Horrible year. Miraculous year. Annus Horribilis. Annus Mirabilis.
Thusly the Year of Our Lord 2022. Or the Year 2022 of the Common Era (CE) if you prefer.
When 2022 began, it was on a cascade of ominous notes. Russian troops massing along the borders of Ukraine. A coronavirus pandemic raging out of control. A new variant, the Omicron, slicing through masks and social distancing measures like a knife through butter. China in lockdown. Trump loyalists on the march. Inflation rising. Mental illness spreading.
The news on all fronts was grim at this time last year.
But darkness was not fated to triumph. One year ago, Greymantle published a final post of 2021 looking ahead to the new year. A few dedicated readers (and I know who you are – thank you!) will recall that the title of that post was “Our Big Prediction for 2022: The World Won’t End”.
It’s argument was a modest one. It envisioned continuity outweighing dramatic change and stasis outlasting entropy. It argued that Planet Earth and humanity would somehow pull through, avoiding a slide into irretrievable disaster due to the natural resilience of both.
I’m happy to be vindicated beyond my wildest expectations.
MANY HAPPY RETURNS – TO THE MEAN
After great and sudden shocks, both the world and life in general have a tendency to “return to the mean“. Old patterns reassert themselves. People resume their former habits. Life goes on.
The primordial pattern of the return to the mean was much in evidence in 2022 in most corners of the world, China being the major exception.
As the pandemic receded, ball parks and restaurants re-opened, people went back to concerts, and graduation and other ceremonies went fully live. 2022 was a banner year for weddings as millions of nuptials postponed by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 were successfully…consummated.
Despite great anxiety in all parts of society, the pandemic and, with it, an indefinable sense of free-floating panic, began to recede. Offices re-opened, commuter trains partially refilled. People moved on.
And after the initial market shocks unleashed by Russian’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 (which this blog predicting on Dec. 30, 2021), the US and global equity markets staged a decent rally by November.
BETTER THAN STASIS
But a return to the mean wasn’t the only, or even the major story of 2022. As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows – or should know full well – the biggest story of 2022 was a revolt of the unexpected.
While nearly all professional military affairs commentators predicted that Ukraine would fall to Russia’s invasion in a matter of weeks, if not days, the same people were totally confounded by the will to resist of the Ukrainian people and their heroic government.
Ten months later, they fight on, taking back the parts of their homeland (about 17% of the whole) inch by inch from the invader to the wonder of the world and the glory of all free peoples.
Many positive events have already flowed from the Ukrainians’ resolve and courage, and many more positive benefits will accrue over time.
Here are just a few:
A tyrant’s mystique of competence has been trashed.
The Russian military has been humbled and 20 years of rebuilding has been demolished in less than one year.
Russian will not be able to threaten NATO militarily for at least a generation.
China’s leaders have been given pause in their plans to invade Taiwan.
The NATO alliance has been reinvigorated.
Various right-wing commentators who aligned with Vladimir Putin in the run-up to the invasion have been badly wrong-footed, their reputations with their core audiences tarnished.
President Biden has proven his toughness and experience against fearsome adversaries and won new allies.
Military and diplomatic connections between Ukraine, the NATO countries, Taiwan, and various non-aligned actors have been immeasurably enhanced.
…and these are just the good things stemming from Ukrainian resistance, to say nothing of the troubles that the Chinese leadership, the Iranian junta, and America’s Trumpian populists have encountered in 2022.
In short, 2022 did not equal a reset to the terms of 2019. Between March and May 2022, the world’s tectonic plates shifted massively in favor of the liberal democratic West and its allies.
They could still shift against the Western coalition in the future. The world is an unstable place. But 2022 gave us cause for hope.
NOT EVERYTHING’S COMING UP ROSES
This is not to say that we should forget the horrible aspects of 2022 and lose ourselves popping open bottles of champagne.
For millions of people around the world battered by pandemic and inflation and a cost of living crisis, 2022 was actually horrible. An estimated 40,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since Russia’s invasion began in late February. Roughly 11 million have been displaced both internally and externally, creating Europe’s largest refugee crisis since 1939.
Additionally, more than 200,000 Russians have fled their homeland in opposition to the war and out of fear for what comes next. Deepening repression. Forced conscription. Economic hardship.
On the Russian side of the war, the US military released estimates in early December calculating between 80,000 and 120,000 Russian combat deaths and injuries resulting from the war. Of these, about 30,000 are deaths and the rest are wounded, captured, or missing.
These tolls may be for the aggressors, but many were just boys thrown into the meat-grinder by unscrupulous political leaders. Every one has a mother. Every one has a family. The same as the Ukrainian dead. War is Hell, goes the old expression. True again, sadly, in 2022.
And many more lives will be lost to the war in 2023. That is certain.
But to those Ukrainian soldiers sleeping in unheated, filthy and cramped conditions on the front lines tonight, uncertain whether they will live to see another sunset, I can only say that your heroism is saving more than your country, it is bolstering the will and guts of what had been a shaky NATO alliance and a waffling Western public.
GIANTS WITH FEET OF CLAY
The ancients knew that the miraculous often walks hand-in-hand with the horrific. Otherwise, from whence do religion and magic and art come? Who could compose an opera or write a fantasy of horror novel were this not the case? Were good and evil not so closely joined?
If one central theme emerged from the strange and bloody and wondrous year 2022, it was that sudden reversals of fortune are part of the whoop and woof of life. God is inscrutable. Or ‘the gods’ are capricious. And the wheel of fortune turns round.
In 2022, the authoritarian leaders who loomed so large in 2021, bestriding the Earth like titans of old, were revealed to have feet of clay.
Putin’s seemingly invincible war machine crashed. Chinese citizens waving blank sheets of paper made their discontent manifest to Xi Jinping and his coterie. Xi ended the ‘Zero Covid’ policy when it became clear the Chinese population could not, would not tolerate it any longer.
Irans’s leaders dismantled their feared ‘religious morality police’ under pressure from similar popular demonstrations. Turkey’s President Erdogan brokered and wheedled and bargained between the US and Russia and the EU and Ukraine and the Central Asian nations until his face was blue. He may still lose his seat in Turkey’s spring 2023 elections.
And Donald Trump, America’s own would-be authoritarian tyrant, is in slow but steady retreat. What looked to be an ideal combination of circumstances for a Republican sweep of Congress and the state governorships a la 1994 or 2010 turned into a veritable rout for America’s Trump-infected GOP ballot as one set of election deniers after another went down in defeat in 2022.
The core conservative and right-wing media have turned against Trump. As has, finally, the Republican establishment and big donors. He remains a dangerous would-be monarch in internal exile at his Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago, hounded by lawsuits and creditors. But his star is fading.
Many other commentators have summarized Trumps troubles more than adequately. There is no need to rehash them in this space.
Giants with feet of clay. Strongmen who are not nearly as strong as they first appeared. Populist movements that seemed unstoppable. Cresting. Crested. Bogging down. Mugged by reality.
And towering above them all is a diminutive former actor and television producer named Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’. Just about everyone’s person of the year. Ample proof that the ‘man of the hour’ is never at all obvious even one minute prior to the start of the proverbial hour.
But Biden’s experience, Atlanticist smarts, and Europeans’ finding their guts to stand up to Putin – finally – particularly on the question of energy supplies, have also played a big role.
There is a case to be made for Joe Biden as the real ‘Person of the Year’. But we’ll make that case another time. For now, let’s give Zelensky his due. He stood up to nuclear-armed regime of gangsters on his doorstep – and won.
TALKIN’ 1942 BLUES AGAIN
I’ll close with a simple thought: 2022 will go down as a major turning point in history. As a ‘hinge year’ as the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens dubbed it in one of his best editorials – ever – the week before last.
I’ve often disagreed with Mr. Stephen’s columns. But Trump and worldwide catastrophe have matured Stephens into a wiser and more measured thinker and writer. In act, they have brought out the best in him. And I think he’s got it right when he called this past year a ‘hinge year’ in history.
Much that will be is pregnant in the final days of 2022. There are always contingencies. The future is uncertain. The wheel of fortune turns ever round. But 2022 feels like it embodies a very palpable shift in global sentiments and calculations. Even India, Indonesia and Mexico sided against Russia, their old ally, at the G20 Summit in Jakarta.
Who would have believed that possible one year ago?
Here is the question not only for ourselves but for future generations to ponder: Was 2022 another 1989? Or another 1953, when Stalin died and Mao and Kim Il-Sung had to sue to for peace in Korea? Was it another 1914, when the Kaiser was stopped at the Marne? Or another 1940, as Mr. Stephens believes? 1871? Or 1776?
My vote goes to another year entirely: 1942.
Near the end of 1942, when the Second World War was at its middle point (though none knew it at the time) and “the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank” as the Rolling Stones sang 26 years later, Winston Churchill, wartime prime minister of Great Britain, addressed a gathering at the Lord Mayor of London’s quarters following the Battle of El-Alamein.
‘We are not at the beginning of the end, but at the end of the beginning.”
Those were his words. The year 2022 felt a lot more like THAT than it did another 1989, 1953, 1940 or 1914. The Battle of Kyiv was not another Battle of the Marne or of El-Alamein: it was a much more decisive battle. But a turning point type of victory nonetheless.
When Germany lost the Marne it failed to win, but could still have avoided losing, the First world War. When it lost the Battle of Kyiv in March of 2022, Russia lost Ukraine forever. The old empire of the Czars will never be restored. In fact, the Russian Empire is now decisively on the path to dissolution. It will take decades, but the direction is irreversible.
Like the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, the 2022 Battle of Kyiv was a major historical turning point.
Ukraine will join the West. Nothing foreordained this. The courage of the Ukrainian people and of Zelensky made this possible.
The Fates shudder. The Sybil mutters in her cave and covers her face.
We are still far from the final end of the Russian Empire and the cycle of events that began with the inauguration of George W. Bush as US president in January 2001. But we are now past the end of the beginning. 2022 was a dark year. A year to play the blues. But the dawn is breaking.
And ere long, Khamenei, Putin and Xi will fall, whether due to natural causes or those designed by Man. Putin will go first. He is a dead man.
Not that the US will escape major instability in the coming years. The Great Republic has been – and will be – shaken to its core.
But such was always the way of things.
In our next post, as the sun rises on 2023, Greymantle and company will have some predictions for the coming twelve months.
Until then, Happy New Year!
I remain,
Greymantle
