One good thing can be said about 2021: it wasn’t as tumultuous as 2020, which put in a claim to be the worst year ever. That, however, may be damning with faint praise. Yes, the past twelve months did bring some good news. Indeed, for a moment in early summer it seemed that COVID-19 was in the rearview mirror. However, it isn’t. And 2021 brought other bad news. So here are my top ten world events in 2021. You may want to read what follows closely. Several of these stories will continue into 2022 and beyond.
The AUKUS Deal Debuts.
On September 15, President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson jointly announced a new trilateral security partnership named AUKUS. The most significant part of the deal was the U.S. pledge to provide Australia with technology to build eight nuclear-powered (but not nuclear-armed) submarines. The only other country to receive similar access to U.S. technology is the United Kingdom. The statement announcing the pact justified it as necessary to “preserve security and stability in the Indo-Pacific.” Although none of the three leaders mentioned China by name, AUKUS was widely seen as a response to growing Chinese assertiveness. Not surprisingly, Beijing denounced the pact as “extremely irresponsible” and “polarizing.” But China wasn’t the only country unhappy with deal. France fumed because AUKUS terminated a $37 billion agreement it struck with Australia in 2016 to build a dozen diesel-electric powered submarines. As a result, Paris recalled its ambassadors to Canberra and Washington, a move without precedent in bilateral relations with either country.
Billionaires and the space race
Oliver Daemen, from left, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and space tourism company Blue Origin, Wally Funk and Bezos’ brother Mark pose for photos in front of the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, left rear, after their launch from the spaceport near Van Horn, Texas, Tuesday, July 20, 2021.
Alec Baldwin and the movie-set shooting
On Oct. 21, on a movie set in New Mexico, what was supposed to be fiction lurched into reality in the most destructive of ways.
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was shot and killed by a prop gun held by Alec Baldwin, one of the country’s most prominent actors. The ensuing anguish and investigation revealed what some said were dangerous gun-handling protocols on a set where some crew members had complained about conditions.
Baldwin has not been charged, though the investigation continues and lawsuits have been filed.
Britney was freed. Bennifer came back
Britney Spears supporters celebrate the ruling that ends the pop singer’s conservatorship on Nov. 12, 2021, in Los Angeles. A Los Angeles judge ended the conservatorship that has controlled Spears’ life and money for nearly 14 years.
Migration Crises Test Rich Countries.
The downturn in international migration flows in 2020 triggered by COVID-19 continued into 2021. That didn’t translate, however, into the end of migration crises. A case in point was the southern U.S. border. By October, the number of people entering the United States illegally had hit 1.7 million over the prior year, the highest number since 1960. COVID-19, economic hardship.
The European Union saw a 70 percent rise compared to 2020 in the number people entering illegally, with critics arguing that the EU was failing its duty to help migrants. A surge in migrants crossing the English Channel from France triggered a diplomatic row between Paris and London. Meanwhile, Belarus encouraged migrants to cross its territory to enter Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland in a bid to pressure the EU to end sanctions it imposed to protest the rigged 2020 Belarussian presidential election.
Countries Fail the Climate Change Challenge—Again.
“A code red for humanity.” That’s how UN Secretary General António Guterres’ described the UN report released in August that concluded that humanity faces catastrophic climate change unless the emission of heat-trapping gases is slashed. But one didn’t need to read the 4,000-page report to know that. Extreme weather dominated the news in 2021, as it has for much of the past decade.
Climate optimists could find some developments to cheer in 2021. President Biden committed the United States to rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. China agreed in September to discontinue financing coal-fired power plants overseas, and Iceland opened a facility to take carbon dioxide out of the air. At the COP-26 meeting in Glasgow in November countries pledged to take steps to address climate change, including by cutting methane emissions. But pledges aren’t accomplishments. Carbon emissions jumped in 2021 as the global economy roared back to life.
The Taliban Return to Power.
The U.S. war in Afghanistan ended as it started twenty years earlier: with the Taliban in power. In 2020, President Donald Trump struck a deal with the Taliban that required withdrawing all U.S. troops by May 1, 2021. Two weeks before that deadline, President Joe Biden ordered that a complete U.S. withdrawal be concluded by no later than September 11, 2021—the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As the withdrawal proceeded, the Afghanistan national army collapsed and the Taliban overran the country. Kabul fell on August 15, trapping thousands of foreigners in the capital city. The United States launched a massive effort to evacuate stranded Americans by August 31, a deadline set by the Taliban.
The Followers of President Trump stormed the Capitol
The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was bad. It may have set the stage for worse
On Jan. 6, when followers of President Trump stormed the Capitol to try to block the election of President Biden, the insurrection seemed like a bizarre anomaly — a freak storm whipped up by pro-Trump extremists and right-wing militias.
But in the months since the attack, the movement that spawned the uprising — sometimes called “election denialism” — has turned out to be larger, more durable and every bit as worrisome as the violence of that chaotic day.
Joe Biden Becomes President.
“America is back.” Joe Biden made that point repeatedly in 2021. He moved quickly upon taking office to fulfill his promise to strengthen relations with America’s allies. He returned the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization, renewed New START for five years, sought to revive the Iran nuclear deal, and ended U.S. support for offensive military operations in Yemen. These moves away from former President Donald Trump’s America First policies drew applause overseas; initial polls showed a sharp improvement in the U.S. image abroad.
COVID-19 Vaccines Arrive as the Virus Mutates.
The vaccines created to address the novel coronavirus may join the smallpox, polio, and measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines as major advances in saving lives and diminishing morbidity. The speed at which COVID-19 vaccines were developed was stunning. Vaccines historically took ten to fifteen years to develop. The quickest any vaccine had been developed previously was the four years it took to create the mumps vaccine. COVID-19 vaccines were created in less than a year. Just as important, the leading COVID-19 vaccines worked stunningly well; the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are both more than 90 percent effective against early COVID-19 variants. More than 7.4 billion vaccine doses were administered in 184 countries in the first eleven months of 2021, with seventy countries making donations.
The Delta variant, first identified in December 2020 in India, was more infectious than its predecessors and soon became the dominant strain around the world. In November 2021, South African scientists identified the emergence of the Omicron variant. Within weeks it had been found around the world. As 2021 ended, it was unclear whether Omicron presented a greater health threat or would send the global economy into another tailspin. What was clear is that more than 5 million people globally and 800,000 Americans had died from COVID-19.
Other stories to note in 2021.
In January, Saudi Arabia agreed to reopen its border with Qatar, ending a three-year-long diplomatic crisis. In February, the U.S. Senate acquitted former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. In March, Pope Francis met in Iraq with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the first ever meeting between a pope and a grand ayatollah. In April, a dispute over access to water triggered a clash on the Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border, leaving 55 people dead and some 50,000 displaced. A cyberattack orchestrated in May by Russian criminal hackers forced the closure of the Colonial Pipeline, disrupting the delivery of gasoline in the eastern United States. In June, G7 leaders agreed to back a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15 percent. Lithuania agreed in July to allow Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in Vilnius, a decision that prompted China to downgrade relations with the Baltic country. In August, the White House approved the sale of $750 million in arms to Taiwan, a decision that China quickly denounced. In September, the United States dropped a three-year-old request that Canada extradite a senior Huawei executive, prompting China to release two Canadian citizens it had arrested when the extradition warrant was first filed back in 2018. In October, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the Pandora Papers, which contained more than 12 million documents showing how the wealthy and powerful use off-shore accounts to evade taxes and hide money. In November, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived a drone strike on his home. A Russian military buildup near the Ukrainian border prompted Biden to warn Russian President Vladimir Putin in a December video call that the United States “would respond with strong economic and other measures in the event” Russia invaded Ukraine.
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