The war appears to be fostering vastly more of everything that Putin opposed... and for obvious reasons... while he seemed to think, foolishly, that he could threaten it away...
NATO might have gone away, in time... if Putin and Russia hadn't revitalized it...
Even with the revitalized raison d'etre.. for NATO... I still don't think Europe as now constituted, can last long... as a dictatorship of the bureaucracy... another governmental innovation pioneered in China... grows insular over time, and self interested to a degree that makes minding the fences... unprofitable. The outer provinces will tend to wander... as their needs are not met, and their concerns ignored...
Among other obvious issues... you now have to add... being proven incapable of rationalizing both defense needs, and a policy for engaging with neighbors... that avoids exactly what they have created now... because of how incapable they are of self governing... wisely.
That the bureaucracy hamstrings Europe... is clearly not the worst possible thing that could happen to Europe... and thus, to the rest of the world... as we saw twice last century...
An east-west split in Europe... would not have been shocking... before the war. Actually was looking both likely and perhaps was becoming necessary. Now, the shift in public opinion is far more likely to make western Europe... move back more in the same direction as the east has been trending...
I expect events this year will make Europeans far less tolerant... of the gross mismanagement they've been accepting as "the way things are" for a while now.... I expect it will prove interesting to see... how they adapt to suddenly having the need to change. And, if there's not change sufficient to the need... I agree that the European unity we see today... might prove rather short lived without Putin focusing their attention....
I don't expect that devolutionary pressures will remain a European issue, either... The nature of the changes occurring now are global in scope...and there are few corners that don't have related issues....
Randomly, today, ran across an recent Doug Casey video... he being interviewed... quite a ramble, really... in which he noted that Brazil is really three different countries... that don't really like each other all that much...
Great "Resets"... might well turn out to be not all that great... and not much of a reset... so, throw in a couple of currency failures, sovereign bankruptcies and a healthy bit of "defi" and crypto... and who knows what might happen.... and where... as global supply chains continue to wither and die ?
Ukraine isn't all about politics... There's also a fair amount of it that's all and only about Putin taking the neighbors stuff... And, likely we'll see more of that too... as the tail end of the Cold War... finally devolves into a series of hot wars... many likely fought over control of resources...
Mexico... mentioned in the conversation already... is barely a country any more... as a opposed to a fiefdom composed of a couple of competing narco-states...
Canada... not all that happy with each other... and really don't have much reason to be...
I don't think the U.S. and China are exceptions. Russia certainly is not... as living in a tough neighborhood is only going to be getting tougher for them with a bit of blood in the water, already. China seems to be making a huge mess of Shanghai... repeating all the same mistakes as were made in Wuhan...demonstrating a flat learning curve... which is disheartening.
I think a lot of people have a hard time seeing any of that... because they have a hard time envisioning the changes coming, now, that have already been set in motion by recent evens...
Economic contraction... and a global economic "re-shuffling" of the deck, as made necessary to unwind the failure of "globalization," are all coming... and it's not going to be pretty... or impact equally...
But, it will be interesting...
War is likely to accelerate the pace of events... far more if it expands... as grows more probable by the day, IMO... while most of the punditry seems to be thinking, instead, that from here it should settle down into a grind that persists, and lasts for years...
Saw a pretty good vid today... from "ProTrader"... that was a third party reaction... to a vid of Raul Pal chatting with Michael Sailor... about changes coming to the crypto world... which I think fits in the rubric of this post... but, I failed to capture it...
And, of course... market events... about which... I need to shift focus back that way...
|
