Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021.
U.S./China Conflict Enters New Phase Under Biden Tom Crean and Vincent Kolo The following article is based on a discussion at a meeting of the China/Hong Kong/Taiwan section of International Socialist Alternative (ISA) on February 7.
T
he COVID pandemic has utterly exposed the rot and decay of global capitalism. The United States. and the European Union (EU), allegedly “advanced” capitalist powers, have completely failed to contain the virus leading to massive and completely unnecessary loss of life. But the virus was also the trigger of the deepest global economic crisis since the 1930s which has been particularly devastating in the neocolonial world. Underlying this is a crisis of productivity with capitalists generally refusing to invest in expanding production but rather plowing the bulk of their superprofits back into the global financial casino. Global economic perspectives for 2021 and 2022 are very much linked to progress in vaccinating the world population. There is increasing vaccine nationalism from all the key powers. They use the vaccines as a tool of foreign policy, like China and Russia, or take a protectionist approach and hoard their supplies like the U.S. and the U.K. or even threaten, as the EU has done, to refuse the export of vaccines produced in their territory. China is delivering its vaccines from Sinopharm and
Sinovac to dozens of countries especially in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and even to Eastern European countries excluded from the EU’s vaccine plans. China’s propaganda has lauded its “vaccine diplomacy” and attacked the Western vaccines as “unsafe.” An article in Business Insider (2/6/21) made the following points: The fundamental problem is that there is not enough manufacturing capacity to vaccinate the entire global population this year or even next year. A report published by UBS found that - at current rates - only 10% of the world will be immunized against COVID-19 by the end of this year, rising to just 21% at the end of 2022. That limited supply will almost exclusively be used to immunize wealthy countries’ populations, which have bought almost the entire forward supply of vaccines. But a nationalistic approach will carry an enormous public health cost by prolonging the pandemic and increasing the chance of a new, vaccine-resistant strain emerging. Business Insider goes on to point out that the International
