2020
WHO declares COVID a pandemic
The director-general of the World Health Organization, in a Geneva press room mostly emptied by his own warnings, used the word pandemic for the first time. Within days schools closed, borders shut, and most of humanity went indoors. The economy of touch and proximity was put on hold by official decree.
Murder of George Floyd
A Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on the neck of a handcuffed Black man for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds while bystanders begged for his life. Floyd died. Within a week, protests had spread to every U.S. state and dozens of countries. Statues of Confederate generals and slave traders began coming down.
Hong Kong national security law
Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong that criminalized secession, subversion, and "collusion with foreign forces," with penalties of up to life in prison. Pro-democracy newspapers folded, activists fled or went to prison, and the city's freewheeling civic life ended within a year. "One country, two systems" was officially dead twenty-seven years early.
Soleimani killed in Baghdad
An American drone strike at Baghdad airport killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's Quds Force and the architect of its regional proxy strategy. Iran fired ballistic missiles at U.S. bases in Iraq days later and a Ukrainian airliner over Tehran was mistakenly shot down. War seemed possible for a long week.
Second Karabakh war
Azerbaijan, armed with Israeli loitering munitions and Turkish Bayraktar drones, launched an offensive that recaptured most of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia in forty-four days, demonstrating the lethal effectiveness of modern drone warfare. Russian peacekeepers froze the front. Three years later Azerbaijan would finish the job, and one of the post-Soviet world's frozen conflicts would simply end.
First COVID vaccinations
A 90-year-old grandmother named Margaret Keenan rolled up her sleeve at a Coventry hospital and became the first person outside a clinical trial to receive Pfizer-BioNTech's mRNA vaccine, a technology that had been decades in the making. Less than a year after the virus was sequenced. The fastest, and arguably greatest, medical achievement in human history was rolling.
Crew Dragon takes humans to orbit
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station. It was the first crewed launch from American soil since the shuttle's retirement nine years earlier, and the first ever by a private company. Nine years of public dependence on Russian rockets ended.