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After exactly a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we can be almost certain that we cannot classify it as a regional conflictas well as those in Chechnya and Georgia, triggered by Wladimir Putin during his glittering career as an imperialist autocrat while we were distracted elsewhere, or as the Syrian one was, or even the devastating Balkan war itself in the 1990s.
No, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is different. And it is neither more nor less appalling than all other conflicts, for the premises that triggered it, for the context in which it occurred, and for the consequences it produces, more than for the nature of the conflict itself. And if the rhetoric of World War III is sometimes inappropriately evoked, as a bargaining chip or as a threat, whatever, it’s not a prospect we have to rule out a priori. And not only because we have entered the unknown land of the impossible becoming possible a war in the heart of Europe, the return of wartime opposition between the two great nuclear powers but also because there are at least five signs that, taken together, make the prospect of a conflict spreading like wildfire around the world, affecting other powers and other territories, at least realistic.
The first sign is that everyone is upgrading. Not just Italy, which was already doing this before the war, and NATO in general. Not only Germany, which since the Second World War has always distinguished itself as a pacifist state. Not just the Japan of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that now wants the atomic bomb. The process of progressive rearmament has been going on for some time and is a global phenomenon that has been going on at least since the arrival of the USA donald trump to the United States Presidency dotting the patronage Barack Obama for a world without atoms, buried by Donald’s succinct belief that the United States should not have given up nuclear supremacy. This is a signal that has given way to another push to rearma Russia Avangard hypersonic missiles, the flagship of the Russian nuclear apparatus, were developed in 2018 and China. In a world geared towards rearmament, the prospect of new conflicts is only a matter of time, the result of the incentive to use arms before the other is rearmed. After all, that is exactly what Russia did in Ukraine.
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The second sign is that the US is no longer intervening as beforeand in that sense the withdrawal in Afghanistan with the return of the Taliban exactly twenty years after 9/11, this was, or suspected, a very strong signal to the other great powers. The signal that there is no longer an American empire and that there is no longer a desire in American public opinion to bring home white coffins draped in a Stars and Stripes flag to defend American hegemony over the world. When you’re armed to the teeth and the threat of US military retaliation recedes, the incentives to impose your hegemony on those around you are overwhelming. In this case, Putin did an excellent job of trusting that belief and immediately raising the specter of the nuclear threat.
The third bad sign is the world’s growing demand for energy and raw materials, son of an impending ecological transition and a technological revolution underway. Putin also deliberately attacked the skyrocketing price of methane and Europe’s dependence on its gas pipelines at the end of winter, when reserves are almost zero. But let’s also expect further conflicts over resourcerich earths such as uranium or the rare earths that are necessary to extract the building blocks of all our smartphones and electric cars.
The fourth bad sign a corollary of the second and third is that today everyone feels entitled to reclaim disputed land. Just to stay east, let’s talk about them Kuril Islandsrich in rare earths, again disputed between Russia and Japan, the islands of Dondo and Takeshimadenied by Japan and South KoreaOf Taiwan, always in Beijing’s sights, and the South China Sea islands, the subject of bitter disputes between the US and China, which the Pentagon says are now actually Chinese military bases. If we go north, there areArcticwith its trade routes opening up as glaciers melt and raw materials and energy reserves once again uranium, rare earths, methane, oil are buried underground and Russian interests in Svalbard and Chinese and American interests in Greenland they are just an aperitif of what could happen.
The fifth bad sign, perhaps the worst, is that democracy is going through a serious crisis. We see it in the Sliding of Russia and Turkey two democracies, at least on paper towards the establishment of increasingly authoritarian regimes. We see it in China by Xi Jinping, that, unlike his predecessors, he can remain in office for life; and that he has tightened the mesh of liberty in a country that was gradually opening up before him. We see it in Iran, where reforms are out of the question, and in Afghanistan, with the return of the Taliban, in Egypt with Al Sisi, in Syria with Assad where the echo of the springs is only a distant memory. And we see it here too, where in the last five years we have at least touched the limits of the fragility of our western democratic systems, which are between Capitol and very large coalitions have shown that they are no longer working as well as they used to, and that the pandemic has inevitably further undermined. And that threatens to further undermine the Russian war in Ukraine. Unless, of course, we wake up in time.
Francesco Cancellato is editorinchief of the online newspaper Fanpage.it. From December 2014 to September 2019 he was editor of the online newspaper Linkiesta.it. He is the author of Factor G. Why the Germans are Right (UBE, 2016), Neither Exploited nor Big Babies. Solving the generational question to save Italy (Egea, 2018) and “Il Muro. 15 stories from the end of the Cold War (Egea, 2019)