And why is a bifurcation a problem?

For several reasons:

1) The divorce will be extremely expensive for most of the world. Add this to the economic problems resulting from the pandemic and the costs of climate change.

2) When completed, the removal of mutual economic interdependence will also remove an important deterrent against conflicts.

3) Because of this and because of the generally increased hostility between the superpowers the probability of cyberattacks and military strikes and (proxy) wars will increase.

4) Weaker countries like the European ones will loose independence and be easy prey unless they unite effectively.

5) Global cooperation is urgently needed to handle climate change and the resulting huge geographic displacements of people.

Bifurcation and Corona

As I have said earlier, the course of history does not repeat itself in all details from one civilization to the next: 1) Each civilization has its own characteristics and 2) Pure coincidences and our own actions affect the path. If Toynbee is right we can in principle even escape the quite pervasive trend towards repeating the pattern in development typical for civilizations. But this demands a considerable historical insight and wise policies. There can be little doubt that the best or only possibility for a such escape lies in the phase of modernity. Despite all the typical chaos in this phase, it is also a time with enormous, not least historical knowledge coupled with analytical  thinking.

But clearly such an escape demands a sense of history, wise governance and also that this wise rule applies to most or all of the area enclosed by or affecting the civilization. Clearly it is also necessary that most of the society / societies benefit from successful economic developments. If parts of society become unsatisfied or if outside forces interfere or invade, the course will follow the usual road towards the end of the modernity. 

To look for previous examples of escape from the historical samsara we must thus look at the modernity of our predecessor civilizations. A such look is quite depressing. All civilizations of which we have clear knowledge, have entered a phase of modernity, but in all of those cases this phase has also ended. This has typically happened through an increasingly chaotic late modernity ending with a universal autocracy. The civil wars of the Roman republic ended with Augustus, the brutal period of the warring states in old China ended with the first emperor Qin Shi Huang, the utterly chaotic period of the Orient around AD 1000 ended with Sultan Alp Aslan etc.

But in one case we may see a modernity which even though it did not last forever, still achieved a prolonging. Modernities normally last around 300 years. The Greco-Roman world from Alexander the Great to Augustus, the Oriental from the Abbasid revolution 750 to around 1050 etc. But in the second Chinese civilization modernity seems to have started from the chaos in the latest part of the Tang Dynasty before 900 and to have continued through the unusually wise and orderly Song Dynasty lasting as long as to 1279. This is 400 years, a century more than the usual.

The emperors of this dynasty let qualified politicians govern. Of course there was not democracy in any modern sense of the word, but there was an open and peaceful debate between politicians from the two main parties, Reformists and Conservatives who succeeded each other in forming governments. The monetary system using bank notes was kept in order, production and industrialization grew etc. 
 
What finally brought this to an end was attacks from outside forces in the form of invading nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples, not least the Mongolians who ended this modernity in 1279 or gradually in the first decades thereafter.

Looking at our case, the West, for a long time I was optimistic that we could escape the most chaotic and warring path followed by for example Rome. My hopes were based on our knowledge, historical sense and our causal thinking and not least our humane ideals based on the terrible experience from more than 100 millions of dead in the 20th century. In the decades following WW 2 it seemed as if we would choose a wise path, perhaps not avoid, but at least postpone our Augustus, who otherwise could be expected about 2100, i.e. roughly 300 years after the outbreak of the French Revolution starting our modernity in 1789.

But since the nineties our window of opportunity is closing. By now it is clear that we cannot escape the end of our modernity. We cannot even postpone it. It is too late. Politics have declined and fragmented too much for well considered and concerted actions. The sense of history is lost. Our future for the next decades will be worse than we may wish. But we can still affect how the exact path will be. As said, coincidences and our acts decide the exact path. Coincidences happen, but we decide how to facilitate or inhibit them and how we handle them.


Two recent coincidences may put us on an even more unpleasant path.

The first is the emergence of Donald Trump. Obviously he is not the cause of the radical political decline in the United States. This has been underway for more than two decades. But he has brought the lowest tendencies of this decline to the  highest positions of power and even begun to limit the influence of the hated deep state. This breaks with the till now typical condition in the United States where  responsible presidents and exactly this deep state moderated ill considered actions.
  
The other coincidence with a possible large historical impact is the emergence of Covid-19. This did not need to achieve a such influence, and in the start it did not look like it would. But the extreme spread outside China because of political mismanagement and the ensuing wish to blame somebody else has given the virus a potentially immense importance. A new narrative has been created claiming that the virus spread outside China and had so devastating consequences for the world due to initial Chinese mismanagement and attempts to hide the facts.

A delay in the warning about the disease and its danger may have been caused by China or a Chinese province. But a such possible delay  is dwarfed by the far longer delay caused by slow reactions in countries like the United States and the UK failing to react to strong and clear warnings from the WHO which no matter their exact timing came several  weeks before adequate reactions.

The new narrative spread by a president eager to deny his own responsibility for the spread of the pandemic in his country and by hawks in several countries has replaced the original perception of a China being transparent and cooperative concerning the disease.

Clearly, for many the goal is to further aggravate the new cold war. This may ultimately lead to the (in)famous bifurcation. The partitioning of the world in two mutually unconnected spheres, an American and a Chinese. This is wished by many hawks in both parties in the United States for whom it naturally is unpleasant to experience the loss of the monopoly of world power because of a rising China. 

Normally we are all aware of the unlikeliness of many of the utterances by Donald Trump. But when he criticizes China, many in the Americas and Europe are more likely to believe it. China has a bad standing in the medias and parts of the populations seeng it  as an unfair state capitalist competitor and as a repressive and undemocratic regime. Indeed China has not moved closer to Western style democracy as I had predicted it would. The present malfunction of this system in America and in Europe does not give much impetus for others to imitate it (+). The educating role of the rich democracies is dwindling. This is clearly evidenced in the rise of populist and  authoritarian regimes in several countries around the World. For China an overarching goal is exactly the stability which is under attack in the democracies. But in reality, judging from its level of education and judging from the voting patterns in the United States the Chinese population could be more mature and fit for democracy than the American!
 
An increased risk for a bifurcation could be the world historical effect of the Corona virus. Describing the Chinese as only bad, undemocratic, unfair competitors, disgusting eaters of ugly animals or conspirators accidentally or intentionally spreading or even producing viruses killing us and ruining our economy can be used to  persuade people and politicians to ostracize China and divide the world.

The United States may sooner or later force  Europe, Canada and other  countries to choose side. With a public opinion also outside America already turned against China and now worsened further because of Hong Kong and myths about Corona, the choice may be easy (++).

Our civilization is heading for our Augustus or in the case of a lasting bifurcation our Augusti arriving perhaps around or a decade or two after 2100, and the way to this may become unpleasant. Unlike China in the Song Dynasty our civilization does not have strong nomadic enemies to threaten our modernity. But we also do not possess the wisdom of this dynasty. Therefore we will ruin our own modernity.



NOTES
(+) The earlier considered post-war one-party democracy in Japan proved unsustainable. Thus also this kind of quasi-liberal democracy has lost its appeal.

(++) The choice will be even more easy when the United States introduce economic sanctions against China AND those who do not do the same.   

Needless to say, present day China is an integral part of the Western civilization, culturally much closer than Russia in the last cold war.