Start with Europe: As with the 2010–2012 Eurozone crisis, the bloc’s fault line today runs through Italy. Drained over decades of dynamism and fiscally fragile, it is too big for Europe to save and too big to let fail. During the pandemic, Italians have felt abandoned by their European partners at a moment of existential crisis, creating fertile ground for populist politicians to exploit. The images of Bergamo’s Covid-19 victims being carried in body bags by military convoy to their anonymous, unaccompanied burials, will long remain etched in the Italian collective psyche.
(May 15): The Covid-19 crisis augurs three watersheds: The end of Europe’s integration project, the end of a united and functional America and the end of the implicit social compact between the Chinese state and its citizens. As a result, all three powers will emerge from the pandemic internally weakened, undermining their ability to provide global leadership.
Main image from Bloomberg: A half-completed railway in Duka Moja, Kenya — part of China’s Belt Road Initiative whose tempo has slowed in recent years
