Hal Brands
That’s hard to say, of course, given that how we view any historical event depends significantly on the choices that people made afterward. We would remember World War II much differently, for example, had America simply retreated from the world after that conflict ended, rather than engaging tirelessly to shape the postwar global order. Yet 2020 is sure to loom large in future efforts to trace the arc of the 21st century — perhaps as the year that the American-led global order began to buckle, or perhaps as the year that gave it new life.
It’s easy to imagine how historians might someday see 2020 as the onset of a new dark age. In the space of a few months, the world was staggered by once-in-a-century strategic shocks. A global pandemic killed millions and froze societies across multiple continents. The world underwent a wrenching de-globalization as borders closed and travel virtually ceased. International bodies, such as the World Health Organization and the Group of Seven, were incapable of delivering technocratic competence and global cooperation.
On the geopolitical front, the world’s leading autocracy, China, launched a multifront offensive demonstrating that it was no longer content, as Deng Xiaoping recommended, to hide its capabilities and bide its time. The world’s leading democracy suffered intense domestic unrest and witnessed its president attempt to take the country into something like a soft autocracy after a contested election. World orders have fallen over less.
What made 2020 so jarring, moreover, was that it followed a profoundly traumatic decade. Democracy receded from the heights of the post-Cold War era, retreating in more places than it advanced. Brexit and surging populism threatened European integration, one of the defining endeavors of the post-World War II era. Globalization encountered fierce political and geopolitical headwinds, as the World Trade Organization become gridlocked, China’s economic rise grew more ominous, and America became an uncertain advocate of free trade. Geopolitical revisionism and upheaval challenged regional orders across Eurasia. Political dysfunction became a way of life in the U.S.
From this perspective, the shocks that 2020 delivered were not bolts from the blue. They were crises that exposed a spreading rot within the institutions and arrangements that structured the American-led world order. One possibility, then, is that this year will be seen as the moment at which a system already under strain began descending toward a more anarchic, illiberal state.
But there is also a more hopeful future history of 2020. One of the strengths of the postwar order has been its tremendous resilience — the fact that challenges have often catalyzed constructive innovation.
The 1970s, for instance, often appeared to be end times for American power and the free-world economy, amid oil shocks, the end of the Bretton Woods financial system, and punishing geopolitical setbacks. Yet crises led to rejuvenation rather than decline. The U.S. soon launched a devastating geopolitical counterattack against an overextended Soviet Union. It cooperated with key allies to create new institutions (such as the Group of Seven) to facilitate the shift to a more globalized system. Countries throughout the West embraced pro-market reforms that ushered in renewed prosperity. As a result, we now view 1979 — the annus horribilis that featured the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a punishing global recession — as a new beginning for American influence.
Perhaps 2020 will be another moment of rebirth. This was, after all, the year that America’s political system corrected itself after a dangerous flirtation with quasi-authoritarian populism of the right, while also rejecting a destabilizing populism of the left. It saw efforts, led by American allies, to begin reforming moribund international organizations and create new mechanisms — such as an expanded G-7 — for deeper and broader democratic cooperation.
There also emerged a new wariness of Chinese power, not just in America but in Europe and other advanced democracies: The Trump era ended not with a transatlantic rupture on China but incipient discussions on how to collaborate more closely against the threat Beijing poses. Covid-19 also accelerated efforts to shift to a more geopolitically savvy form of globalization, one in which democratic countries seek not to reshore production but simply to move critical supply chains out of potentially hostile autocracies. Amid the darkness of the pandemic and autocratic assertiveness, there were glimmers of liberal renewal.
We can’t yet know which trajectory the world will actually take. History is always contingent: A shift of some 45,000 votes in four states would have reelected Donald Trump, putting American democracy and foreign policy on a very different path than they will probably take under President-elect Joe Biden. Leadership is critical: Which way the future turns will depend on the quality of the choices, and the power of the rhetoric, of policy makers in the U.S. and other countries. Finally, history includes examples of false dawns as well as false declines. In the late 1920s, it appeared that Europe was finally escaping one era of vicious conflict, only for the Great Depression to cast it into another.
For good or ill, we’ll look back on 2020 as a hinge of history — a year that sent shockwaves through the established order and thus altered the world’s long-term arc. Crises this fundamental can push an international system toward destruction or regeneration — but they can hardly fail to leave a lasting mark.
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