This may change soon. Russia, one of the world’s two nuclear superpowers, is coming off the rails. Quite apart from Vladimir Putin, who German Chancellor Angela Merkel asserted is “living in another world,” every new day brings fresh signs of the country’s collective insanity – such as the May 1 celebrations – which are proudly chronicled by the Russian media. Russia is rapidly becoming the kind of challenge the rest of the world simply won’t be able to easily ignore.
Nowhere is political stagnation more evident than in the United States. The world’s leading economic and military power has had no real government for the past six years. Congress has passed almost no legislation; instead of governing it has been busy not letting Barack Obama govern. Yet, in 2016, for the first time in 200 years, three US presidents in a row will have completed two terms in office. Also in 2016, the most likely candidates to succeed Obama are called Clinton and Bush. Rather than stability, this denotes deep political stagnation.
The same political inertia affects other major world powers. In China, the communist bureaucracy has presided over a spectacular economic leap forward while not allowing any political change. It is now presiding over an enormous, ambitious, complex nation which it may not be fit to govern. In the Greater Middle East, the tired cast of characters – the Saudi royals, the Egyptian military, the Iranian ayatollahs and Benjamin Netanyahu – are stoking ancient tribal and religious hatreds even as the region burns out of control. In Europe, Merkel is marking her 10th anniversary as Germany’s leader, but even where there are fresh faces at the top, it is, as the French say, “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”
The sclerotic political establishment is not equipped to deal with the whole range of problems, such as climate change, technological progress, population growth and rapid economic and social change in the previously backward parts of the world.
Economic policy is a particularly glaring example of neglect. We’re witnessing the emergence of a new nation ofthe global super-rich, an amorphous, yet powerful supranational entity withcapitals in New York, London and Miami. It is thriving in the new, loosely regulated, borderless international economy dominated by global financialinstitutions, and it is currently deploying its financial resources to subvertdemocracy in its cradle, the United States.
Meanwhile, the world economy has become a succession of financial bubbles which seem to burst with a depressing regularity – usually, toward the end of the second term of the sitting American president. It happened in 2000, when Bill Clinton was about to step down, and again in 2008, as George Bush was packing to leave the White House. Conditions are now in place for the current financial bubble to burst in 2016 or thereabouts.
The response by the political establishment and economic managers has been to run fiscal deficits and to print money in unprecedented quantities. The motto of the day seems to be another French phrase: “After me, the flood.”
Our politicians have been able to enjoy the luxury of doing nothing because, serious though all these problems are, the bill for them will have to be footed some time in the future, probably by our children and grandchildren. True, there is a here-and-now bloodbath in the Muslim world, but it brings death and untold suffering mostly to Muslims themselves and their immediate neighbors. The rest of the world faces the occasional act of international terrorism and Southern Europe is being overwhelmed by refugees from conflicts. But none of this is an immediate existential threat. This is why the response to ISIS by the world community has been limited to expressions of concern and the occasional payload of bombs dropped on their heads.
The same lackadaisical attitude has been initially evident in the Western response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine. But then there was the mounting concern by NATO members in Central Europe, the downing of the Malaysian passenger jetliner with many Dutch and Australian citizens on board and increasingly bellicose rhetoric coming out of Moscow. The world community is starting to take notice – but it is still not united and its determination to stand up to Russia has not yet been seriously tested.
It is easy to blame Putin for annexing Crimea and starting the war in eastern Ukraine. But the problem is clearly deeper. Putin managed to stir up Russian resentments and to tap into some deep-seated inferiority complex in the post-Soviet psyche. It is amazing to see how readily Russians have given up their relative prosperity of the past 15 years and how they are cheering the destruction of their own economy and the collapse of their political and social institutions.
Putin has awakened the tiger and has been riding it over the past year, transforming himself from thief to warlord. It is an ironic twist that a Russian regime that spent more than a decade touting its own stability has turned into a major destabilizing factor both inside the country and on the international arena.
But Putin is not the worst-case scenario – not by a long shot.
So far, he has been able to mediate between warring factions in his entourage and his government still preserves at least a semblance of functioning institutions. Plus, many people in his inner circle have close personal and business ties to the West and are not prepared to face total isolation which would occur if the conflict in Ukraine intensifies.
As the Russian economy is degraded and society breaks down,further radicalization is probably inevitable. Whether Putin can continue to control the rebellion he has unleashed or will be swept aside by it doesn’t really matter in the final analysis. Ukraine so far has been able to deal with Putin’s cautious aggression and hybrid war, but the question is whether it can survive a Russia run by Ramzan Kadyrov, Alexander Dugin or some other nut the unpredictable social and political upheaval could throw up. Or by a Russia plunged into a thug-run, semi-anarchy on the model of the Donetsk People’s Republic.
The rest of the world needs to focus on Russia, and do so soon. Russia is no ISIS; or rather, it could become an ISIS with nuclear weapons, a trillion-dollar economy, a vast population and clandestine networks of agents worldwide, some of them dating back to the Soviet era. A rogue Russia poses an existential threat not only to Ukraine and its other neighbors, but to life on earth.
