The state of the world in 2023

Where we are, where we've been and where we're headed

The Earth seen from Apollo 17. Photo by NASA, courtesy Wikipedia.

I could make an argument that the most significant country in the world in 2023 was the Netherlands.

In March of this year, news outlets around the world covered Dutch farmers protesting against their government’s environmental policies. Then, eight months later, Geert Wilders and his political party—whose ideas include banning mosques, outlawing the Quran, and removing headscarves from public buildings—swept the Dutch parliamentary elections and will lead the formation of a new government.

In the news media and through my private conversations, many observers believe that what’s happened in the Netherlands could have significant ramifications for Europe and beyond. The year 2024 will see more than 80 elections worldwide with 2 billion people voting in at least 50 countries—a record-number of elections in a single year. The state of the world in 2023 will dictate much of what happens in 2024, and the Netherlands could be a bellwether of things to come.

The mounting discontent in the Netherlands will sound familiar. Dutch inflation reached unprecedented levels following the Covid-19 pandemic, with energy prices increasing as much as 17 percent, and food and housing costs up double-digits. At the same time, immigration and refugees into the Netherlands more than doubled, some escaping Ukraine and others escaping violence and unrest in the Middle East (Syria, Turkey, Iraq, etc.). For millions of Dutch voters, it created a tension: why are we spending resources to house and feed immigrants from other countries—especially those who do not share our heritage, religion or skin color—when those of us who have been here for generations cannot afford food and housing?

Amid this battle arose another between urban and rural. Progressives inside the Dutch government, concerned about nitrogen oxide pollution from the Netherlands’s vast agricultural industry, issued a report that included a recommendation to shut down or buy out livestock farms in an effort to reduce emissions. Farmers were incensed. According to The Guardian, farmers had already reduced their emissions by almost two-thirds since 1990, while during the same period the government had encouraged farms to expand (the Netherlands is the #2 agricultural producer in the world behind the United States). Suddenly, farmers were told that they were the problem, as opposed to the fossil fuel companies responsible for air pollution and carbon emissions. “A lot had the feeling that the government betrayed them,” one analyst told The Guardian.

The combined results have been violence, protests, and surprise election results that have flipped Dutch politics on their head (the symbol of the farm protests is, in fact, a Dutch flag turned upside down). The situation has proven ripe territory for a politician such as Wilders, who has built his career on affixing blame for societal problems on immigrants while stoking isolationist and nationalist sentiments. The urban liberal elites have failed, the argument goes. They have driven up prices, allowed crime to fester, opened doors to immigrants while neglecting those at home, diluted national character and identity, and have placed abstract ideologies over the necessities of constituents. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is a similar line of argument used in Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden and other European countries. Depending on election results next year, European policies on the environment, immigration and support for Ukraine could be at risk. Countries such as Slovakia and the Netherlands could even vote to leave the EU.

This is not solely a European phenomenon. In Argentina, president-elect Javier Milei built his political career railing against elites who, he said, repeatedly failed Argentine voters and had been unable to rein in runaway inflation. In his rhetoric, Milei resembled his neighbor in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. Though Bolsonaro was defeated in 2023 by President Lula, his movement has not dissipated, and Brazilian society remains deeply divided along partisan lines. Perhaps no contemporary nation is as divided along partisan lines than the U.S., where anti-immigrant sentiments, inflation, and a feeling that political elites have abandoned everyday people are omnipresent from El Paso, Texas, to East Palestine, Ohio. I was recently at an event in Washington, D.C., where journalist Judy Woodruff spoke about her new project traveling across the U.S. interviewing Republicans and Democrats. Without spoiling the show, which airs soon on PBS, I will simply say that what she told us made it feel as though there were vast oceans between different parts of the country, a sentiment I have felt keenly in my own travels.

Meanwhile across the Pacific Ocean, the Chinese Communist Party has made its mission to reconfigure the world order of the previous century led by the United States. The CCP has invested heavily into so-called “chokepoint technologies,” the goal being to remove any reliance on foreign markets—e.g., the U.S. and Japan—for components that power everything from microprocessors to solar panels, instead having them built and assembled in China. This would ensure no interruptions to the supply chain and rapid technological development free from foreign interference or sanctions. At the same time, the CCP has accumulated the world’s largest military; created its own China Development Bank to compete with The World Bank; invested more than $1 trillion into its Belt & Road Initiative building infrastructure around the world; positioned itself as a peace broker in the Middle East, sidelining the United States; and continued its espionage and influence operations in the U.S. and around the world.

The Chinese government also continues to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which this year exceeded more than 500,000 people killed since the war began. In the Israel-Hamas war, some estimates are that nearly 20,000 people have died. The Syrian Civil War, which has disappeared from news coverage but has not ended, has likely also exceeded 500,000 people killed, though it remains impossible to ascertain a precise number. Sudan’s civil war is now in its eighth month, with more than 25 million people in dire humanitarian need and 6 million people displaced, according to an International Rescue Committee report. Houthi rebels in Yemen have been at war with the Saudi-backed government for eight years, causing one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world, with more than 11 million children at risk, according to UNICEF. Across the globe, more than 100 million people have been displaced, according to the U.N., from war, famine or persecution.

Concomitantly, technology companies continue to consume the economy and our attention spans. ChatGPT became the fastest platform ever to reach 100 million users; TikTok continues to have double digit growth everywhere except the U.S.; digital ad spending now exceeds $800 billion worldwide; and being a YouTube / social media influencer has cracked the top five dream jobs for American teenagers. Tech companies such as Meta and Amazon are among the top spending lobbyists in Washington, shaping public policy to their whims and desires, with ByteDance, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Apple and IBM each spending more than $1 million in a single quarter in 2023. While journalists and the public debate artificial intelligence, tech companies are eyeing medicine, education, space and defense as frontiers for their next expansion. Can you imagine a future where tech companies with billions of dollars and sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities use proprietary datasets to develop weapons? You should, because it is on its way—and the United States is racing to get there before China and Russia do.

If all of that were not enough, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration believes that 2023 will be the world’s warmest year since modern day record-keeping began, and 2024 figures to be even warmer due to the effects of El Nino. Wildfire smoke and choking air pollution smothered parts of the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia this year, with no reason to believe that volatile weather will not continue in the years ahead. While world leaders take private jets to Dubai and Davos to talk about combating climate change while committing to little or no action, nearly half of American adults do not see climate change as a major threat, and nearly two-thirds of Americans rank it as a lower priority than other national issues, according to Pew.

Which brings us back to The Netherlands. In a way, nearly all of these issues are contained within the dynamics of Europe’s 31^st-smallest country. In a clumsy attempt by governmental elites to try and address the climate crisis, other existential crises of identity, migration, inflation, ideology, instability and uncertainty about the future were ignited—in part organically, and in part purposefully by nefarious actors. Among everyday people, there is a massive sense of instability that political leaders and elected officials seem incapable of mitigating—or, worse, are benefiting from at the expense of others. Such tensions are playing out across the globe, the issues transnational, borne from decades, if not centuries, of conflict and contestation over land, resources, religion, politics, power, class, capitalism, identity and the future of the planet. In other words, these challenges were made by history, and history will be essential to solving them. Not bite-sized, hyperbolized, hyper-partisan e-history packaged to generate likes, clicks and shares on social media; but rather, serious, rigorous historical analysis that unpacks our most wicked problems, identifies their root causes, and prescribes some measure of solution on how to address them.

Such is why I continue to write this newsletter, and do the work that I do. Serious solutions for the future require serious excavations of the past. From tech to disinformation, democracy to antisemitism, climate change to terrorism, everything has a history—and I believe that serious, publicly-engaged history has a role to play in trying to heal our broken world. Amid all my travels in 2023, across a combined ninety-one speaking engagements and media appearances (phew!), and innumerable conversations, the need for policy-relevant history has been made abundantly clear. That will continue to be the case in 2024 and beyond.

Thanks for being with me on this journey.

-JS

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