Kharkiv is a city of heroes.
Over one million people live here everyday, despite the disruption, despite the bombs, to provide the military and economic backbone of Ukraine in the shadow of Russia.
Ninety years ago, Russians, Britons, and Americans shared a vision of a world without fascists, a world where borders wouldn’t be drawn by violence, and although all sides would violate this principle many times around the world, we found ourselves in an uneasy era of peace and international law for at least the privileged few.
It couldn’t even last 100 years.
Russia, a shadow of a shadow of its former glory, has decided to violate what millions of its men, women and children died for. In the same stupid way America invaded Iraq, Russia and many other countries, including Israel, have learned the exact wrong lesson from the War on Terror: that anything and anyone is a fair target in the name of “national security.”
Countries like America, Russia, and Israel that are governed by their military impulses and industrial complexes, will also suffer by them.
Despite this obvious reality, the world learned a different, much darker and incomprehensible lesson: that, in an era of economic interdependence, the world would be forced to put up with any misbehavior by great powers. What all these states fail to take into account is the severe damage that this lawlessness did to America in the aftermath of its invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq. Faith in institutions declined, and the democratic experiment is at risk worldwide. The United States, and the world, is neither richer, stronger, nor safer because of such adventurism. Instead of seeing what should be a cautionary tale, the ambitious violent men of the world see opportunity.
The economic gains of the world over the last 21 years have been on credit, and are inherently unsustainable. Trillions of dollars of debt have been added to the global financial system for a global war that had no winners. Every “terrorist” we killed created two more to take their place. Overleveraged corporations that looked juicy in the era of zero-percent interest rates, look as weak and flimsy as the global financial system that underwrites them.
Right at the moment where the world can least afford war, similar to 1939, we find ourselves right back where we started, in a world that wants to devour itself.
And here I sit in Kharkiv, a city under siege by drones and glide-bombs, more than 90 years after that fateful year. What really has changed? And yet, how could things be more different? In what era could I live in a major city less than 20 miles from frontlines of one of the great wars of human history sipping beer and eating sushi? How can this level of prosperity and chaos be possible?
I tell Ukrainians this all the time, “Imagine telling your babushka that in the future, during a major, world-altering war, we are able to sit here and live almost normal lives, with no shortages and good sushi.”
It almost flirts with the absurd.
And in Moscow it is a similar story. We live now in a correct prediction of Orwell’s 1984: that industrialized nations will be able to wage forever wars without major consequences to their population, sustaining themselves and their oppressive systems by illusionary threats to their domestic domains.
And yet there are consequences.
Just because populations can be sheltered from the costs and sacrifices of major conflicts, does not mean that these conflicts do not do lasting damage to the planet that we all need to survive. Is the Ukraine of 2024 really more favorable to Russia than the Ukraine of 2014? Has NATO ceased its relentless eastward expansion? And are Iraq and Afghanistan really more favorable to Americans than they were in 2003? And are those paltry gains worth a few trillion dollars? Is Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon truly a more palatable situation to Israel than in 2006? And do Jews really feel safer in the world now than before the War on Terror?
The honest answer to all these questions is no.
But unfortunately, honesty is not a political commodity in the year 2024.
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