The geopolitical conflicts that have been brewing since the collapse of Soviet Russia have become more heated in recent months.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has united the West against its president Vladimir Putin’s expansionist policy. The West rightly condemned the invasion of as a violation of international law. The headlines coming out of Ukraine are heartbreaking due to the destruction in both property and lives.
There’s a big question that has drawn some attention from the media – how far will Putin go to achieve his aims of eliminating the Western-style democracy? Some are presenting the scenario that he might use nuclear weapons in his bid to conquer Ukraine. Fortunately, we’ve been spared of the destructiveness of Putin’s arsenal thus far.
However, we need to switch the subject from the possibility of war to economics. Right now, you’re asking why on earth do we need to talk about economics? Because economics are connected to questions of security, peace, and international order, as stated by writer Michael Lind in his story “The Coming Resource Wars.”
When asking questions about nuclear weapons, one must also ask questions about the resource wars Lind mentioned in his story. The writer addressed the issue of the contours of the current war which pits the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Quadrilateral Security Dialog (an organization fronted by the US and founded to contain China) against the Russia/China bloc, represented by the two great powers and their allies in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. In the economic realm, it’s about material production versus immaterial production. The issue with our adversaries is the fact that they grow a lot of food and produce a lot of energy, although we do some of the same things. Our economy is based around those who write aps, make movies, and make loans. All these things are important, but our economy doesn’t need to be so dependent on those who are breaking international law and proliferating arms races.
Former Bill Clinton Administration Treasury Secretary Larry Summers described our economy in the 1990’s: “the twin forces of information technology and modern competitive finance are moving us toward a post-industrial age,” he said. Silicon Valley and Wall Street, not manufacturing or agriculture or oil and gas, symbolized the “’new economy.’” Summers listed examples of this new economy - “AIG in insurance, McDonald’s in fast food, Walmart in retailing, Microsoft in software, Harvard University in education, CNN in television news.” Summers felt that backward, old-fashioned East Asians and Germans make cars and TV sets and telephones and computers; America will sell insurance and motion pictures to the world.
Remember, the power of economics means China can prop up Russia and help it evade Western sanctions, although the sanctions have caused considerable damage to the Russian economy thus far. What China and Russia are proving, even if they fail in the bid to drive Western countries from their sphere of influence, is that countries can become international players even though they might not be dominant in fields like banking, insurance, fast food, etc. Russia and Ukraine are responsible for 25 percent of the world’s wheat exports.
At one time the US did most of its own mining. What type of political regimes do the mining now? Autocracies like China and Russia, as China mines nickel, tin, and gold and Russia mines oil, gas, and nickel. Lind points out that in the Cold War many thought capitalism was associated with democracy and Communism with totalitarianism, but economies with a single commodity crop (banana republics) have been ruled by dictatorships and are associated with what is called the “resource curse.”
To be competitive in manufacturing, a country needs an educated workforce and technological innovation requires a great deal of intellectual and political freedom. Lind states the problem with political freedom and extractive regimes: “but if a government or economic elite derives its income simply by selling other countries the products of its mines or farms or ranches, what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call an ‘extractive’ regime, it has no incentive to educate most of the population or respect their rights and every incentive to enserf or enslave the miners or agricultural workers. And if the route to personal political power and wealth in a nation lies through control of the nation’s oil fields, mines, or agricultural estates, ambitious individuals will be tempted to dispense with cumbersome elections and to seize power and resources directly through assassination and coup d’etat.” Lind points to an example of an extractive economy in our history – plantation agriculture in the South.
The US should transition its economy away from dependence on autocrats and their extractive economies. It should create a democratic trading block with countries that share our values – the United Kingdom, European Union, Japan, Canada, Taiwan, Australia, and other democratic nation states. This way we wouldn’t be transferring wealth to countries that are wreaking havoc on the international order. The recent effort to ship American natural gas to Europe to remove its economies from Russian natural gas is a starter. Remember, natural gas is the least carbon intensive of the fossil fuels. Might I point to environmentalist Barry Commoner’s 1979 book “The Politics of Energy” where Commoner advocated natural gas as a bridging fuel to a clean energy future. Such an economic policy could also be made part of a larger security policy in fighting the greenhouse effect.
I want to leave the reader with a final thought, an economic and energy policy that brings our adversaries to their knees will lead to a new era of international law and arms control, as arms control historically comes when nations feel they are overwhelmed by an adversary and have no other way out of an arms race. However, they won’t concede if they can play the economic chip in the geopolitical struggle. An economic strategy to manage our competitors certainly beats funneling more money into arms that have nothing to do with our security problems. Lind points out the benefactors of our current policy in his story “The Three Big Questions that the American Establishment got Wrong: “ordinary bureaucratic politics explains the result. Involving the United States in foreign civil wars and regional conflicts that have no direct bearing on American national security means bigger budgets for the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, and other agencies; more funding for defense contractors and NGOs with government contracts; more resources for academic security studies programs; more importance for members of Congress on military and foreign affairs committees and subcommittees; more celebrity and more book contracts for foreign affairs correspondents, and so on.”
Jason Sibert is the Lead Writer for the Peace Economy Project.