The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated global news for months. Almost half of the world’s population is under social or economic lockdown. People are afraid. In the background, an unprecedented global crisis could precipitate a dramatic international systemic transition from a Pax Americana to a Pax China. This could establish a new world order in which China, rather than the US, dominates the international system.

By Arthur Blok & Marco Mattiussi
“If today, thinking it over calmly, we wonder why Europe went to war in 1914, there is no sensible reason to be found; there is never any real occasion for the war. There were no ideas involved; it was not merely about drawing minor borderlines. I can explain it only, thinking of that excess of power, by seeing it as a tragic consequence of the internal dynamism built during those forty years of peace, and now it has demanded release.”

From the book The World of Yesterday (1943) by the Jewish Austrian viewwriterview writer Stefan Zweig, this quotation is considered the most famous book on the Habsburg Monarchy. Zweig sent the manuscript to his publisher before he committed suicide in 1942 in Brazil.

Zweig’s philosophical book provides an exciting backdrop to the question: “Are we in the midst of a new global war?” This war would be one war against the West that many of us do not even realise is upon us. We are all so focused on the latest figures for COVID-19 deaths and infection statistics that we do not yet understand what might be happening in the background; this is not a conventional war in which tanks and soldiers are on the front line, but a war of information and psychological control.

2020 WARning
In 2016, the Dutch political scientist Ingo Piepers (PhD) published his thesis ‘2020: WARning’, in which he elaborates on the phenomenon of wars. In his thesis, he asserts that the global system produced, and still produces, two types of battles: systemic and non-systemic. He qualifies the latter as small wars, for example, between two nations with limited effects. On the other hand, systemic wars could be limited to ‘world wars’ and could lead to a ‘rebalance’ of the global system.

In short, Piepers argues that systemic wars are periodically necessary in anarchic systems to rebalance relations among states and to implement upgraded international orders that provide, at least temporarily, relative stability to the world system.

Pipers has studied all major wars and global conflicts from 1495 to the present. He elaborated on the Cold War period, following the last major war (the Second World War, 1940–1945), to the present, a chaotic period during which the number of unresolved issues increased and tensions accumulated in the global system. After data analysis and new insights into the workings of complex global systems and networks, his study has come to a troublesome forecast: the system we live in will produce the next systemic war – a World War – around 2020. Eerily, that forecast was made in 2016.

Just four months ago, this conclusion probably would have been dismissed as a grand and, frankly speaking, quite delirious theory of some mad scientist. But today, April 2020, the world is unquestionably not what it was just four months ago. Perhaps today, we should look at Piepers’ worrisome conclusion with different eyes. Has the Third World War started already, but we haven't realised it yet?

The unprecedented crisis
It is no exaggeration to say that we have suddenly plunged into a social and economic situation that makes the financial crisis of 2008 look like a quiet Sunday afternoon in the park. The brightest minds in the economic field all agree on this.

More than 40 high-profile economists, including IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath and a former president Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, published alarming recommendations via the Centre for Economic Policy Research. They urge governments to act quickly and do whatever it takes to keep the lights on in the COVID-19 crisis.

There are many drastic measures proposed. Some include: ‘helicopter money,’ giving everyone a no-strings-attached handout; Eurozone countries using Eurobonds to issue debt together rather than individually; and state investment banks providing unlimited emergency lending to firms. These are unorthodox measures to avoid a complete economic collapse of the current global system.

In addition, American Economist Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics at New York University's Stern School of Business, recently stated that it took two years in 2008 to incur the losses that have been incurred in less than a month in the current crisis. In his own words, “This is just something we have not seen before.” Roubini contends, “It is like an asteroid hit the Earth.”

People will not soon forget the sight of hundreds of planes carrying all possible flags of the world, motionless, grounded at national airports, lined up in perfect order, close to each other as they wouldn’t be moving anytime soon. Unforgettable will be the sight of empty highways, deserted city centres, and shopping malls in Europe and the US.

Could anyone have ever imagined such dramatic scenes only a few months ago? How would we have reacted if somebody had depicted these scenes? We would have probably dismissed him as a lunatic. Yet, here we are, in a global lockdown situation that has never happened before on this scale in modern history.

Green and Sustainable Economy
The belief that we are at a turning point at which the current world order is poised to change is receiving increasing attention from environmental activists and green lobby groups. Many argue that this is the perfect moment to shift the current capitalist system toward a more sustainable, globally green economy. This would be an economy that protects the environment and supports economic growth: low-carbon, resource-efficient, and socially inclusive.

Data on a sharp reduction in air pollution levels between February and March 2020 have been released, showing drops of more than 50% in CO2 in regions worldwide hardest hit by the virus. Activists have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns should remain for months to come. Semi-scientific studies have even suggested that the ozone layer is healing itself due to the dramatic reduction in productive processes, although this remains unproven. Images of previously unseen blue skies and nature scenes already taking over have been widely circulating, from clear skies over the Chinese capital, Beijing, to wild animals in the streets of London.

Clean skies, clean air, and the green dream are matters that all idealists have dreamed of and speculated about for decades. Still, for these radical changes to come into effect, it would need all significant economic powers of the world to be on the same page. This is unlikely to occur at the current stage of the global crisis, when economies are collapsing and worldwide panic and distrust prevail.

All eyes on China
Beyond the Green activists' captivating and optimistic hopes, more alarming concerns are emerging worldwide. Extreme circumstances give room for radical conjectures. Unsurprisingly, most of the circulating theories point their finger toward China. Some have already translated into official actions: for example, American lawyer Larry Klayman and his advocacy group, Freedom Watch, filed a $20 trillion lawsuit in March against the Chinese government, the Chinese army, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Klayman has claimed that the US intelligence agencies have been compiling evidence to prove that China has prepared COVID-19 as a biological weapon against the West. According to the lawyer and his followers, the virus was concocted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then released.

Although quite difficult to prove, the trend has been set. Numerous anti-China petitions have popped up online, calling for a boycott of Chinese goods. The wildest theories accusing China of deliberately attacking the West are circulating everywhere. Fueled by the ongoing China–United States trade war, these theories have escalated during the Trump presidency.

In 2019, China was accused of installing spyware in popular China-made applications such as TikTok. This recalls the row with Huawei a few months earlier. The phone-maker faced bold accusations that it had engaged in corporate espionage to steal competitors' intellectual property.

Last year, it was restricted from engaging in commerce with U.S. companies and was banned from installing the 5G network in the US and parts of the EU. On top of that, there were US allegations that it willfully exported technology of US origin to Iran, all in violation of US sanctions. These are the most widely known cases in a long sequence of incidents primarily involving the trade of advanced technology to and from China.

Undoubtedly, this is a highly fertile background that supports the theory that COVID-19 could be China’s counterattack, thereby validating Dr Pieper's studies, albeit in an unexpected way. Could it be true that the Western countries and their Middle Eastern allies are under an attack coordinated by China?

Let’s be clear: this would not be a traditional war attack. As said in the introduction, this is not a war involving tanks, soldiers, and conventional weaponry. Nevertheless, it would be a war that would change the world equilibrium as we know it today. Indeed, a ‘systemic war,’ as per Pieper's words. A war that has also seen the other world powers acting to find their place in the arena, taking sides with one of the two giants, although not always in the most expected ways.

From this perspective, the unique, unexpected, and sudden situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic should raise some grave concerns. For an outsider, it almost looks like China launched the coronavirus crisis as a perfectly orchestrated media campaign, first leaking little news about a new virus, arresting whistle-blowers, then progressively exposing the scale of the problem until reaching the devastating numbers of casualties. The Chinese then demonstrated to the world how to respond and contain it through a strict lockdown. They returned a few weeks later, with surprising regularity, to a business-as-usual situation that will be executed this week.

According to Chinese official data, how plausible is it that significant megacities like Beijing and Shanghai barely had any victims while the rest of the world is in chaos? These are, most certainly, questions that are deemed to remain without answer, for now, of course.

Whether we are inclined or not to follow this theory, we cannot deny that this situation of an unprecedented ‘perfect storm’ on a world scale, without a precise timing for its recovery, constitutes the best possible ground for a complete shift of power at a global level. This shift of power is ripe for the taking of whoever will be able to seize the occasion.
Time will tell.

Arthur Blok is the Executive Editor-in-Chief of the Levant News, and Marco Mattiussi is an Italian political analyst.