The Russians have invaded Ukraine. And, Tom Friedman writes, the world won't be the same. We can't go home again:
Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. This is the first war that will be covered on TikTok by super-empowered individuals armed only with smartphones, so acts of brutality will be documented and broadcast worldwide without any editors or filters. On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.
You have never seen this play before.
Some things are familiar:
Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him.
But this war is about much more than annexing land:
In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War.
That balance — or imbalance in Putin’s view — was the humiliating equivalent of the Versailles Treaty’s impositions on Germany after World War I. In Russia’s case, it meant Moscow having to swallow NATO’s expansion not only to include the old Eastern European countries that had been part of the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, like Poland, but even, in principle, states that were part of the Soviet Union itself, like Ukraine.
So we have returned to the jungle. But the old jungle was different than the new one:
We may be back in the jungle — but today the jungle is wired. It is wired together more intimately than ever before by telecommunications; satellites; trade; the internet; road, rail and air networks; financial markets; and supply chains. So while the drama of war is playing out within the borders of Ukraine, the risks and repercussions of Putin’s invasion are being felt across the globe — even in China, which has good cause to worry about its friend in the Kremlin.
Welcome to World War Wired — the first war in a totally interconnected world. This will be the Cossacks meet the World Wide Web. Like I said, you haven’t been here before.
How will it end? Nobody knows.
Image: Urban Barn
18 comments:
Yesterday, Lt. General (retired) Andrew Leslie stated that the world has never been this close to a nuclear-driven Third World War. President Putin, he believes, is a sociopath who has shown many times that he has little concern for human life and no one close to him with power enough to stop whatever he might decide. However, there is one man who might have power enough to stop him - President Zi of China, who is concerned that Putin's brutal attack against the Ukraine could damage China's own expansion plans. Reportedly, he has urged Putin to bring the war to a peaceful end. What such an end may look like is unclear, but it may prevent an on-going war which grows completely out of control. True, no one can tell where this war might lead. In Leslie's opinion, it might lead to a resumption of the Cold War with NATO troops permanently stationed in Europe as they were during the Cold War, able to respond to future Russian aggression quickly.
CD
That option would mean going home again, CD -- and living on a razor's edge.
I don't buy the nuclear war argument - it's just an excuse for the US to avoid getting involved. Putin hasn't amassed his hoard of riches to watch them go up in a nuclear inferno. He's a mafia thug, not a suicide bomber.
If Friedman is right and this is really World War Wired, I'd like to see Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TicToc, etc. using their algorithms to push footage of Russian atrocities in Ukraine to their Russian subscribers. Let's see how Putin reacts to that.
Cap
I'd like to think that Mutually Assured Destruction still holds water, Cap. But it's hard to read Putin. Who knows what he's thinking?
I went back to my old blog, all the way back to 2008. It was a shooting match between Russia and another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Russia chiseled away South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It was eerily like Donbas. I think it was the first appearance of Putin's "little green men."
Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili made overtures to Washington and NATO but to no avail. Saakashvili eventually wore out his welcome and went to Ukraine, renouncing his Georgian citizenship to become a Ukrainian and governor of Odessa. He was given the boot, becoming stateless, before sneaking back into Georgia only to wind up in a cell where it seems he remains.
Odd that this war is lost to memory. It seems to be a template for what's happening today only this time Putin seems bent on toppling Ukraine's government. Sort of a blend of the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Russia's adventures in Georgia.
In geopolitics it pretty much comes down to whoever the strongest player got that power.
Here’s the thing. Up until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (and yes, it is an invasion, justifiable or otherwise) there was something called the ‘rules-based order’ promoted by mainly the US but also supported directly by the European Union and the Commonwealth.
The rules of the ‘rules-based order’ were simple. We make the rules, you follow them. We reserve the right to change the rules whenever we want to suit our purpose.
It was the geopolitical equivalent of Sam Francis’ idea of ‘anarcho-tyranny,’ which boils down to, “rules for thee, but not for me.”
We’ve heard the Russian diplomats complain about this for years. Why have these rules if they are not ever enforced?
As I point out all the time when talking about leftist ideologues purity spiraling towards self-destruction, we have these rules because only others’ hypocrisy counts. Sub-humans are not allowed to talk or even be a part of the conversation.
And in the world of diplomacy as practiced by the collective West, the Russians are definitely sub-human, just like the unvaxxed and now anyone to the immediate right of Karl Marx and isn’t a furry.
All that changed when Russian tanks crossed the border, stand off missiles hit anti-aircraft and artillery batteries, and marines came onshore in Ukraine.
For months we’ve been treated to the dumbest and most infuriating facsimile of diplomacy I’ve ever witnessed. It beggared belief listening to the nauseating virtue signaling of US ‘diplomats’ who refused to engage Russia’s concerns in even a half-serious manner while blaming them for every issue on the planet.
It was as clumsy as it was stupid, to quote Darth Vader.
It was clear that Putin and his staff would be given this ultimate option, invade Ukraine and face global opprobrium or kneel before Zod.
If the goal were simply to "conquer" Ukraine, this would have been over.......yesterday.
Obviously Putin and Russia are being surgical and "discreet" as possible.
Need I remind all you Kool-aid drinkers that the west and its vassals brought scorched earth to Iraq and killed over a half a million civilians?
Can you tell me why we went into Iraq? Why we spent 20 years in Afghanistan? Why we are in Syria? Why we destroyed Libya?
Putin is in Ukraine because they were being used and set up as the next NATO military base......nukes and all. I don't blame him one bit and admire the patience he displayed. If I were in charge of a country, my main goal would be to limit exposure and dependence on DC and London and Brussels at all cost.
We've got nukes in Turkey, people.
When you are in an adversarial situation, you keep people out of arms length. If you don't, you'll get sucker punched.
Putin did the right thing. It is their business......in their back yard.......and none of ours.
The West has grown into a corpulent bully who really believes it's the boss of everything and everyone. It happily plays everyone against everyone else. It subjugates its masses to support oligarchs and to otherwise be obedient. The average citizen has been magnificently trained to be a woke true believer in whatever the current orders are. Being abysmally educated and unable to process logic an insect could master defines 50% of US graduates or more.
I wonder if endlessly printed money and ZIRP and NIRP emboldened these flakes.
Putin didn't feel like being bullied any longer and Russia defended its borders. The corpulent bullies are outraged. Germany is so incensed it sanctioned itself and plans to freeze asap. (A Darwin Award Winner? - removing its genes from the pool forever? Huzzah!!)
The EU has decided to consider committing suicide by telling Russia to take its energy and everything else and sell it to everyone else, then issue endless sanctions that just p*ss off Russia. Oh The Stupidity!!! Another Davos Project. Perhaps the EU should call a time out by inventing a dangerous new Covid Variant that requires immediate lockdowns for all for the sake of humanity. Then hope Russia falls for it and quarantines.
Just perhaps, this will be the first step in a new plan where actual Adults start to run things, and not fast buck artists, war mongers, and woke monsters.
One of your Thomas Friedman quotes:
"In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II ..."
And that's where I stopped reading. Whatever one thinks of this crisis, for someone like Friedman, who has had a front-row seat to the USA's sodomizing of the "rules of the international system" for the last couple of decades, to pretend that everything has been rainbows and lollipops up until a few days ago is the height of dishonesty. And hypocrisy.
Perhaps we should give Putin a "Friedman Unit" and see how things work themselves out?
If we were really paying attention, Mound, we would have done something back then.
If I ever need help, Android, I'll remember not to ask you.
The United States has never been, in Reagan's words, a "city on the hill," thwap. But the system all the allies built after World War II has served us well.
I disagree, Yellow Cake. This battle stretches far beyond Putin's backyard.
Normally, I ask Anonymous comments be initialed, Anon. You've had your say. I agree that we're in this situation because rules weren't enforced. But I don't see "the rules" as oppressive. Those rules have served us well.
I was thinking about the South Ossetia war myself in relation to what’s currently happening in Ukraine. There are a lot of differences, starting with Saakashvili being something of an authoritarian himself and previously crushing one of three breakaway regions in Georgia with significant brutality before looking to re-absorb South Ossetia. He also took the bait and launched an attack into South Ossetia that gave Russia the pretext they needed to send their own forces in. Most importantly, though, Russia kept their goals limited. They just secured the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and no more. They didn’t launch a full scale invasion of Georgia proper. They didn’t make it a stated war aim to overthrow Saakashvili’s government. They just secured the two breakaway republics, degraded Georgia’s military capacity, and stopped.
For Ukraine, that is similar to the 2014 invasion. Russia annexed Crimea and supported separatists in the Donbas, but didn’t try to conquer the whole country or overthrow the government when it became clear their puppet didn’t have the support in Ukraine needed to make that a reality. There was clearly still a great power dynamic of doing more or less what it wants to do in its own sphere of influence in both cases, but they kept to the norms, such as they are, in those cases. What they are doing now goes well beyond that. Iraq in 2003 is probably the closest parallel, but even the US had a better rationale for going to war then (however much that rationale was BS) than Putin has offered for this attack. It is really kind of scary that Putin seems to have lost his senses and is now going for such a maximalist goal like overthrowing a country’s government, when we have so much recent history to show how badly that tends to go for the invader these days. He does seem far less rational than he used to be, and that is terrifying given the circumstances.
Oh, while I am too young to remember it, I am pretty sure the Cuban missile crisis was far closer to nuclear driven world war than we are at the moment. Not to mention a couple of other near-miss incidents later on. Not that the current situation can’t escalate (or degrade, depending on your viewpoint), to that level in the coming days or weeks, but I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet. People do need to keep some perspective.
The idea of limits doesn't seem to apply here, BJ. Putin seems to be taking on the whole world order.
I remember going to high school during the Cuban Missle Crisis, BJ, not knowing I'd get home at the end of the day. I'd hate to see us reach that point again.
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