World: Important Political Events of 2020

• I. On January 3, the United States launched an air strike on Baghdad, because of which a high-ranking Iranian IRGC leader Qassem Suleimani was killed, and a few days later Tehran hit US bases in Iraq with rockets.
• II. On January 8, an Iranian air defense system shot down a Ukrainian Boeing 737-800 near Tehran, mistaking it for an American missile. All 176 people on board the Tehran-Kiev flight were killed.
• III.  On January 11, China reported the first death from a new type of coronavirus. On March 11, WHO announced a pandemic.
• VI.  On January 15, the Russian government resigned ahead of schedule, and Mikhail Mishustin became the new prime minister.
• V.  On January 31, a historic event took place - Brexit - for the first time one of the member states of the European Union - Great Britain - withdrew from it.
• VI.  On March 9, oil quotes collapsed (the biggest drop since the 1991 Gulf War), a sharp depreciation of the ruble, a fall in world stock markets.
• VII.  Late May - riots in the United States that erupted after the death in Minneapolis of African American George Floyd at the hands of police. In June, protests took place in more than 2,000 cities in 60 countries around the world.
• VIII.  Since August, protests have been held every weekend in Belarus, the participants of which oppose the results of the presidential elections, which took place in the country on August 9.
• IX.  August 20 - poisoning of Alexei Navalny. The German government announced the presence of traces of poison from the Novichok group in Navalny's body.
• X.  September 27 - the beginning of the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, which ended on the night of November 9-10 with the signing of a complete ceasefire by Azerbaijan and Armenia with the mediation of Russia.
• XI.  November 3 - a presidential election was held in the United States, which broke all voter turnout records, taking into account voting by mail. Losing Republicans insist on massive election fraud.

The famous political scientist Avraham Shmulevich very aptly called the time we are experiencing as the beginning of entering the turbulence zone. If we remember that this term comes from the Latin word “turbulentus”, meaning “stormy, disorderly”, then, at least logically, all the events of the outgoing year, although they were not predictable, are quite explainable after their completion. Actually, almost any event after its completion can be explained ...

The disorder of our world means that the established orders in the field of politics, economics, socio-cultural norms, and, in fact, any values ​​and attitudes that have been tested over the years in the most diverse areas of human life are beginning to collapse. The seemingly chaotic nature of this process shows that the world is on the threshold of qualitative changes that will lead not only to a reformatting of its structure, but also to the emergence of new actors and centers of the global political space.

It should be understood that previously separated by consciousness, economic, political, spiritual, social and all other processes and phenomena, from now on in their isolation can only provide distorted beyond recognition reflections of our everyday reality. For example, the coronavirus pandemic, taken by itself, does not clarify much, but with a systematic approach, it turns into a structural factor accelerating the cumulative crisis process that has engulfed humanity for at least the past thirty years.

The pandemic is embedded in the problems of ecology and the environment, intertwined with the problems of food security, hunger and resource allocation, through them goes to the problems of war and peace, changes in political systems and their borders, then it directly affects the education and health system, translating them into online mode. This is only an outline, the contours of the variety of connections and dependences of all natural and artificial processes. The foregoing sounds somewhat abstract, but now most of the system forecasts about the very near future of mankind will sound like that. Only at the stage of quantitative analysis, a single approach will be maintained.

In this context, we can highlight these “one off” events in 2020 that will have an impact on the future of humanity. Many political scientists and analysts believe that the crisis of the US political system should be considered such a central (main) event. Obviously, in the light of the above systemic concepts, the central event should look more complicated, it should be associated with the dynamics of Russian-Chinese relations, the forthcoming economic development of the PRC, India's position in the triangle: the US-PRC-RF and the EU's movement towards strategic autonomy.

However, even in such a broad perspective, the degree of reliability of possible forecasts will be very limited, since the geostrategic parameters of the future confrontation should be determined. For example, the upcoming drop in the importance of hydrocarbons in the global energy sector will obviously reduce the "political weight" of the Middle East and give rise to new regions of world confrontation in the near future (which is already easy to predict today). In this regard, the struggle of the Arab countries, Turkey, Iran and Israel for hegemony in the Middle East may still change the balance of political forces. It seems justified to predict the growth in world politics and diplomacy of "smart power", which is the ability to combine "hard and soft power." The upcoming thirty days may serve as an illustration of the application of the principle of "smart power" in US-Iranian relations.

A little about statistics. On January 11, 2020, China reported the first death from a new type of coronavirus, and on March 11, WHO announced the start of a pandemic. At that time, COVID-19 affected 118,000 people in 114 countries. In fact, even today, when the virus has affected 70 million people, we cannot talk about the beginning of a pandemic.

Answers to three questions are important: 1. Is the coronavirus a natural or artificial entity that can mutate? 2.  Are the existing vaccines a panacea? 3. Will the coronavirus become a true pandemic in 2021?

The past year has seen many events (change of government and amendments to the Russian Constitution, Brexit, falling oil prices, general self-isolation regime, racial protests in the United States), which will continue in 2021. Chief among them is the US presidential election on November 3. In connection with this event, much is crossed out, and much is re-planned in the future development of not only the United States, but also the whole world.

Finally, one regional event - the escalation of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh into a 44-day war - has attracted worldwide attention for a variety of reasons. This includes the peculiarities of warfare in the 21st century, unexpected alliances that ousted traditional arbiters from the region, and the final predominance of a military solution to a conflict over a peaceful solution, and much more, which needs to be analyzed in a separate article.

Here we recall the fait accompli of the outgoing year: on December 14, we entered the second wave of coronavirus, from which we will presumably exit on January 18, 2021.

For the first time, people will celebrate the New and Old New Years in self-isolation.

Ali Abasov