The Russia / Ukraine Conflict Is A World War

Western politicians and pundits keep saying we must avoid turning the conflict in Ukraine into a "world war". Sadly though, they don't seem to understand that it already is a world war. While the fighting is limited so far, everyone in the world is being affected by the war -- and most of them are watching it in real time.

Here's a small part of what Thomas L. Friedman says about it in The New York Times: 

Almost six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’m beginning to wonder if this conflict isn’t our first true world war — much more than World War I or World War II ever were. In this war, which I think of as “World War Wired,” virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically — no matter where they live.

While the battle on the ground that triggered World War Wired is ostensibly over who should control Ukraine, do not be fooled. This has quickly turned into “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy,” the Swedish expert on the Russian economy, Anders Aslund, remarked to me.

Though this war is far from over, and Vladimir Putin may still find a way to prevail and come out stronger, if he doesn’t, it could be a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China. So, what happens on the streets of Kyiv, Mariupol and the Donbas region could influence political systems far beyond Ukraine and far into the future.

Indeed, other autocratic leaders, like China’s, are watching Russia carefully. They see its economy being weakened by Western sanctions, thousands of its young technologists fleeing to escape a government denying them access to the internet and credible news and its inept army seemingly unable to gather, share and funnel accurate information to the top. Those leaders have to be asking themselves: “Holy cow — am I that vulnerable? Am I presiding over a similar house of cards?”

Everyone is watching.

In World War I and World War II, no one had a smartphone or access to social networks through which to observe and participate in the war in nonkinetic ways. Indeed, a large chunk of the world’s population was still colonized and did not have the full freedom to express independent views, even if they had the technology. Many of those residing outside the war zones were also extremely poor subsistence farmers who were not so heavily affected by those first two world wars. There weren’t the giant connected globalized and urbanized lower and middle classes of today’s wired world.

Now, anyone with a smartphone can view what is happening in Ukraine — live and in color — and express opinions globally through social media. In our post-colonial world, governments from virtually every country around the globe can vote to condemn or excuse one side or another in Ukraine through the U.N. General Assembly.

While estimates vary, it appears that between three billion and four billion people on the planet — almost half — have a smartphone today, and although internet censorship remains a real problem, particularly in China, there are just so many more people able to peer deeply into so many more places. And that’s not all.

Anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can aid strangers in Ukraine, through Airbnb, by just reserving a night at their home and not using it. Teenagers anywhere can create apps on Twitter to track Russian oligarchs and their yachts. And the encrypted instant messaging app Telegram — which was invented by two Russian-born techie brothers as a tool to communicate outside the Kremlin’s earshot — “has emerged as the go-to place for unfiltered live war updates for both Ukrainian refugees and increasingly isolated Russians alike,” NPR reported. And it’s run out of Dubai!

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s government has been able to tap a whole new source of funding — raising more than $70 million worth of cryptocurrency from individuals around the world after appealing on social media for donations. And the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk activated his SpaceX company’s satellite broadband service in Ukraine to provide high-speed internet after a Ukrainian official tweeted at him for help from Russian efforts to disconnect Ukraine from the world. . . .

But just as so many more people can affect this war, so, too, can more be affected by it. Russia and Ukraine are key suppliers of wheat and fertilizer to the agricultural supply chains that now feed the world and that this war has disrupted. A war between just two countries in Europe has spiked the price of food for Egyptians, Brazilians, Indians and Africans.

And because Russia is one of the world’s biggest exporters of natural gas, crude oil and the diesel fuel used by farmers in their tractors, the sanctions on Russia’s energy infrastructure are curbing its exports, causing gasoline pump prices to rise from Minneapolis to Mexico to Mumbai, and forcing farmers as far away as Argentina to ration their diesel-powered tractor usage or cut fossil-fuel-rich fertilizer usage, jeopardizing Argentina’s agriculture exports and adding further to soaring world food prices. . . .

Putin, it turns out, had no clue what world he was living in, no clue about the frailties of his own system, no clue how much the whole free, democratic world could and would join the fight against him in Ukraine, and no clue, most of all, about how many people would be watching.