A scent of Musk in US-China space spat. Pull up! pull up! Beijing earlier this week accused the US of creating danger in space after Chinese astronauts commanding their country’s sparkling new space station nearly crashed into a satellite launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Beijing says the US government has to ensure that Musk’s satellites honor a 1967 treaty on safety in space. Given that SpaceX plans to launch thousands more satellites as part of its Starlink global internet access project, an already cluttered orbit is going to get even more dangerous. Governments will have to sort out who is responsible for policing private spacecraft. In the nearer term, we wonder whether this week’s near-miss space spat will have implications for Musk back on earth: China is currently the only country outside the US where his Tesla electric car company runs a factory (Germany is next, beginning early next year). Chinese social media has reportedly lit up with criticism of Musk, with anecdotal accounts of calls for a Tesla boycott. That could hurt. Last year, Tesla sold $3 billion worth of cars in China, more than a fifth of its overall sales.

Abbas meets Gantz in Israel. In a meeting decried by hardliners on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas travelled to the home of Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz for a two-hour meeting on security and economic relations. The trip, Abbas’s first official visit to Israel in a decade, came against the backdrop of escalating attacks by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, as well as increasing violence by Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel. After the meeting, Israel announced “confidence-building measures,” including an advance transfer of taxes to the PA and additional permits for Palestinian businesspeople to cross into Israel. But the militants of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, blasted Abbas’ move as treasonous, while the rightwing Likud party of former PM Bibi Netanyahu warned of dangerous “concessions” to the Palestinians. Still, some 60 percent of Palestinians polled say that anything to improve their daily lives is worth pursuing. That puts Abbas on the spot to deliver — the same poll shows three-quarters of Palestinians want him to resign. Overall, the Abbas-Gantz meeting is hardly a breakthrough. The official position of Israeli PM Naftali Bennett is that “there won’t be” a renewed peace process anytime soon. But in a conflict that has rarely seen significant leaps of progress, merely opening the way to constructive talks is always worth keeping an eye on.

Putin requests call with Biden. The Biden administration has announced that the US president will hold another call with Russia’s President Putin on Thursday afternoon “to discuss a range of topics, including upcoming diplomatic engagements with Russia.” Crucially, the White House says Putin asked for the meeting. The presence of tens of thousands of Russian troops near the border with Ukraine has set Europe and the US on edge and NATO on alert. But the threat of a Russian invasion is tempered by the high economic and political costs that Russian casualties and an occupation of parts of Ukraine hostile to Moscow would impose. We’ll be watching for any sign that Putin can draw some concession from Biden that can help him claim a political victory without a shot being fired.

Readers of yesterday's Signal will recall that we challenged you to pick out which of our five favorite vaccine incentives was totally made up. With sincerest apologies to those of you who booked flights to Curaçao for a shot at snorkeling through a vat of Galleon rum to look at an LED-lit shipwreck, we regret to inform that the Galleon distillery is merely a figment of Signal's imagination. Still, Curaçao is nice!

At the start of 2021, Eurasia Group, our parent company, released its predictions for the top 10 geopolitical risk stories of the year ahead. The report tried to answer many questions. What major issues will a post-Merkel Europe contend with? Will crisis-ridden Latin America emerge from the pandemic in far worse shape? How will US President Biden govern in a country where roughly half the population deems his presidency illegitimate?

As 2021 draws to a close, we take a look at how some of the report’s forecasts have stacked up, and where things might be headed in 2022.

Joe Biden: The asterisk president

Biden won more than 81 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, the most of any presidential candidate in US history. Would it be enough to lend his presidency an air of legitimacy after his predecessor’s claims of electoral inconsistencies?

The answer became urgently clear on January 6, 2021, when Trump-supporting rioters stormed the US Capitol, leading to destruction and several deaths that will forever mar the record of American democracy.

It’s not just the rioters who have their doubts. A new poll released Tuesday found that 71 percent of Republicans – one-third of the nation – say they still don’t believe Biden’s win was legitimate.

Political polarization has deepened further throughout 2021. Getting a COVID vaccine – or not – has become a political statement. Some 60 percent of Republicans remain unvaccinated, compared to just 17 percent of Democrats. This phenomenon is also reflected in vastly different perceptions of the state of the economic recovery, which remain divided along party lines.

As Trump maintains a stranglehold on the GOP, many Republican politicians realize that fealty to the former president is the only way to ensure their continued political survival. (Just ask Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who was removed from her leadership position after rallying against the former president for encouraging the Capitol riot.)

A Merkel-less Europe

Angela Merkel has been Europe’s point person for the past 15 years, while steering the EU through a range of challenges, including the 2009 Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, as well as a massive refugee wave in 2015 that gave rise to a populist tide across much of the continent.

Now, as the omicron wave pummels Europe, the challenges facing the Union are mounting. As rolling lockdowns continue, will the promised economic relief, made possible in part by Merkel’s leadership, be effectively distributed in coming years? Who will manage EU relations with illiberal governments in Hungary and Poland whose COVID relief funds are contingent on rule-of-law reforms?

Indeed, France’s Emmanuel Macron had tried to position himself as Merkel’s rightful successor, but as Macron focuses on his own dicey re-election prospects in April, no one yet seems convinced – certainly not outside agitators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose aggressive military moves toward the Ukrainian border have recently become much more brazen. Putin saw Merkel as a force to be reckoned with. It’s a problem for Europe that no other leader commands that sort of respect from the Kremlin.

US-China relations: Tense but could be worse

“Following Trump's exit, the US-China relationship will not be as overtly confrontational,” Eurasia Group analysts wrote at the beginning of the year. That hasn’t entirely proven to be the case. President Biden has made countering China his foremost foreign-policy priority, while a recent summit between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden was strained and yielded no breakthroughs.

The two sides remain at odds over trade, technology, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Xinjiang. What’s more, Biden recently held a global democracy summit to isolate not only China, but also those who cozy up to the rising economic behemoth. Washington is also investing heavily in partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to create a bulwark against the further expansion of Beijing’s influence.

Still, over the past 12 months, both leaders have been mightily distracted by crises at home (for China it’s been COVID and a free-falling real estate sector; for Biden it’s COVID and, well, the near-collapse of big parts of his domestic agenda), proving wrong those who predicted a Cold War-type clash in 2021.

Latin America: Backlash at the ballot box

The pandemic has deepened many of the social, economic, and political woes that plagued the region for decades. Weak governance, poor infrastructure and economic instability have meant that by mid-2021, despite accounting for just 8 percent of the global population, one-third of all COVID deaths had taken place in Latin America. That’s changed in recent months as vaccination campaigns have expanded.

Regionally, poverty and inequality have worsened – with the employment rate now 11 percentage points lower than in pre-pandemic times.

This ongoing economic deterioration has provided an opening for political outsiders who’ve capitalized on disillusionment with incumbents. In Argentina, the ruling coalition, led by the Peronista party, lost control of both houses of parliament for the first time since the restoration of democracy almost 40 years ago. In a similar sign of frustration, the small Central American nation of Honduras recently booted out President Juan Orlando Hernandez – who governed the country for close to a decade – in favor of a female leftist who has never served in elected office before. Meanwhile, Chileans, also disillusioned by inequality exacerbated by the pandemic, recently voted in a 35-year old former student activist.

Sigh… 2021 was supposed to be the year of hot vaxx summer, maskless vacations, and unruly office Christmas parties. That wasn’t to be. Here’s hoping that 2022 will be kinder to us all.

Keep an eye out: On January 3, 2022, Eurasia Group will drop the Top Risks report of 2022.

When Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the 2020 election, many people were happy, and many people were sad — but at Puppet Regime we were worried as hell.

Not because of Trump’s damaging lies about the election being “stolen.” Or because of the Capitol insurrection that he fanned. That was all very bad.

But we had a more immediate concern: we had a show to put on, dammit, and we’d just lost our biggest star.

For four years, Puppet Regime, like countless other sketch comedy parody shows, was spoiled by a world leader whose unique capacity for the provocative, the unpredictable, and the surreal gave us more material than we knew what to do with.

Sometimes our best shots at parody were overtaken by reality altogether — like when we scripted Trump and Kim Jong-un comparing the size of their nuclear buttons and saw that happen in real life just days later.

But Trump Estrangement Syndrome ended up being a good thing. It forced us to work harder, more melodiously, and with a wider canvas. After all, the world of global politics certainly isn’t any more functional, coherent, or reassuring than it was twelve months ago, and our mission is the same: to entertain and illuminate without any biases except one – it better be funny.

And so it quickly became clear that Trump’s departure hadn’t diminished Joe Biden’s chronic anachronism, Vladimir Putin’s feline malice, Emmanuel Macron’s debilitating arrogance, Mark Zuckerberg’s android megalomania, or Angela Merkel’s just wanting to get out of this mess after 16 years.

Here’s a look back at 2021, through the rods and felt of PUPPET REGIME:

In January, Joe Biden showed up at the White House thinking that a certain someone was gonna leave more easily than he did — and boy was he wrong.

And it didn’t take long for us to get a sense of what Biden’s presidency would look like — Trillion Dollar Joe wanted to spend more money than anyone in history, but wasn’t quite sure where it would come from, and his early push to renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal turned into a massive song and dance.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the European Union was struggling mightily with vaccine supply, forcing Angela Merkel to slum it with the drug deal of the century.

Then the world got a taste of the blockbuster Godzilla vs Kong, a rivalry that looked pretty quaint next to what shaped up in Brazil when former president Lula was released from jail and made it clear that he’d try to knock current president Jair Bolsonaro off his perch in next year’s elections.

Speaking of important votes, the world’s leading US elections expert, Vladimir Putin, made a mid-year PSA to educate Americans on how to make the least of their democracy. File that one away for next year’s midterms.

Throughout it all, of course, the pandemic continued to rage, with the COVID family welcoming a slew of new variants who turned the coronavirus household into a soap opera.

By the end of the summer it was clear things were going off the rails for Joe Biden — first the delta variant showed up with a wave of musical taunts, then Biden couldn’t keep allies like France and the UK from childishly squabbling over submarines. The holidays gave him no relief either: not only was he unable to pick a good Halloween costume, he couldn’t even properly pardon a Thanksgiving turkey!

Perhaps the final blow was when Biden ended up looking like the second most powerful “Joe” in Washington DC – the president was just “Dancin’ for Manchin” all along.

And as the year drew to a close, we turned up the volume for a legendary aufwiedersehen from one of the world’s longest-serving leaders: Angela Merkel’s hit record Eins Zwei Drei (Kraftwerk Mix)

Now we head into 2022 with the pandemic raging again and the world’s autocrats smirking at the charade that democracy has become.

And of course, President Trump – who can’t stand being out of the spotlight – is readying his numbers in order to become the star of the show once again.

Thanks to all of you who were part of the Regime this year. See you on the other side, friends.

9 billion: More than 9 billion COVID vaccine doses have been administered in 184 countries since the shot was first rolled out just under a year ago. Of those, roughly 2.8 billion have been administered in mainland China.

168 million: Roughly 168 million school-aged kids worldwide have missed out on classes for around a year during the pandemic, and one in three of those were unable to access remote classes. The toll of the pandemic on children's development and wellbeing will become more evident in the months and years ahead.

247,000: Net international migration added 247,000 people to the US population in 2020-2021, the smallest increase in decades. (It reached a high of 1,049,000 in 2015-2016.) US land borders with Canada and Mexico, the main getaway for migrants, remained closed for much of that period because of the pandemic.

100 billion: Insurance claims from extreme weather events linked to climate change topped $100 billion in 2021, according to a new British report. The most expensive single event was Hurricane Ida, which hit the US’ Northeast this fall, causing $65 billion in damages.

What are the most critical challenges facing the world in 2022? Join GZERO Media for the Top Risks 2022 livestream on Monday, January 3, 2022 at 1pm ET, where Eurasia Group analysts will discuss the firm's forecast for the top 10 geopolitical risk stories of the year ahead.