Valdai Club

The collapse of the OPEC+ deal in early March 2020 erased much of the progress made in the world energy market. After several years of successful cooperation between leading oil producing countries, its every country for itself once again.

The coronavirus problem has revealed the imbalances in the global economy. If it hadn’t been for the coronavirus something still would have to have been done to deal with the risk of recession.

The way the current crisis is resolved will have a direct impact both on the state of the world economy and on politics, as well as on the outcome of the American election campaign.

The EU is becoming the trendsetter for the global environmental agenda. It sees itself not only as a competitive economy but also as the leader of the green revolution.

The question remains if Biden will become the energy center of the Democrats’ campaign. Although he beat Sanders, his weak point, like Hillary Clinton’s, is his obvious elitism, affiliation with the establishment, lack of original ideas and a doubtful advantage over Trump in the election.

The Coronavirus pandemic will change how the world works. It will bring new drivers of both cooperation and conflict. Even more fundamentally, the outbreak will make the impact the most basic social interactions.

Kazakhstan is a glaring example of social inequality and the nationalization of the elite in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

The world economy was fragile even before COVID-19. The trade war between the US and China, coupled with rising geopolitical tensions, had taken a toll on global trade which had hitherto driven globalization.

The coronavirus has confirmed what the world has been afraid to admit for several years: there are no global responses to global challenges.

We need to look for other means and other platforms for making decisions that correspond to the specifics of the moment that we are all experiencing. The G20 may become one of the important nodes of the complex new global governance mechanism, but it is incapable of replacing the whole mechanism.