2022 in 5 conflicts
The United States may have been slow to wake up to the Chinese threat, but today it’s one of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans. If anything, the current cold war, first diagnosed by the Chinese foreign minister in May 2020, may have more far-reaching effects than the one with the Soviet Union. The hot-button issue these days is Beijing’s heavy-handed regulation of Chinese companies listed in the US. Some in Congress want to respond by restricting American investment in Chinese companies. But steps like this usually have unforeseen consequences. Here’s hoping that in their battle for geopolitical dominance, the two countries don’t end up crashing the world economy.
The ayatollahs are playing for time, that’s obvious by now. As the negotiators in Vienna haggle over bringing back cameras and allowing in inspectors, the centrifuges spin faster than ever. Iran is now weeks away from a bomb, and even if it were to cease work today, it already has the practical expertise to step right up to the nuclear threshold. Given Iran’s conduct until now, Israel faces two possible scenarios in 2022:
The US State Department is ringing alarm bells over a Russian invasion of Ukraine it believes may materialize within weeks. Putin and Biden have spoken twice over the past two weeks, with Biden warning that an invasion of Ukraine would be met with sanctions on a scale never seen before, as well as increased spending on NATO. Putin countered that Russia would sever its ties with the United States. This challenge makes the tensions with China and Iran look slow-burning, and holds the potential for an even more serious fiasco for Biden than Afghanistan.
In the US, 2021 saw inflation rise to 6%. Everything cost more: meat, oil, clothes, delivery costs. And a labor shortage drove up wages; Amazon was forced to offer drivers up to $20 an hour.
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