Coronavirus: "We are also in an economic war"

Jean-Christophe Gallien is a political scientist and communicator. He teaches at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

There is a terrible evidence. Without having learned the lessons of SARS, without having prepared accordingly, the Coronavirus extends its deadly shadow over the planet. This is what we all dread for our grandparents, our parents and ourselves. Another death, economic and social, is about to spread even faster and more widely.

The virus has killed more than 5,000 people at the time of writing. Several tens of millions of people will see their economic and social lives destroyed if our national, European and international governments do not intervene massively and quickly. In the absence of a reaction from an economic war, bankruptcies, layoffs, unpaid invoices, generalized over-indebtedness ... will follow each other at an exponential rate and above all lastingly, dragging entire populations into chaos.

We must vaccinate our economies against the current blast

Of course everything must be done to win, as Japan has realized, as Korea is preparing to do, the health war and to defeat the virus which attacks our bodies. We must also and even more quickly vaccinate our economies against the current blast. There is like the inexorable feeling of a pivotal moment. Even more than in 2008, the system seems able to tip over into the unknown with an end that has been announced several times.

We let China become the factory of a globalized and above all financialized world. When China coughs, the planet trembles with fever in every corner. We pretend to discover that even our pharmaceutical security, I'm not even talking about sovereignty, was sold to the short-term greed of financial leaders.

A more deadly challenge than in 2008

The epidemic comes crashing into a geopolitical and international financial context already largely tempestuous as a rascal wave. Immediate result: repeated stock market crashes, oil war between Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States and the revival of a real war in Syria in another migrant crisis to come.

We need doctors of medicine who find medical solutions, but even more of doctors of economics who, finally, invent effective and lasting responses and above all statesmen who take their responsibilities to guarantee, without weakness, the future . The challenge is even more deadly than in 2008. The response must be more massive, faster, more coordinated and relentless in its application.

US and EU at risk of strategic weakening

There is an unrefined collusion, of a rather opportunistic type, but which could have the objective of striking Western economies in the context of an ongoing economic war between the West, Russia and China.

The latter, which suffered the crisis on the front line since it gave birth to it, is in the process of emerging from it. China will emerge from it weakened economically, but its leader Xi Jinping, who had come close to the political crisis, now claims a personal, but also collective, victory for the Chinese political system, over weaknesses and failures that he criticizes in the West .

Oil war poised to deliver new winners

Very quickly, in parallel with the westward expansion of the Coronavirus, a new war between Russia and Saudi Arabia broke out. The Saudi "ally" of the United States has decided to lower oil prices without notice. Obviously Moscow followed suit. With their reserves and especially their production costs, the two members of an OPEC, now without a strategic line, can assume such a fall in prices. The American shale gas value chain no! If prices remain, the next few months, at this historically low level, everywhere, from Texas to Pennsylvania via North Dakota, all the states of the American oil sector, which collectively had taken the leadership of world production, fear now to disappear. Nothing less. We know what happened next in the United States: closings, unemployment and regional and then national recessions. The reaction of the Trump administration and the FED have been quick enough, will they be enough? For once even in the United States, the dynamics let hover uncertainty.

Syria zone of confrontation and evaluation of the global balance of power

Let us widen the field a little further, beyond the health crisis of the Coronavirus, the oil crisis at work, even beyond the economic war that has been going on for months, it is the geostrategic balance of the world that 'it's about.

Syria, essentially for energy reasons, we have often forgotten in analyzes, has been, for more than 10 years, a zone of confrontation and evaluation of global power struggles. First on the ground, by proxy, then less and less and now in an economic conflict, live.

Russia but also China, other actors such as Turkey were able to observe, assess and take advantage of American hesitations and weaknesses, notably those of Barack Obama, in Syria.

Now everyone sees and brings out a new multipolar world. The tactical example developed on the petroleum issue, at the heart of an OPEC supposed to control the markets but paralyzed by their cross-action and the individualism of Saudi Arabia, the alleged ally of the Americans, illustrates the changes at work. .

EU countries face a challenge of unprecedented intensity and complexity since 1945

Largely exfiltrated from the Syria assessment area, individually and collectively, Europeans, including France, find themselves caught in this terrible sanitary, economic and geopolitical blaze ignited by the spark of the Coronavirus. Italy, largely abandoned to its fate by the members of the European Union, the Union's third economy, will go into recession. In addition to the Coronavirus, Greece and Bulgaria face the cynical blackmail of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ready to drop columns of refugees from the Syrian conflict and from many other regions in Europe. The American ally, NATO's main power and first trading partner, in the midst of the presidential campaign, already in the midst of a strategic withdrawal, will experience a tough confrontation with a new economic reality. The 27 countries of the European Union face a challenge of intensity and complexity unprecedented since the Second World War.

In this context, there is a need for a concerted, immediate and massive recovery plan, delivered directly to the real economy, not to that of the banks or investment funds which vampirized most of the 2009 effort. and afterwards, there must be an asserted and assumed will of power and collective sovereignty. It is the time of politics.

Do we want to remain in control of our destiny or do others want to impose their domination, their values ​​and their technologies on us? 5G, health, chips, biotech, cyber, quantum, energy, defense, lifestyle…?