COP26: Pandemic Geopolitics | Opinion

With the pandemic still underway and the climate catastrophe looming on the horizon, the two world summits of Heads of State and Government, the G-20 – which includes the largest economies – in Rome, and the COP26 in Glasgow for the reduction of emissions, celebrated one after another, mark the moment of deep geopolitical uncertainty that the world is going through.

It highlights the return of the United States to multilateralism and the fight against climate change after four years of absence and boycott by Donald Trump. But Joe Biden, the bearer of the good news, arrives weakened at both summits. On the domestic scene, due to the fierce Republican boycott that seeks to block its social and environmental investment plans and regain the majority in Congress and even in the presidency, a circumstance that would make the Democratic president a parenthesis and constitutes, in any case, a element of uncertainty about the future of world leadership.

His Atlantic friends and allies also arrive divided, among themselves and with the American senior partner, after the painful end of the war in Afghanistan and the displacement of Washington’s interest towards its Asian allies. Doubts are deep about the exact place that Europe should look between China and the United States. And countries like France and the United Kingdom come fought over the Brexit dispute. No one has interpreted the absence of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin from both summits, avoiding face-to-face diplomacy in favor of teleconferencing, as a result of the pandemic, but rather as the display of perfectly calculated political distance.

The long year and a half of covid has transformed diplomatic habits thanks to videoconferencing, a technology that accommodates both the growing hostility between leaders of the superpowers and the continuous contact between those who maintain cooperation. The Chinese president, pending to secure the third term from 2022, has been almost two years without leaving his country, something unusual until the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic began, and which constitutes an essential data in the multipolar and unstable world that is emerging.

The power that seeks to become a world leader has a winning card in its hands: it is the world’s largest emitter, almost a third, and at the same time the largest consumer of coal. Its representatives arrive in Glasgow with a modest, vague and longer-term emission reduction proposal. The message is very clear. Without China, no goal will be met. Xi Jinping wants to set his own pace and goals, including his terminology about ecological civilization, in an explicit demonstration that the western globalization it is not theirs and that there is instead an alternative globalization led by Beijing instead of Washington.