When the curtain finally comes down on 2020, it will have a distinctive annus horribilis tag to it, given the malignant bleakness of the pandemic-tainted year. Massive disruptions to the normal global rhythm resulting in nearly 1.6 million Covid-19 deaths across the world, colossal economic losses and still-unassessed, pandemic-induced consequences will challenge state and society in the rebuilding to come. This is predicated on the mass production of proven, effective and affordable Covid-19 vaccines . There is some promising news on this front, but it is too early to cheer. The macroeconomic assessment of 2020 is definitive. The International Monetary Fund has estimated overall global GDP will fall 4.4 per cent, with emerging markets and developing economies expected shrink by 3.3 per cent and advanced economies by 5.8 per cent. However, 2020’s impact on geopolitics is more complex and tangled. It is exacerbated in no small measure by the policies of US President Donald Trump’s administration and the actions of President Xi Jinping’s team in Beijing. The Indo-Pacific in particular reflects many of these tensions and contradictions. It is hoped the transition to a Joe Biden-led White House will allow for a return to more normal diplomacy and familiar patterns of engagement among the major powers. In 2012, I advanced a tentative framework about emerging geopolitical trends. I argued that after the 2008 global financial crisis and the role played by the US and China, the world would have to contend with a transformation to the global power matrix. I said that “the US-led international order and the selective interpretation of what constitutes ‘liberal’ as well as the exigencies under which certain values and interests are to be protected will be either resisted or challenged by the ’rest’ – but in an uneven, issue-based manner”. Hence my suggestion that the emerging global order would be more of a “‘contra-polar’ world, where contradictory policy pursuits and contrarian impulses are the norm”. The compulsion to contradict and unresolved overlap between strategic considerations and the constraints-cum-opportunities shaped by globalisation in the economic domain are most visible in the Indo-Pacific. Global economic recession may be ‘less severe though still deep’, IMF says It is instructive to note that among the major players in this region, the IMF projects that only China will have positive GDP growth in 2020, coming in at a modest 1.9 per cent. In contrast, the other four major players are all expected to register negative GDP growth, ranging from India at 10.3 per cent to Japan at 5.3 per cent, the US at 4.3 per cent and Russia at 4.1 per cent. While number-crunching about macroeconomic indicators and analysing geopolitical patterns is of interest to specialists and policy wonks, the comprehensive capability of any state has to relate to the safety of its citizens during dire challenges, however unexpected. Here, the democratic cluster comes off second-best. In relation to how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected human security, the numbers are stark. China has 93,782 total cases, 4,746 deaths in total and 3.3 deaths per million population, and it appears confident it has effectively controlled the pandemic. In contrast, the US has 15.2 million cases , 286,232 deaths and 857.1 deaths per million; India has 9.7 million cases, 141,360 deaths and 102.1 deaths per million; Russia has 2.5 million cases, 43,674 deaths and 295.5 deaths per million, and; Japan has 166,592 cases, 2,334 deaths and 18.2 deaths per million. The security-trade dissonance in the Indo-Pacific was more evident in the disaggregation of the just-concluded Malabar naval exercises by the Quad nations and the ambitious Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) that was signed in November. The US, India, Japan and Australia carried out substantial naval exercises in the Indian Ocean in November, even as their political leadership was managing a variation of contra-polarity. US-China competition came into sharp focus when the outgoing US director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, asserted that China posed the greatest threat to America and the rest of the free world since World War II. Whether the Biden team will use the same rhetoric in relation to Beijing remains unclear, but it is unlikely the US-China pendulum will swing to the other extreme of bonhomie and trust. Furthermore, Beijing and New Delhi remain locked in an uneasy military stand-off in the Himalayas, but this has not inhibited China from allowing the import of rice from India. At the same time, Japan and Australia joined the RCEP despite their Malabar participation while the US and India were not part of the trade bloc . To add to the emerging contradictory pattern, soon after the Malabar exercises concluded, the Indian navy engaged in a bilateral exercise with the Russian navy. Welcome to the contra-polar world. The end of World War II and the start of the atomic age sowed the seeds of bipolarity, and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991 began a brief period of US unipolarity until about 2001. However, there is no available template that can accommodate the complexity and contradictions of 2021 and beyond. Emotive nationalism is being cynically harnessed for electoral advantage, and domestic politics have become strident and insular. The final contradictory strand is that, for all the opprobrium the Trump presidency has elicited for its coarse, unpredictable policy lurches, the US has not started a new war since 2017. Trump has, though, exposed the corrosive cost to US interests of the Henry Kissinger-led China policy. Whether the Biden administration will make major policy changes in the Indo-Pacific remains to be seen. However, it must be noted that the US and India – the world’s oldest and largest democracies – have sidelined themselves in the regional economic domain even while seeking an abiding strategic objective to guide their nascent partnership. China’s ability to avoid becoming the glue that provides cohesion to the US-India partnership will shape the contours of the contra-polarity that defines the next decade. Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar is director of the Society for Policy Studies (SPS), an independent think tank based in New Delhi