159 - Saving the World, and Civilization, from Putin's Destructive Drives

            Increasingly, as the war in Ukraine slogs on and as human conditions in the rest of the world deteriorate, it is more and more apparent that the very survival of our civilization is at risk. After decades of “progress,” the planet as we know it and want it to be is becoming an unhinged collection of competing belief systems and personal power aggrandizements.

            At the end of the Cold War, with the collapse of Soviet communism and the industrial and material weaknesses of a China still recovering from the destruction of Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution, the peoples and governments of the West and then high-flying Japan smartly expected that the citizens of the globe confidently could look forward to the spread of human rights observing democracy and to the gradual material development and prosperity that would ineluctably follow.

            There would continue to be problems, of course, but prevailing wisdom was that despotism would give way to democracy, respect for the rule of law would spread, closed economic systems would open, and free trade would replace protectionism. Collaboratively, the swelling tides of sensible and rationale policy would lift all boats everywhere, and inhabitants of even the least forward-leaning countries would slowly benefit and be better off.

            There were problems in realizing such utopian prospects, of course.  After the demise of the Soviet Union, the young Russia was chaotic and increasingly corrupt. China, rapidly embracing free market capitalism, was equally insistent on resisting any tendencies that would reduce ruling party dominance or improve the potential growth of participatory democracy.

            In Asia and Africa, despotism dug in. Ridding a number of countries of dictators and odiously cruel regimes, like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Mengistu Haile Meriam’s mad Marxist cruelties in Ethiopia, led more to electoral autocracies than to growing democracies.  Even racist regimes like apartheid South Africa were being succeeded (after Nelson Mandela’s retirement) by heavy-handed retreats from the good governance outcomes that had long been presumed. Zimbabwe and a number of other countries also left their liberationist power-to-the- people origins behind and transitioned abruptly to one-man, single-party rule, with falsified and rigged elections.  Venezuela under Hugo Chavez did the same, as Daniel Ortega presumes today in Nicaragua.

            These reality rebuffs to our rosy-hued assumptions were held in check until the invasion of Ukraine.  (We should have paid closer attention in 2014.)  For the past thirteen months we have reluctantly come to terms with the fullness of what is going to be a long and unremitting struggle for freedom writ large – for liberal democracy, for respect for the rule of law. Most of all, the new world order that Western democracies thought that they had established in the aftermath of the defeat of Hitler’s aggression and sealed with the Nuremberg trials has become undone.

            Despair and desolate discouragement affect many. The rise of mental health challenges may reflect the breakdown of world peace and the overriding social contract that so many across the globe thought that they had crafted.  Conceivably, this breakdown even has had as much impact on mental illness as social media.

            Two well-respected measurement regimes, the New York-based Freedom in the World rankings and the Gothenburg-based Varieties of Democracy dataset, report and detail the continued rise of autocracy and the demise of freedom in the world.  More countries than ever are shifting from being “free” to becoming “partly free” and “not free” – categories used for decades by Freedom House.  Likewise, the Swedish index makers report an intensified shift from democracy to autocracy and the alarming rise of electoral autocracies, that is, countries that pretend to continue to follow democratic representative practices while using electoral cover to discriminate against ethnic congeries, restrict freedom of speech and press, limit assembly, and slink away from their democratic heritage. 

India, the world’s largest nominal democracy, is now regarded as such an electoral autocracy, sliding more and more under Prime Minister Narendra Modi towards single-man rule. Hungary under President Viktor Orban and Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also qualify. Zimbabwe has fit that category since at least 1999.  Sudan and Uganda are other African countries in the same mode, along with El Salvador in Central America. Israel under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seeks to join them.

            The war in Ukraine epitomizes this larger contest. Although Putin’s Russia is now a weakened junior partner to President Xi Jinping’s resurgent China, he and it are in the vanguard of this decade’s consummate battle for the soul of the globe.  Now that China has refused to reduce Putin’s ambitions and to provide a glide path for resumed planetary peace and prosperity, the fictional struggle for Middle Earth is now the struggle for the fate of the real earth. That is precisely why President Biden and the governments of Europe and free Asia are aiding Ukraine’s war effort so fully and why they will increasingly be called upon to do more and more.  Their efforts, with Ukrainians as proxy fighters, are attempting to save the new world order that we thought that we had securely established decades ago.  But Putin, backed by Xi for different reasons, is now still trying to undo and reconfigure the nature of sovereignty, international law, and harmony among nations.

            Our human destiny is still fragile .What we thought that we had achieved is still a work, alas, in progress. Hubris blinded us, perhaps. So did that happy idea that we had in fact glimpsed the beginning of “the end of history.”   

            The peoples of the West, and their elected governments, are now called once again to complete (or at least try to resume) the onerous task of enhancing individual freedom, political participation, and respect for human rights across a very polarized planet. We had become complacent. Putin’s pretensions remind us that a victory that will sustain the kind of civilized world order that we want is still very much endangered. There is more work to be done to give people the freedoms for which they yearn.  At the same time, freedom has little meaning in neglected places if 43,000 Somali starve and 180 Haitians are killed by local gangs during a two-week period.

As we resist Putin to give Ukrainians their autonomy, so we must show that the free world can take care of those who are needy and more distant from the cascading guns of our spring discontent.

PS  To attempt to relieve the gloom that this post might have shed, I will try next week to write about degrees of happiness, as revealed by the Happiness of the World Index.