Geopolitics: Turbulence & uncertainty of 2023 will spill over into 2024

There is a need for the big players to do well to keep the global economy more than chugging.

The year 2023 began with Ukraine fatigue even as the war raged between Russia and Ukraine, and it ended with the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas after the latter attacked Israel killing 1,200 and capturing more than 200 civilian as hostages on October 7.

But as 2023 winds its way to an end, the Israel fatigue has set in, especially in the West. US President Joe Biden told Israel that it was losing international support because of its indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians in its bid to eliminate the militant Hamas.

Uneven Economic Recovery

It was not just the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza that have been haunting the world, it was the stuttering global economic recovery from the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic shock.

Two of the big economies, the US and China, have been struggling to get back to the pre-pandemic growth levels. The American economy is showing signs of recovery and growth and generally faring better than China, but uncertainty is the common theme of the economies of the two big ones.

The progress of the third decade of the 21^st century is both turbulent and cloudy. The proverbial silver lining is that the emerging market economies (EMEs) like India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Mexico and Indonesia have been faring much better than the European Union and North America on the economic front. But this is not much of a solace because there is need for the big players to do well to keep the global economy more than chugging.

Unending Internal Churn

The internal developments in some of the countries raised international concern.

In the US, Donald Trump who lost the 2016 presidential election and who refused to accept defeat is marching triumphantly towards a Republican nomination to fight for the presidency next November, even as President Biden, despite announcing he would fight for re-election, is on a weak wicket with falling popularity ratings.

In a Biden-Trump rematch, it looks the odds are in Trump’s favour though everyone is aware that a Trump presidential win will send America into a political tailspin with unintended consequences. America is ideologically polarised between the liberals and the conservatives, fighting on contentious issues like abortion and medicare. The melting of the Silicon Valley Bank and two others has sent the American corporate world into a tizzy.

When there was an outbreak of the short-lived prospect of a coup by the private military company, the Wagner, led by its oligarch-turned militia leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin in June, it seemed that Putin’s throne in the Kremlin was on shaky ground.

But the Wagner coup melted away as soon as it began with the intervention of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko. And in August, Prigozhin was killed in an air crash, and it seemed to have played out in the old Soviet/ Chinese style. Trouble was nipped in the bud, and Putin survives to fight the presidential election for yet another term in 2024.

The presidential win of Javier Milei, an economics professor and TV pundit, with a maverick agenda for Argentina which is reeling under a three-digit inflation, and who is a professed admirer of Trump, has sent shock waves in the West. Part of Milei’s shock-therapy for the economically ravaged country is to close the central bank and dollarise the economy.

It is anybody’s guess whether drastic measures are the way to bring Argentinian economy back on track. Similarly, another right-wing politician, Geert Wilders, winning the Dutch election with his anti-immigrant and Islamophobic agenda, has bruised the liberal sensibility of the European Union (EU) leaders. The right-ward lurch in world politics is troubling but it seems to show the vulnerable flank of liberal politics in the West.

The Rise Of AI

The political and economic maelstrom that has dominated headlines has been supplemented by the dystopian prospects of the emerging apps of AI. The year began with ChatGPT storming the imagination of ordinary people and the intelligentsia on the technology frontier. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which has spun out the app, ChatGPT pleaded before the US Congress the need to regulate the djinn that has got out of the bottle.

Technophiles, including Henry Kissinger, who died this month, saw a new bend in civilisation with AI at the vanguard. But many others were worried about how it could turn into a nightmare for humanity, with people turning puppets in the hands of the potential malware.  AI is also spawning a chips’ war between the US and China. Even as policymakers and political leaders were assessing the risks involved in AI, the drama at OpenAI stemming from concerns over AI safety, ended as a minor whirligig. And AI is shimmering on the horizon.

People can be forgiven if they want to press the pause button on the changes that are getting more bewildering with every passing year.

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr is a New Delhi-based journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.