Looking ahead into 2023, looking back at 2022 is inevitable, given that the New Year comes with the baggage of last year. As if the disruption of food and energy security caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the West were not enough, now there is the possibility of China’s Communist rulers destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world once again by unleashing another coronavirus variant.
At a time when the focus should have been on an amicable settlement of the Ukraine war, what we witness is an increasingly adamant Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisting on the near impossible retrieval of territory lost to Russia as far back as 2014, namely, Crimea. Even the most trenchant critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin believe that Crimea has always been Russian and given that the majority population there is ethnic Russian, there is no way that patch of land is coming back to Ukraine, a fact that Zelenskyy has to accept. While there is no justification of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, now that he has done it, major parts of Donetsk and Luhansk, where too the population is majority Russian, may have been lost to Ukraine for good. However, instead of trying to push Zelenskyy towards peace, we have the United States flooding Ukraine with billions of dollars of military and financial aid in a manner that the war gets prolonged, with the target being removing Putin from his chair. It’s as if the United States wants Ukraine to fight its battle with Putin till the last Ukrainian standing, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken making it clear recently that “we (the US) are with Ukraine for as long as it takes”—which could be tomorrow or for ever. Even the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is being seen through the prism of Ukraine, with Blinken justifying it as “if we were still in Afghanistan, it would have…made much more complicated the support that we’ve been able to give…Ukraine”. Similar sentiments were voiced in the New Year by Nato Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg as well, when he told the BBC that western countries should be ready to give long-term support to Ukraine. Given that Ukraine is now the US/Nato’s holy cause, Washington D.C.’s, “competition”—“competitor”, that’s how Blinken described PRC—with Beijing is no longer a priority. We saw a glimpse of that in November at the G-20 summit in Bali, where a smiling President Joe Biden ran across the dais to make friends with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and if the Chinese have to be believed, by agreeing to all of China’s conditions about not containing it.
No wonder the rest of the world, particularly the countries in the eastern hemisphere—India, Taiwan, Japan etc—are worried that the PRC will take advantage of the US’ Ukraine obsession to launch into a military misadventure, either against Taiwan or India, in the hope that nothing more than lip service will come from the US. By now it would have been clear that Xi Jinping can reach monstrous levels when eliminating opposition to him, so much so that China-watchers are coming to the conclusion that the ongoing Covid mayhem in China is Xi’s revenge on his own people for protesting against his Zero-Covid policy. From the speed with which China dropped all Covid restrictions it seems teaching his people a lesson drove Xi to thrust them into the jaws of death, completely unprepared to deal with the infection for lack of immunity, courtesy the zero Covid policy and the useless vaccines produced by PRC. This is unimaginable cruelty of Mao Zedong’s level, who was guilty of killing millions of his own people, a man whose track record was worse than Hitler’s and Stalin’s. For a similarly unscrupulous man to be in control of a completely malign system that lacks a moral compass can be a nightmare situation for the rest of the world. This nations have discovered in the last three years after Xi Jinping unleashed the Covid-19 virus on them, destroying the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. Three years later, we are still paying the price for Xi’s crimes against humanity, something that has not stopped western leaders from wooing Xi. It seems as if no one is willing to confront Xi, seek accountability for what he has done to the world, or may do to it once again. Isn’t it strange that Putin’s critics want him to face an international war crimes tribunal, but willingly give Xi a free pass?
In other words, 2023 is unlikely to be an easy year for the world, not with Xi Jinping running amok. However, it’s also hoped that 2023 will see India’s continued rise on the global stage and as president of G-20, it will be able to provide a different kind of leadership to a world that is seeking freedom from both disease and warfare—a leadership that is focused on the people and their needs.