Today, we look back at a 2021 that felt like last year all over again, wonder whether Joe Biden has an omicron plan, and hold onto some Venezuelan gold in London.

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Carlos Santamaria

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Today, we look back at a 2021 that felt like last year all over again, wonder whether Joe Biden has an omicron plan, and hold onto some Venezuelan gold in London.

Thank you for reading — your friends can sign up here.

Carlos Santamaria

   

Did 2021 actually happen, or are we still stuck in 2020? So many things seem to have barely changed this year. After all, we’re entering yet another holiday season worried about a fresh wave of the pandemic, and uncertain about what comes next for our economies and our politics.

In a lot of ways, the past 365 days feel like a year of unfulfilled promise. Let’s have a look back at what did, and did not happen in 2021.


The year kicked off with US democracy in deep trouble: first the Capitol insurrection, and later Donald Trump's second impeachment over it. After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, he told the world: America is back. (Spoiler: the world is still waiting.)

Global attention soon turned to the COVID vaccine rollout. It sputtered at first, but even when it got better it exposed deep divisions over things like health passes, vaccine mandates, and patent waivers. The vaccination gap between the rich world and everyone else was hard to ignore. Still, to have inoculated half the world’s population in under a year is no mean feat.

Middle East politics got hot again with a brief war between Israel and Hamas, Iran's presidential "election," and Bibi Netanyahu ousted as Israeli PM after 12 tumultuous years.

Then came a series of extreme weather events that focused everyone’s attention on climate change just months ahead of the COP26 climate summit. But first, the world watched in disbelief as the US chaotically withdrew from Afghanistan, and then the Taliban reclaimed power virtually overnight — right before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Like in 2020, global cooperation was hard to come by, as we saw a bit at UNGA but much more at COP26. The fact that even faced with such an existential problem, the world’s top polluters failed to agree on the same deadline for net zero emissions revealed again how fragmented global politics have become. Forget G20 or G7 — we live in a rudderless, G-Zero world.

In such crazy times, arguably the smoothest political transition came after the German election, with Angela Merkel handing over the reins after 16 years as chancellor — and Europe’s de-facto leader — to Olaf Scholz.

And now, as the end of the year approaches, we are about to mark the 30th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse worrying about whether Vladimir Putin actually intends to invade Ukraine.

More broadly, there are three things that didn't really play out as many people expected they would at the start of the year.

First, US-China ties didn't get quite as bad as many feared. With Biden in the White House, the world’s two largest economies didn't exactly bury the hatchet. They remain at odds over trade, technology, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Xinjiang. But they did find some common ground on climate — and domestic distractions for both countries helped quiet the rumblings of a new Cold War. (Not to mention a hot war, which as retired US Adm. James Stavridis told us, could start over Taiwan.)

The arrested development of deteriorating relations wasn't the product of anybody's grand design. Biden began his presidency with big foreign-policy ambitions, but he soon got bogged down at home by squabbling among Democrats over his domestic agenda, and later by Afghanistan. Xi Jinping, for his part, showed more interest in further consolidating his own power over tech giants, the Chinese economy, and the ruling Communist Party than in picking fights with Biden.

Whether the Cold Peace will hold in 2022 will likely depend on what happens inside each country, especially if they really start to recover from the pandemic.

Second, 2021 was the year of the vaccine, but the jabs on their own didn't end COVID. The good news is that vaccines were successful at bringing down deaths and severe illnesses. The bad news is that distribution was unequal, and hesitancy higher than expected in some places.

Where access to jabs was lacking, the delta variant brought a more deadly wave, like the one that ravaged India for weeks. (We spoke to Indian journalist Barkha Dutt the day after her own father had succumbed to the virus.) Now we are waiting to see how effective the current jabs are in the face of omicron.

Finally, the post-pandemic recovery was not what we hoped for — mainly because we never made it to the “post-pandemic” at all. Even where economic growth rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, the lingering virus messed up supply chains (check out Ian Bremmer's explainer), drove up the prices of food, energy, and pretty much everything else.

US economist Larry Summers told us why he sounded the alarm bell on inflation earlier in the year. We also learned from LSE's Minouche Shafik about how women bore the brunt of the unequal pandemic recovery.

It’s been a disappointing year, but one way in which 2020 mirrors 2021 is that we end the year with fresh hope. Last year we looked forward to the arrival of the vaccine to change things. This year we look ahead to 2022 hoping that the current pandemic wave may be the last major one. Let’s see how our optimism fares this time around.


 
 

 
 
   

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What’s Biden omicron plan? The omicron variant has set up shop in the US, and COVID cases nationwide have risen 20 percent in the past two weeks. New York City is a hotspot with more than 20,000 new cases per day. President Biden will address the nation on Tuesday to detail the steps his administration will take to try to curb the spiraling outbreak. It’s already clear that he plans to double down on a messaging strategy centered on vaccines and boosters — having recently released a strongly worded warning that the unvaccinated should prepare for a “winter of severe illness and death.” But will Biden address — and rectify — more immediate challenges like testing capacity, which is buckling under the pressure of a surging caseload? What guidance will he give Americans about holiday travel just four days before Christmas? Biden promised to bring an end to the pandemic and get the US back to normal. With public confidence in his competency at a record low, public perception of his ability to manage this latest outbreak could make or break the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects in 2022 and beyond.


An opening for peace in Ethiopia? Tigrayan militants who have spent the past year at war with the central government say they have now withdrawn from several regions beyond their home territory. The move, coming after recent gains by Ethiopian forces, could open the way to fresh ceasefire talks. The war, which started in November 2020 over the Tigray region’s refusal to postpone elections during a power struggle with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, has claimed thousands of lives, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and led to alleged war crimes committed by both sides. In recent months, battlefield fortunes have swung wildly — at one point the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front were within striking distance of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, but government forces have taken back swaths of territory in the past few weeks. The TPLF says it hopes that pulling its forces back will encourage the international community to push for negotiations. The Ethiopian government, for its part, is facing stricter US economic sanctions in the new year unless progress toward peace can be made.

The UK's new Brexit minister. British PM Boris Johnson's tailspin continues. After a week of scandal over government violations of its own COVID lockdown protocols, a Tory rebellion against his new COVID restrictions, and his Conservative Party's loss of a parliamentary seat it had held for most of the past 200 years, Johnson’s Brexit Minister, Lord Frost, resigned. Frost, a hardline Brexiteer who has led post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, had reportedly been at odds with Johnson over taxes (too high) and environmental policy (too ambitious), but the last straw was Johnson's imposition of new measures to contain the pandemic. Frost's replacement will be current Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is popular within Tory circles and is seen as a potential successor to Johnson, particularly if he should stumble further next year. But handing her the Brexit portfolio is a challenge and a half: the pragmatic and diplomatically inclined Truss will need to resolve the ongoing dispute with the EU over the status of Northern Ireland — without alienating the Tory's hard Brexiteer right wing, on the one hand, or provoking a crippling cross-channel trade war on the other.


 
 

 
 
   

Joe Biden has been in office for 11 months. It hasn’t been easy for the US president.

For Ian Bremmer, Biden's biggest problem right now is Joe Manchin, who's putting some coal — perhaps from West Virginia — in the president's stocking for Christmas.

Ian gives the president good marks on passing the $1.3 trillion bipartisan infrastructure spending bill. He's done reasonably well on COVID, but who knows what'll happen with omicron.

On foreign policy, Biden has had his ups and downs — among the latter especially Afghanistan. But any US president would have a hard time with such dysfunctional domestic politics.

Watch Ian's full Quick Take here.


 
 

 
 
   

3: Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese hit the streets in Khartoum Sunday to mark the third anniversary of the ousting of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. The military, which staged a coup in October against a power-sharing government, responded with tear gas.


58: To stop the spread of the omicron variant, Israel has barred its citizens from traveling to 58 countries on a government “red list." The US and Canada have now joined that list, which also includes the UK, France, and Germany.

1 billion: The UK’s Supreme Court ruled Monday that Venezuelan gold worth $1 billion will remain in vaults at the Bank of England while the labyrinth British court system decides if it should be returned to the government of President Nicolás Maduro or to Juan Guaidó, Venezuela's opposition figure backed by London. If the courts rule in Guaidó’s favor, it could set a precedent for the recovery of other Venezuelan assets held in European banks.

5: Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, who played a prominent role in the 2011 uprising that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak, has been sentenced to five years in prison for “undermining national security.” Two other activists also received prison terms. Since coming to power in 2014, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army chief, has cracked down hard on political dissent.


 
 

 
 

This edition of Signal was written by Gabrielle Debinski, Alex Kliment, Carlos Santamaria, and Willis Sparks. Art by Annie Gugliotta.