran's nuclear programme.  

The year opened with Donald Trump's abrupt acquittal in the Senate of the charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in a political trial known as impeachment, a process to which only two other US presidents had previously been subjected. A meagre consolation prize for the man who aspired to obtain a Nobel Prize like his predecessor Obama. The Senate majority's refusal to call witnesses and appearances allowed Trump to claim victory, without the accusations and testimonies surrounding the failed impeachment process ultimately undermining his supporters. The year thus ended with Joe Biden's victory in the presidential elections, which broke records of polarisation and turnout (66.7 percent, over 159 million voters), tarnished somewhat by the racial riots and the outgoing president's unprecedented stubbornness in denying his defeat, against all evidence, institutional decorum and sense of state, which may have prompted some foreign power to attempt to gain access to government computer systems.

The space between these two parentheses in American politics was taken up by the debut of the first pandemic of the global era, which became known as COVID-19; beyond being an unmitigated health catastrophe, it plunged the world economy into an induced lethargy from which it is not yet clear how we will emerge, but which enabled the European Union - after astonishingly witnessing the arrival in Italy of Russian motorised troops with medical assistance - to meet the need by approving a plan to restore the economy. The size and scope of this plan, far from the famous Marshall Plan, has provided us with entertaining disquisitions between allegedly frugal, unreliable and illiberal people, who happily found a meeting point 'in extremis'. All this, together with the fast development, production and inoculation of vaccines, allows us to face 2021 without sinking irremissibly into desolation. 

In contrast, the rest of the year's events pale in comparison, although a couple of them, such as the recent Abraham accords and the signing of the free trade agreement between the United Kingdom and the European Union, will mark the course of geopolitics in the years to come; under the notorious and already ubiquitous shadow of the Chinese giant, whose presence has manifested itself dramatically at the dawn of the pandemic. Thus, the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the civic protests against the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, the price war and eventual collapse of the oil market, the pitched battle between Chinese and Indians in the Kashmir region, the suppression of the revolts in Hong Kong, and the increase in maritime tension in the western Mediterranean, the clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and even the armed conflict in the Ethiopian region of Tigray, have taken a back seat in terms of information and politics, despite the fact that their true significance and underlying dynamics point to geostrategic movements in all these hot spots on the planet, which will presumably evolve worse over the coming year.