The World

The Party knew such a disease would one day come, but no one knew when and no one was prepared. On 17 November 2019, a man in China’s Hubei Province was diagnosed with a new virus. On 31 December, Wuhan Municipal Health Commission announced a cluster of cases of pneumonia caused by an unknown germ. A thirty-three-year-old doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, Li Wenliang, shared a report of a respiratory virus with his colleagues and was arrested for ‘making false comments on the internet’. On 31 January 2020, two Chinese tourists in Italy fell ill. On 6 February, in the United States, the first patient died; on 7 February, Dr Li died of this new respiratory virus, Coronavirus 2019. The fast-moving twenty-first-century world, in which millions of people flew from city to city on cheap flights, spread the disease with unprecedented speed. For two years, fear and panic followed waves of the virus that, like every pandemic, inspired civil schisms, distrust of foreigners, wild conspiracy theories and strained governments, which by March 2020 were confining people to their homes. The lockdown started to reverse a century and a half in which the office – the working space – had occupied as much time and attention as family life. Thanks to smart computers, many people could work at home, as they had before the industrial revolution; ironically, the pandemic returned people to their families.^* Fifteen million people – mainly older and poorer, and those with respiratory vulnerabilities – died.

Xi declared a ‘dynamic zero-Covid’ policy that treated the pandemic like ‘a people’s war against an invisible enemy’, but such a disease was impossible to control and it exposed the vulnerability of China’s prosperity and the rigidity both of its system and of its leader. In the open world, smaller war democracies – Taiwan, Israel – proved more efficient than larger comfort democracies, but its mitigation was most catastrophic in India where around five million (a third of the global Covid deaths) died, thanks in part to its government’s incompetence.

Trump’s bombast wilted amid the hysteria, his incompetence and insouciance exposed, and in November he decisively lost the election to Biden, who at seventy-eight became the oldest president with Kamala Harris as the first female, first African-American and first Asian-American vice-president. Even though Biden had won six million more votes, Trump, refusing to concede, espoused a conspiracy claiming that he had been robbed of the presidency. On 6 January 2021, encouraged and abetted by Trump, a mob of freakishly garbed Trumpians stormed the weakly defended Capitol to stop Congress’s electoral vote count. It was fortunate that Trump lacked the backing and the acumen to organize a coup, but he now dominated the Republican party, hinting at a second presidency; America had not seemed so fragile since the civil war.

Every president had dreamed of extracting America from the 9/11 wars, above all from Afghanistan, where the corrupt pro-American rulers were maintained by a small NATO presence while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside. In the classic iPhone and dagger state, men in Toyota trucks with Kalashnikovs could still take towns and defy America’s expensive technologies. Biden unwisely accelerated an exit, insisting that the Afghan army was ‘better trained, better equipped, more competent’ than the Taliban, whose victory was ‘highly unlikely’. Instead, on 15 August, the Taliban, commanded by the terror lord Sirajuddin Haqqani, advanced, the regime collapsed and thousands fled to the airport where the Americans desperately evacuated their friends. Not even the fall of Saigon was such a self-inflicted blow.

One man was watching this from the isolation of his mansion outside Moscow. Now sixty-nine, Putin asked historians whom he met, ‘How will history judge me?’ Putin, spoiled by easy if blood-drenched successes in Chechnya, Syria and Crimea, limited in debate by his dominance and misinformed by his sycophantic secret police, came to believe that a coup de main at the opportune moment would restore the Russian imperium and destroy Ukraine as a nation. Russia’s massive oil and natural gas production could fund a war and force dependent Europe to acquiesce. Putin sensed a felicitous conjunction offered a unique opportunity: the democracies were paralysed with culture wars; NATO, said President Macron, was ‘brain-dead’; Britain, now led by the erratic Johnson, had undermined the EU; Biden, unlike the unpredictable Trump, personified western bewilderment; and Xi backed him. In February 2022, Putin flew to Beijing where Xi explained, ‘We’re working together to promote a truly multilateral world order,’ pooling their ‘efforts to uphold the real democratic spirit’, code for a world of power spheres ruled by the autocrats of empire nations.