Why has the world come unhinged?

Mankind has got it all wrong. It has not been able to transfer from a period of cognizable existence to the one that has begun exhibiting ‘force of nature’ events which for the moment man continues to deal with in his conventionalist ways. The war between Russia and Ukraine has gone on interminably for over ninety days now and no one knows how to stop this meaningless event. True, it is a man-made disaster but dig deep and one will find the marks of uncertain times underpinning what has become our unfortunate destiny. Yes, they try and give meaning to it but there was no godly reason for it to have started in the first place. Putin didn’t go mad just like that, in a moment of craziness? Yet, he did; probably when he got humbled and overwhelmed with the accelerations of disjointness hitting him and Russia hard in a world that instead needed to be fully wired.

Did he become a victim of his apprehension? Did he feel encircled and enveloped physically and perceptually? Was there really an encirclement being stitched against Russia? Or was he just imagining? Why couldn’t someone tell him there wasn’t any? When the world restructured after the first World War Russia was on board. When the new order got established after WWII USSR agreed to how the world would function and under what rules. When the global system moved into a World Trade Order, Russia abided by it since that was the way to a stable future which would bring accelerated prosperity. At one time G7 became a G8 when Russia was inducted. Now it isn’t and that is a problem of sorts, perhaps attributable to Russia’s own minor excursion of the global order in 2014 when it annexed Crimea. Since then Russia has been made into a pariah in the international community. Which means none engages with it in any intimacy. Suspicions and apprehensions grow and miscalculations evince.

Enter Biden who in an attempt to appear relevant in a society buffeted with Trump’s egregiousness only perpetuated the confusion with his placidness. An unsure America lost its trek as a leader of the liberal world in a rule-based order first instituted by it to emphasise its eminence and manage the arrangement. The world began to unhinge and descend into a disorder. The US and the West — which has charted its own trajectory around exclusivity and anti-civilizational triggers bordering on ghettoizing the immigrants into hate bubbles — have disenfranchised the rest of the world, notably emerging powers and economies like Russia and China, against the principle of rule-based cooperative existence. Russia may be an imagined pariah because that is what suits Biden’s conventionalist imagination but in doing so he has unleashed the dissolution of what had held the world together.

The trouble is Russia is world’s largest exporter of gas and one of the top three to export oil — almost half of it to Europe itself which now stands threatened by both persistent sanctions laid by the USA and/or by Russia turning the tap off for some to punish them with no energy to run their systems, functions, factories, homes and their life. Interdependence is a two-way street and there is no instant replacement that the re-radicalised West can fall back on. Expect a European freeze in the coming winters and then some more because neither life nor industry, nor trade will function. We may have only seen the tip of the huge supply-chain iceberg in the ongoing Covid era but wait till supply lines and oil and gas pipelines actually dry out. A recession? Surely. A depression? Likely. The crashing of the liberalist market economies? Possibly. Wait, it is all coming.

In the meanwhile Russian and Ukrainian wheat and fertilizer, 25 per cent of world’s total need, will be no more. Sanctions and supply-chain disruptions and lack of productivity in a meaningless war has already ensured that food shortages and famine are triggered the world over especially in the weaker and the developing world of Africa and Asia. Sri Lanka has already sunk. Many more will in a resultant sociopolitical turmoil in these countries. Pakistan must import three million tons of wheat this year to make up its shortages. Wherefrom and at what price? No one knows. We used to export some and also feed a dependent Afghanistan. Not anymore. We may have serious law and order situations and rampant smuggling as a consequence over which riots will erupt of which all control may be lost to a revolting populace. Just because Russia and Ukraine are at war. Why? No one knows and there exists none who can intervene to stop this complete unhinging of the order in a world from its predictable existence.

Oil and gas, wheat and fertilizer, power shortages, insurmountable debt piles, water scarcity, reduced trade, supply-chain disruptions are already giving economies unmatched inflation and forcing banks to intervene with higher discount rates. A massive slowdown in world economic and trade conditions is on the anvil. Historic experience tells us when this happens a recession looms. Only this time the massivity and expanse will be too large for the fragile to bear. The world order will be in tatters. Covid is not finished with us yet. Over six million the world over have perished as it keeps changing face from Corona to Delta to Omicron to Monkeypox. More will follow and we have no clue how to manage or control what is coming because we are out of ideas and thoughts and have failed as a collective to comprehend the challenge. We haven’t put our heads together as in a G7 or G8 or a G77 to chart out our way against changing threats to mother Earth and its now eight billion inhabitants. We are on the verge of perishing and augment it with thoughtless conflict and a reversion to block politics. The need was to cooperate; we are instead humanity in reverse gear. Just because minds are too inadequate to think afresh and change human behaviour.

I recommend an NYT piece by David Wallace-Wells, a climatologist and an author, where he suggests: “By 2030 the world will be experiencing more than 500 major disasters each year…and what was once called ‘generational storms’ or ‘500-year storms’” — the one that Noah faced — “or even ‘acts of God’ (will) disorient us.. that it will be hard to distinguish once-a-decade events from once-a-century ones”. Just as a comparison when asked of a climate scientist how frequent were such events in the earliest times of human existence: “once in eight million years”. It is a piece on climate change — the best that I have read — but is enough to open our eyes how the forces opposed to mankind have now traversed from cognizable to nature-triggered and how human mind has lagged in its evolution to comprehend what stares in its face as disaster waiting to happen. Multiply that with the incomprehensible human behaviour and instinct, wars, tariffs, inability to cooperate and coexist, harping on divisions than augmentation of human capacity, and you get apocalypse. Man himself shall trigger his own end. We are well on track to such an end.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 27^th, 2022.

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