We Have Never Been Here Before is Tom Friedman’s take on the significance of Putin’s land grab in the context of a Flat World:
The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: “The world will never be the same.” In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
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.
Tom Friedman has been working hard the idea on how interconnected the world has become for some time now. The World Is Flat advanced the proposition that globalization has so connected the world, we have gone from competition between nations (1.0) to competition between corporations (2.0) and are now at 3.0 where individuals now face competition that can come from anyone anywhere in the world.
It’s a way of viewing the world that has both admirers and detractors. As a grand unified theory of everything, it involves a lot of oversimplification and assumptions that don’t always hold up — but it does offer some insights.
Super-empowerment by smartphones is a super power of problematic usefulness. Too much information, much of it uncertain or even contradictory and in some cases false, can actually make it harder to understand a situation than lack of information. [Additional update comment: watching CNN to try to understand the world is a case in point. especially when they turn their talking heads loose. A mile wide and inch deep as the saying goes.]
Also, flood people with information, and they will respond in a variety of ways to fit it into something they can deal with — if they want to deal with it at all. [From comments below, “I will believe it when I see it" has been reduced to "I will see it when I want to believe it"] Reconciling facts with beliefs is no small challenge. And there’s a lot to take in...
“It’s been less than 24 hours since Russia invaded Ukraine, yet we already have more information about what’s going on there than we would have in a week during the Iraq war,” wrote Daniel Johnson, who served as an infantry officer and journalist with the U.S. Army in Iraq, in Slate on Thursday afternoon. “What is coming out of Ukraine is simply impossible to produce on such a scale without citizens and soldiers throughout the country having easy access to cellphones, the internet and, by extension, social media apps. A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world. What is occurring is already horrific, based on the information released just on the first day.”
Friedman gives some examples of the way globalization has shaped the consequences of what Putin has set in motion that add context beyond the military aspects.
Then think about this: Thanks to rapid globalization, the E.U. is already Ukraine’s biggest trading partner — not Russia. In 2012, Russia was the destination for 25.7 percent of Ukrainian exports, compared with 24.9 percent going to the E.U. Just six years later, after Russia’s brutal seizure of Crimea and support of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine and Ukraine’s forging of closer ties with the E.U. economically and politically, “Russia’s share of Ukrainian exports had fallen to only 7.7 percent, while the E.U.’s share shot up to 42.6 percent,” according to a recent analysis published by Bruegel.org.
If Putin doesn’t untangle those ties, Ukraine will continue drifting into the arms of the West — and if he does untangle them, he will strangle Ukraine’s economy. And if the E.U. boycotts a Russia-controlled Ukraine, Putin will have to use Russia’s money to keep Ukraine’s economy afloat.
This suggests Putin may have resorted to military force in part because Russia could not compete on economic grounds and was losing. It also suggests that a near-term military victory could prove to be a long term economic disaster.
There’s a quote from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series by one of the key characters early in the saga that may apply here: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” — Salvor Hardin. Putin may have concluded he had no choice but to seize Ukraine lest he be seen to have lost it. He may have decided the economic consequences were acceptable. And he doesn’t have any better answers.
Given that reports are now coming out that the Russian economy is only a fraction of the size it should be because Putin and the kleptocratic oligarchs have siphoned off so much wealth, it would not be a surprise. Certainly, whatever plans Putin may have for “Make Russia Great Again”, concern for ordinary Russians or Ukrainians is not a high priority in them.
Given the brutal way Putin has assured his continued rule of the country, invasion is merely an amplification of his tactics. He apparently believes in Maxim 6 “If violence wasn’t your last resort, you failed to resort to enough of it. ” (Context here. So much for hope of negotiations to avoid the conflict.)
Friedman also has an interesting angle on China’s dilemma:
...Here are a couple of other interesting facts from the wired world: First, China’s economy is more dependent on Ukraine than Russia’s. According to Reuters, “China leapfrogged Russia to become Ukraine’s biggest single trading partner in 2019, with overall trade totaling $18.98 billion last year, a nearly 80 percent jump from 2013. … China became the largest importer of Ukrainian barley in the 2020-21 marketing year,” and about 30 percent of all of China’s corn imports last year came from farms in Ukraine.
Second, China overtook the United States as the European Union’s biggest trading partner in 2020, and Beijing cannot afford for the E.U. to be embroiled in conflict with an increasingly aggressive Russia and unstable Putin. China’s stability depends — and the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party rests — on Xi’s ability to sustain and grow his already massive middle class. And that depends on a stable and growing world economy.
Read the whole thing — the link on top should get through the Times paywall. Friedman’s concluding observation is just a bit unnerving:
...today’s world is resting on two simultaneous extremes: Never have the leaders of two of the three most powerful nuclear nations — Putin and Xi — had more unchecked power and never have more people from one end of the world to the other been wired together with fewer and fewer buffers. So, what those two leaders decide to do with their unchecked power will touch virtually all of us directly or indirectly.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is our first real taste of how crazy and unstable this kind of wired world can get. It will not be our last.
The corollary to that is America’s inability to handle the threat from our own corrupt oligarchs funding the party of Trump. Just as Putin and Xi are coming up against the inherent contradictions in their worldview, we the third powerful nuclear power are finding a significant fraction of our population and the political party inciting them are caught in a positive feedback loop that makes them more extreme every day. If Trump returns to power, he and the GOP will become increasingly unchecked as well.
Interesting times ahead.
UPDATE: Charles P. Pierce has a weekend email for subscribers that gets into the corruption aspect in a major way.
Ever since the Russian military began its extended imperial sojourn into Ukraine this week, the American press has been doing some long-distance spelunking through the mind of Vladimir Putin. Is he trying to establish a facsimile of the Soviet Union? Is he drunk on the illusion that he is divinely called to empire, the way the Tsars used to be? Is he just an international thug on a land-grabbing crime spree? Is he on some kind of kamikaze mission to take western democracy down with him?
I suspect it’s all in there somewhere, amid a dozen other dark motives nobody’s thought of yet. But there is one thing that should not get lost in all the noisy speculation. Putin in a king thief. Moreover, he is a thief among thieves. Almost everyone who got wildly rich after the USSR came apart is at least half-a-thief. Putin is more than that.
emphasis added
No wonder Trump idolizes him.
Pierce links to a BBC article with some details:
A video investigation by Russia's leading opposition figure that claims President Vladimir Putin spent illicit funds on an extravagant Black Sea palace has reached more than 20 million people within a day of publication.
Alexei Navalny's team released it after he was jailed on his return to Moscow.
The investigation alleges the property cost £1bn ($1.37bn) and was paid for "with the largest bribe in history".
The Kremlin denies the property belongs to the president.
Claims that federal officials were guarding a vast palace complex on the Black Sea coast were "pure nonsense", spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
The Navalny investigation describes the property as 39 times the size of Monaco.
...The report claims the property in the resort town of Gelendzhik was constructed using illicit funds provided by members of Mr Putin's inner circle, including oil chiefs and billionaires.
"[They] built a palace for their boss with this money," Mr Navalny says in the video.
It alleges that Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) owns some 27 sq miles (70 sq km) of land surrounding the private residence.
The report describes various details of the property, and claims it features a casino, an underground ice hockey complex and a vineyard.
"It has impregnable fences, its own port, its own security, a church, its own permit system, a no-fly zone, and even its own border checkpoint," Mr Navalny says in the video.
"It is a separate state within Russia," he adds. "And in this state there is a single, irreplaceable tsar. Putin."
Pierce cites some other sources on the money and the corruption around Putin:
Estimates are that Putin now has a net worth of somewhere in the vicinity of $200 billion, almost none of which he’s actually earned. The number first originated with Bill Browder, an American fund manager who’s been a harsh critic of the Putin regime ever since his tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, died in custody in Russia. However, since Putin touched off the Ukraine crisis, according to Bloomberg, many Russian billionaires have taken big hits. Did the kleptocracy create Putin, or was he its natural protector? What is certain is that he considers any attempt on his fortune to be the equivalent of a military attack. It’s about the money because, in this world, it’s always about the money.
emphasis added
This suggests Putin is not going to take kindly to sanctions directed at him personally.
Pierce links to a number of sources to fill out the portrait of Putin the Tsar of all the Kleptocrats, and concludes with this:
Without the support of the oligarchs and the piles of money they’ve stashed around the world, Putin is an old KGB hand telling spy stories in some dim bar in St. Petersburg. Beyond his own natural gifts as a dictator, he is a creature of the Russian kleptocracy. It is the river in which he swims, the air that he breathes, the thick, poisonous fog in which he hides. He exists as a world leader only on the strength of what he and his cronies have stolen. He knows it and the kleptocrats know it. I suspect a goodly portion of the Russian people know it, too. After all, they’re the ones from whom it has been stolen, day after day, year after year, up until this moment.
Ultimately, in an important way, this has been all about the money. So much is all about the money. In the annals of human folly and human disasters, it’s the constant in so much crime and sorrow, and it is the one thing that never, ever changes.
emphasis added
Saturday, Feb 26, 2022 · 3:28:06 PM +00:00
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xaxnar
UPDATE: NBC reports that a certain portion of videos, etc. supposedly coming out of Ukraine are misinformation. Friedman rather glossed over that predictable aspect of global connectivity. As the saying goes, a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. Globalization makes it happen at warp speed.