Will the world survive 2022?
There's no reason for needless pessimism, but there's little to be optimistic about for the coming year
Back on New Year’s Day 2016, I wrote:
If anything, I was perhaps being too naively optimistic. This was before the election of Donald Trump and the clearcut signs that the post-World War II order was coming undone. It was before the torpedoing of the Iran nuclear deal and the global pandemic swept the world, before the fragile status quo in places like Libya and Ethiopia unraveled, and world powers China and Russia began challenging governments in Taiwan and Ukraine.
Editors asked me last month recently to write up a story identifying a places around the world to watch in 2022. As I began researching and interviewing people, it was clear that the number of potential dangers has multiplied dramatically and that something darker was at work.
If it seems like the world is becoming more dangerous, that’s because it is. There are now more armed conflicts brewing in more places around the world than at any time since Second World War… Even as a global pandemic shrank economies and destroyed livelihoods, global weapons sales expanded… The number of people driven from their homes by war, deprivation or political chaos stands at 84 million worldwide, double the number of a decade ago. And according to the United Nations, 274 million people will be in need of humanitarian aid in 2022, more than four times the number a decade ago. In places like Syria, Yemen, and the Sahel region of Africa, civilians are caught in the crossfire, and even good Samaritans working for aid agencies devoted to helping ordinary people are regularly targeted. “It’s not just that things are getting uglier,” says George Readings, the global crisis analyst at International Rescue Committee, a private aid organisation. “It’s that something has broken. This is not some organic growth; this is something fundamentally wrong.”
In a subsequent piece, I described the continuing threat to safety by the Islamic State, which some say is picking up momentum and surging throughout the world even as we try to ignore it. For many ISIS is last decade’s news, and we’re over it. But ISIS is not finished yet, and as long as there are cracks failed states, it will reemerge, perhaps coming back in full force next year.
Challenging Isis militarily seems to be about the only way governments are fighting the group. But it is a sticking plaster. No amount of firepower, and no number of spies or unmanned drones, will be enough to get rid of militant groups like Isis, which feed off the failures in governance and human rights in affected countries. The dysfunctions and gaping social and political cracks in places like Iraq and Syria, which Isis has exploited to gain a major foothold in the world, remain – and have, in some ways, worsened.
Would love to hear what readers think about 2022, and where they think the world is headed. Any signs of hope or places in the world to be optimistic about?