Biggest political blunder of 2022

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

?

[2952-0-0]

Xi Jinping maintaining his lockdowns long after the rest of the world abandoned them, not bothering to use the lockdowns to vaccinate the Chinese people, even refusing offers from the US and EU to donate hundreds of millions of Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, and then making a sudden about-face in the worst time of the year, must trump all of them.

[CumbrianLefty]

No, even that pales into relative insignificance compared to Putin invading Ukraine.

If you are counting that as "political" then there is only one possible answer to this question.

[Stranger in a strange land]

Without doubt, it's Russia invading Ukraine. Liz Truss will be little more than an interesting trivia fact five years from now, and Sri Lanka will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis. The Invasion of Ukraine is probably the biggest blunder by any leader in recent times:
- Sweden and Finland are now well on their way to join NATO, which they didn't come close to doing at any point during the Cold War, so Russia now has a MUCH longer border with NATO and is locked into the Baltic and the North Sea
- Turkey, not Russia, is now the dominant naval power in the Black Sea for the first time in hundreds of years, and Russia is even in danger of losing its base at Sevastopol, even if they still control Crimea at the end of the War
- Russia's lucrative supply of gas to Western Europe, and it's ability to use the gas weapon, are permanently weakened, if not totally destroyed
- Russia's hold on Central Asia is badly weakend: within the next 10-20 years, each is likely to shake off the Dead Hand of the Soviet Security State
- The export market for Russian weapons has tanked
- Russia's conventional army is badly weakened, and thus Russia's ability to wage war or intervene in other countries is badly compromised
- Ukraine, which even after 2014 was split in its views of Russia, is now firmly an enemy

[2952-0-0]

Without doubt, it's Russia invading Ukraine. Liz Truss will be little more than an interesting trivia fact five years from now, and Sri Lanka will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis. The Invasion of Ukraine is probably the biggest blunder by any leader in recent times:
- Sweden and Finland are now well on their way to join NATO, which they didn't come close to doing at any point during the Cold War, so Russia now has a MUCH longer border with NATO and is locked into the Baltic and the North Sea
- Turkey, not Russia, is now the dominant naval power in the Black Sea for the first time in hundreds of years, and Russia is even in danger of losing its base at Sevastopol, even if they still control Crimea at the end of the War
- Russia's lucrative supply of gas to Western Europe, and it's ability to use the gas weapon, are permanently weakened, if not totally destroyed
- Russia's hold on Central Asia is badly weakend: within the next 10-20 years, each is likely to shake off the Dead Hand of the Soviet Security State
- The export market for Russian weapons has tanked
- Russia's conventional army is badly weakened, and thus Russia's ability to wage war or intervene in other countries is badly compromised
- Ukraine, which even after 2014 was split in its views of Russia, is now firmly an enemy

Out of those three, there's no doubt. But, I still think that Xi's disastrous handling of the pandemic will overshadow even Putin's disaster in Ukraine. The median historian in the year 2100 will probably view Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the death rattle of an empire long in decline, its last-ditch attempt to maintain the illusion of its status as a global superpower, and its defeat as the trigger for its final collapse. By contrast, I think the median historian will view the pandemic as the symbolic watermark between China as an ascendant superpower poised to challenge the US for global hegemony, and a period of stagnation and decline.

Before the pandemic, everyone in the world was in awe, that the CCP were staffed by competent technocrats who were turning the world's most populous nation into a juggernaut that would, very soon, become a technological superpower that could wage a struggle for global supremacy and even win. Aside from hawkish politicians in Washington, few people - even in countries like the UK and Canada - thought it was worth openly challenging this trend. In the halls of power in cities like Brussels and Tokyo, there were whispers that maybe these hawks in Washington were onto something, but it wasn't clear if they would take action. Even in the first year of the pandemic, there was grudging admiration that Beijing's policy of harsh lockdowns was effective at preventing the mass deaths that were occurring everywhere else. But, by 2021, it became clear that decision-making in Beijing was centralized in one individual, even ignoring the technocrats that enabled so much of China's previous success. Events in 2022 led to a sea change, both in perception and reality.

- The failure to vaccinate China's high-risk population with vaccines that the US and EU were willing to donate immediately, will alone cause millions of avoidable deaths. That's a magnitude greater than even the worst estimated death toll in Ukraine.
- Erratic decision-making in Beijing has caused irreversible damage to China's economy. Many major tech companies have announced plans to permanently shift supply chains out of China. They're afraid that if one man's diktat could order lockdowns that cripple their operations, then that one man can order something else. Hence, they calculate it's worth the cost to rebuild their supply chains even after the end of the lockdowns.
- Interest in emigration among China's upper and middle classes has surged, especially after the lockdown in Shanghai. Even the departure of several million of China's best and brightest will cause a permanent brain drain to its economy.
- Policymakers in other countries, whether in the government or in corporate boardrooms, are no longer assuming as a fact that China will be an ascendent superpower. The bosses of Japanese and South Korean corporations no longer feel that maintaining access to China is something they must do at any cost. Leaders in Southeast Asian countries still feel it's important to be on good terms with Beijing, but no longer feel they must act deferentially. India's political class, while maintaining their traditional non-alignment, calculate that China is a bigger threat to their interests, and are more willing to align with the west. The EU openly deemed China a geopolitical adversary, something that Beijing had spent huge time and effort to avoid. Yes, the pandemic didn't cause these, but it certainly factored into the calculations of all these players involved.
- Most importantly, the damage done to the Party's reputation at home will be difficult to recover from. The social order of political deference in exchange for economic prosperity is gone, everyone knows that, but it hasn't yet trickled down to the common psyche yet. There will be big trouble when that happens. The Party elite will also have doubts about what they've signed up for, since the reality they see with their own eyes will be completely opposite to official propaganda. Gorbachev stated that Chernobyl was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, because that was the moment that caused the Party elite to no longer trust what they had signed up for. I'm not yet stating that this is China's Chernobyl, but I do believe that on balance this is not dissimilar.

Hence, on balance, I think China's erratic policy on the pandemic is a much more consequential disaster than even Putin's invasion of Ukraine. The pandemic didn't *cause* China's existing troubles, as many of them were bubbling below the surface in the 2010s, but the pandemic allowed them to all contribute into a very difficult situation both for China as a nation and the CCP as a political entity.

[SWE]

Russia invading Ukraine is so clearly the leader of the pack that it makes talking about the honorable mentions more interesting. I'll throw out Castillo's coup as being up there. It's one thing to botch a coup attempt, but he didn't even bother to try and garner support, he just randomly tried to declare himself dictator, everyone said "what?" and then he got arrested.

[Vosem]

I feel like I can work myself into the mindset of Zero Covid, I can work myself into the mindset of conquering Ukraine, and I can work myself into the mindset of demand-side stimulus, but I legitimately have no idea what the people running Sri Lanka were thinking. It was not the most consequential blunder on the world stage by any means, but it's the one I find it hardest to wrap my head around.

[CumbrianLefty]

And whilst its not the biggest blunder of 2022, the Truss/Kwarteng thing definitely deserves its place in these lists. In so many ways, a genuinely jaw-dropping episode - and one that could haunt the UK's "traditional party of government" for a long time to come.

[lfromnj]

Why Zero Covid was the worst blunder post

I would say I do heavily see the potential for Zero Covid to achieve your scenario but in the meantime we still have to wait another year or two to see the full fallout of that idiotic policy. Meanwhile it is easier to at least see where Russia's invasion of Ukraine has taken them.

[All Along The Watchtower]

Republican Party midterm campaigns in the US.

Oh you mean world? Yeah, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Though China’s handling of COVID in general is the biggest fall from any kind of grace—but that’s been from late 2019 onward, not just 2022.

[Sir Mohamed]

Obviously #1.

Will also hurt Russia in the long run. On many levels.