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Whatever else it is, the war in Ukraine is a war to control food and energy supplies. The turning point was the 2014 coup, which took Ukraine out of the Russian economic orbit and into the U.S.-dominated “rules-based economic order.”
Umair Haque gives the big picture.
Food prices rising — commodities prices in general — were a directeffect of climate change. So what about Putin’s war? Well, just think about what it’s really about. Controlling resources. Putin knows that if he controls the resources — oil, gas, metal, wheat, and so forth — he can control a dying planet. He who controls the resources controls a dying planet, because we all need them that much more. You can see this very, very clearly in the way that Putin’s skewered Europe right on the horns on an insoluble dilemma: allow war in Ukraine, or depend on Russian resources?
Putin’s war in Ukraine is driven by ideological reasons, true — the weird blend of religion and fanaticism I’ve called New Age Fascism. But more than that, it’s the first of the great resource wars on a dying planet. Ukraine is a strategically vital nation, at least on a dying planet — it’s Europe’s breadbasket, provides the world all kinds of basic resources from wheat to metals. Ukraine is one of the very first nations you’d want to conquer if you wanted to control what few resources were going to be left on a dying planet, and this is the deeper logic of Putin’s game.
Resource wars are not going to end. In fact, they are only now just getting started — just after commodities prices have been soaring for the last few years thanks to failed harvests. See how predictable that is? It’s not that the two are even consciously linked — some dictator sees commodities prices rising and thinks “it’s time for war!” — it’s just that this is what inevitably happens. Putin’s wars are obviously not going to end. China, soon enough, will have to secure its own empire of resources, as the planet goes on dying. The West appears to have no strategy for any of this, because it’s only answer is “globalization,” which has failed the way that my first marriage did — she threw plates at me, dear reader, because I was a bastard.
We are therefore now entering an age of (a) resource wars (b) shortages and (c) inflation. Serious, sustained, vicious inflation. These three things have already the defined the 2020s. What did Covid do? Cause shortages around the globe — in a foreshadowing of the future on a dying planet. Covid highlighted just how illusionary all this abundance of stuff really is — ships stop for a few days, borders shut down for a day or two, and bang — you can’t get stuff to eat or drink the way you’re used to. But what happens on a planet of mega fires and mega floods and mega weather? Mega risk does. Shortages becomes endemic, a way of life. As they slowly are now.
The flipside of shortages is, of course, inflation. And inflation is the savage, gruesome reality of living on a dying planet. There isn’t enough left to go around. There never was. 20% of humanity — otherwise known as “The West” — consumes 90% of the planet’s resources. That leaves just 10% of them for 80% of humanity. The rest of the world has always lived without. It’s just we in the West who are starting to discover what the real economics of existence are.
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