This year was a stinker – what does 2023 have in store?
My copy of The Economist’s THE WORLD AHEAD 2023 has just plopped through the letter box. The arrival of this useful primer is also the annual cue to start the audit on world events in the year just ending.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the overwhelming event of 2022 – which few saw coming. “The war over the internet will define Russia’s near future”, we were informed in TWA’s 2022 edition. If only. But hindsight is easier than foresight so where better to contemplate where we find ourselves in geopolitics in December 2022 than this week’s Price of War conference in London?
The Conference was organised by the Czech CERGE-EI Foundation and Reaction, with sessions chaired by Reaction’s founder Iain Martin, our editor Maggie Pagano and me. Two countries, China and Russia, dominated discussion of the year gone by and, equally inevitably, overshadowed speculation on the year to come.
2022 will be remembered as the year of decoupling from the “Golden Age” when China was moved to be defined as the West’s strategic “competitor”, although no one felt it was credible for it to be excluded in the deglobalisation of world affairs. Vicious belligerent Russia is another matter. In the gloom, the most cheering view was that Ukraine is on course to prevail in the war to defend its people and its independence.
The Guardian journalist Luke Harding said he was honoured to be included on Putin’s banned list of British journalists this year. After years as a Moscow correspondent until expulsion, Harding spent much of this year in the warzone and was speaking on the publication of his new book Invasion – Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival. In spite of the horrors he had witnessed in Bucha, Mariupol, Kiev and elsewhere, Harding said Putin was mistaken in his belief that Russia could overwhelm Ukraine in a blitzkrieg lasting a few days. Instead Volodymyr Zelenskiy had deployed his TV skills to rally the nation. Putin was now weak with disoriented and mobilised forces being sacrificed in a Russian “meat grinder”.
Martin Wolf, The Financial Times columnist, lifted the gloom a little further by saying that he trusted the judgement of his “friend”, war professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, that there would be no resort to nuclear weapons. Harding agreed, arguing that Putin fears the West would retaliate “by dropping a missile on his head”.
Instead of exploiting the weakening ties he believed he could see, speakers agreed that President Putin had strengthened the Western Alliance, particularly with the imminent admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO. The Oxford and Cambridge professor Peter Frankopan was one of several who gave Putin low marks for his essays on Greater Russia, betraying a “false” and “deluded” understanding of history.
There was also a widespread view that Ukraine is now established permanently with an independent, Western-style, identity, whatever the outcome of the present conflict.
Simultaneously in Washington DC, Presidents Biden and Macron were condemning the “brutal war in freedom’s cause” and found themselves “once again defending the democratic values and human rights at the heart of both our nations”. Biden also said he would be prepared to talk to Putin “if, in fact, there is an interest in him deciding he is looking for a way to end the war.” There is so far little sign of Putin looking for a way out, even though the Stanford and Princeton History Professor Stephen Kotkin told Iain Martin that he would not place Putin in the same category of historical evil doers as Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
From Reaction columnist Tim Marshall to the Doomsday podcaster Arthur Snell, there was no expectation of imminent external military aggression by China. Sam Olsen, the CEO of Evenstar, warned of a not yet fully recognised security threat from Chinese technology. He cited unconfirmed reports that Huawei has been able to delete pictures of the recent anti-lockdown demonstrations in China from its phones remotely.
Taiwan’s dominance of the advanced semiconductor chip market was judged to be its best defence against Chinese military invasion. Though Olsen noted that to produce precious earth metals, needed by all, China was prepared to wreak unprecedented environmental destruction on its own territory, which would be unacceptable in the West.
John Atherton, the director of supply chain for Accenture in the US, argued that dependence on China and disruption of supply could be ameliorated if Western nations made greater use of artificial intelligence and other technology to source and manufacture requirements closer to home.
There was consensus that the immediate outlook for the UK, the West, China and the rest of the world was depressing, coupled with scepticism that central banks will be as successful as they predict in reducing inflation. At least, Martin Wolf stated, the dramatic damage done by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng had been short lived. The UK’s financial standing, measurable by comparing its bonds to France’s, were now pretty much back to where they were before her brief premiership. Wolf extemporised at length on the damage which he believed had been done by Brexit. Only one audience member disagreed with him in public on this.
The Economist was also fiercely opposed to Brexit. TWA23’s chapter headings on Britain are pessimistic, including “Sick man of Europe, again”. Under a headline echoing New Labour’s campaign song “things can only get better” it hopes for an early general election.
And what of Ukraine, this year awarded precedence with the first three articles in TWA23’s Europe Section? The Economist’s journalists are less hopeful than the CERGE-EI conference. Looking ahead to next spring they anticipate breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces all the way to Crimea but then “Ukraine threatens to enter the peninsular. Mr Putin issues an ultimatum: stop, or face the use of nuclear weapons. Victory is in sight. But, so too, are the risks that brings.” What then? Let us hope that once again TWA can’t foresee the whole picture.