All things considered, this is a good time to start talking about the geopolitical big picture. As I type these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war is still under way. The assault on Kyiv seems to have been put on hold so that the Russians could focus on clearing Ukrainian defenders from the Donbass region, while pitched battles rage in the south of the country, where Russian forces are pushing north along both banks of the Dnieper River. After a month of hard fighting, Russia has seized close to thirty per cent of Ukraine’s territory and shows no signs of backing down, and sanctions from the US and its client states in Europe and the western Pacific have done nothing to dissuade the Russian government from its course.
Meanwhile blowback from those sanctions is becoming a massive economic fact worldwide, and it’s by no means certain that Russia has lost anything as a result. India, the fifth largest economy in the world, has just finished making arrangements to trade with Russia outside the SWIFT interbank system, settling deals in rupees and rubles rather than US dollars. China, the world’s second largest economy, already has such a system in place. Shortages of diesel fuel and half a dozen other Russian-sourced commodities are setting off economic crises in various corners of the world, while the specter of a global food shortage is becoming increasingly grave—Ukraine is the world’s #3 exporter of wheat, while Russia holds the top spot in that category and also supplies the world with much of its fertilizer. The US and Britain have both tapped their strategic petroleum reserves in an attempt to keep oil prices down, but it remains to be seen whether that will be more than a stopgap measure.
It’s common just now to see these events as a temporary roadbump on the route to a future of business as usual, or to blame them on the supposed personal villainy of Russia’ds President Vladimir Putin. Such evasions are as easy as they are hopelessly mistaken. They betray, among other things, a stunning ignorance of history, since this is hardly the first time that an era of economic globalization has shattered under the pressure of geopolitics. Several thoughtful writers have already noted the parallels between the present crisis and the collapse of Victorian economic globalization a century ago.
The comparison’s exact. In 1913, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out in his deservedly famous work The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a wealthy Englishman eating breakfast with the Times open before him could buy and sell assets around the globe as freely as his equivalent in the United States in 2013. The pound sterling was the indispensible global currency in those days; the Victorian era’s worldwide telegraph network filled the role of the internet, sending orders to buy and sell across seas and continents at the speed of light. Free-trade agreements far more inflexible than the current examples erased barriers to investment and exploitation. The British army and navy, backed by state-of-the-art military technology, provided the backstop for it all. The only cloud on the horizon was the rising power of Germany, which wasn’t willing to settle for second-class status in a world run primarily for Britain’s convenience and profit.
Then 1914 came, a terrorist shot the heir to the Austrian throne, and one after another, most of the nations of Europe went to war. Free trade couldn’t survive once geopolitics took center stage: every combatant nation had to slap on currency controls to keep desperately needed funds from fleeing to neutral countries, and neutral countries responded accordingly, while sanctions and countersanctions among the contending alliances shredded the trust that made global trade work. By the time the war finally wound down in 1918, the global economy of the Victorian era was shattered beyond repair. Attempts to restore some semblance of it in the 1920s helped set the stage for the global economic disaster of 1929. Once the Great Depression hit, free trade was utterly discredited in the minds of most people, and fifty years passed before the United States set out to copy Britain’s imperial strategy for its own benefit, leading to our present situation.
Every nation, like every generation, passes from a youth full of ideals and high hopes to an old age defined by the exact mathematical consequences of its actions. The old belt of high civilizations had its own burdens and its own decadence to pay for, and paid for them. Now, its strength renewed, it’s rising, while the bill for Europe’s age of dominion is being totted up patiently by old Father Time, for payment in full. It shouldn’t be surprising, after all, that the nations that dominated the world during the preindustrial era should be in line to dominate it again as the industrial age winds down.
This, finally, is the wider context in which the Russo-Ukrainian war and its attendant economic convulsions need to be understood. The great question of early twenty-first century geopolitics was whether Russia, with its immense fossil fuel, mineral, and agricultural resources, would align with Europe or with rising Asia. It would have been quite easy for Europe and the United States to have brought Russia into a pan-European structure of alliances and economic relationships. All that would have been required is a reasonable attention to Russian concerns about national security and a willingness to put long-term goals over short-term profiteering. European and American leaders turned out to be too inept to manage those simple steps, and as a result, the question has been settled: Russia is turning east, throwing its resource base and its political support to China, India, and Iran. That didn’t have to happen, but it’s too late to change it now.
And the United States? We did what peripheral powers often do in ages of decline, when the imperial center begins to fold. We grabbed the reins of empire in 1945, when Britain was too weak to hold them any longer, and tried to make the same gimmick work for us. It didn’t work very well, all things considered. Now we’ve backed ourselves into the same trap that caught Britain in 1914: lethally overcommitted to an unaffordable global empire, hopelessly dependent on a global economy that’s cracking at the seams, and unable to realize that the world has changed. The next few decades will be a rough road for us.
That said, it’s the European age that’s ending, not the American age. The American age hasn’t begun yet. The United States these days is a Third World country catapulted by a chapter of historical accidents into a temporary position as global hegemon. Its Europeanized elites, in the usual Third World fashion, are a small minority maintaining a tenuous temporary mastery over restless masses that don’t share its ideals and its interests, and are beginning to sense their potential power. America is still young, and pregnant with the future; centuries from now, long after the European veneer has been thrown off, she will give birth to something else wholly new, and it will inevitably be even more unacceptable—and indeed wholly incomprehensible—to the conventional wisdom of Europe-as-it-is.
But of course that conventional wisdom will no longer exist by then. If history follows its usual track, by the time the future high culture of eastern North America begins to emerge, the age of European global dominion will be a distant memory, and Europe itself will have spent many centuries in its pre-imperial condition: a fragmented, impoverished, bellicose region on the faraway fringe of the civilized world. Its peoples and cultures, for that matter, may not have much in common with those residing there now. Nearly all the nations of Roman Europe went out of existence in the post-Roman era, swamped by mass migrations from elsewhere. At the beginning of the Common Era, the ancestors of today’s Spaniards lived in Ukraine and the ancestors of today’s Hungarians lived closer to China than to Hungary. In the same way, a millennium from now, many of the people who live in Europe may trace their ancestry to today’s Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa, and the historic nations of Europe will be forgotten, erased by tides of migration and conquest that establish new boundaries and new polities.
History is no respecter of persons, and it has a particularly harsh way of treating those who think their sense of entitlement matters in the great scheme of things. That’s worth keeping in mind, as we move deeper into an era of convulsive change whose consequences most people haven’t yet begun to gauge. Over the months to come, we’ll talk more about that, and about the consequences that are likely to follow from it.
