ARMCHAIR SPECULATION

The first state-sponsored invasion that engaged me politically was the abortive attempt by the United States to overthrow the Fidel Castro government in Cuba. That was 62 years ago and things have not gotten much better since. The most terrifying international event that I have lived through was the Cuban missile crisis, a year later. I sat that one out in Chicago with my VW stocked with dried food and a Geiger counter and reservations for my wife and myself on planes heading north to Canada and south to Mexico, depending on which way the wind was blowing. I am, I suppose you might say, an equal opportunity scaredy-cat.

 

What terrifies me most in the present situation is the possibility that Vladimir Putin, pushed to the wall, will launch tactical nuclear weapons, although I have no idea where he would find an appropriate target for one. That would make him only the second national ruler after Harry Truman to use nuclear weapons in a war.

 

There is no point in my trying to make predictions at this point. All I can do is sit here in the relative safety of North Carolina and watch what happens. But I would like to try my hand at speculating what the long-term consequences will be of this Ukrainian invasion, assuming we get through it without a nuclear war.

 

It seems to me quite likely that this will more or less permanently change Russia’s geopolitical position in the world. Russia’s economy will in the medium-term be devastated, and since it depends so thoroughly on oil and natural gas exports, its long-term prospects are dim as well. It strikes me that it would be extremely imprudent in the current situation for China to forge closer ties with Russia, which suggests that the relationship between China and the United States will change. Since China in the course of the remainder of this century is on track to lose half of its population, it may find its ambitious “One Road, One Belt” project more difficult to pursue than it may have imagined.

 

The big winner from this event almost certainly will be the United States, which has been handed by Vladimir Putin a golden opportunity to strengthen and expand the European alliance that it leads.

 

Is this a good thing? Lord, I do not know. It must really bug Putin that America got away with launching a completely unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Iraq, almost halfway around the world, and he cannot even get away with invading what I am sure he views as part of his own territory.

 

What can we say about Pres. Zelensky?  That he was the voice of Paddington Bear in the Ukrainian version of that tale. That he got his political start by playing the president of Ukraine in a television show. Even as I write this I have the feeling I am making it up.

 

There is an old stock market scam that works like this. The scam artist targets a thousand or so marks and sends half of them predictions that a stock will go up and the other half predictions that the stock will go down. Whichever prediction turns out correct, the scammer then divides the 500 who got the correct prediction into two groups and sends half of them a second prediction that a different stock will go up and the other half a prediction that the stock will go down. After several more iterations, he has identified a small group of potential investors who have received an unbroken series of correct predictions from him. Having thus established himself as a canny and highly knowledgeable insider, he proceeds to rip them off.

 

I am tempted to try a version of this scam on my blog readers. I could make a series of quite specific predictions – for example that the 40 mile long column of tanks and supply vehicles making its way toward Kyiv will be pretty much destroyed by Ukrainian partisans using shoulder held rocket launchers. If I turn out to be right, I look like a genius. If I turn out to be wrong, nobody will remember.  But I shall abstain from these games and just continue watching the television.