Recession, nuclear threats: Dangerous days ahead
I remember shortly before the pandemic struck North America, a Phoenix radio host was making jokes about it — something about coronavirus and Corona beer.
He had no idea that a bug then plaguing mostly China and northern Italy would soon be on our doorstep. That it would disrupt American lives more than any other event in our generation and kill over a million people in this country.
Sometimes things far away and barely understood can wreak destruction on us.
In the last two weeks, two events, one deep beneath the Baltic Sea and one in the more prosperous and metropolitan parts of Russia, have emerged and presented that kind of threat.
They have the potential to bring home troubles that are well beyond our daily concerns.
Combine that with a looming global recession and we find ourselves at one of those historic junctures in which events could soon mess with our lives in unimaginable ways.
Our country is changing. We all know that. Change has arrived with political polarization and extremists left and right who want to define what America will be tomorrow. Opinion polls register our angst almost weekly as we wonder what comes next.
The world is also changing.
On Sept. 21, the Russian government announced that it is mobilizing young men to join the ongoing “special military operation” in Ukraine. These men would be conscripted not from the rural and ethnic heartland, but from the more prosperous metropolitan regions, cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don.
The war in Ukraine is finally coming home to middle-class Russians, an unmistakable sign that Russia, one of the great powers of the last century, is in trouble and that its leader, Vladimir Putin, is desperate.
Putin made one of the great blunders in modern history when he invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, thinking Russian tanks could quickly bridle the Ukrainian people who see their future in democratic Western Europe, not Putin’s autocratic East.
That Putin would now call for mobilization
of some 300,000 men, a number many Russians suspect is really a million, is an admission that Russia has stumbled badly in this war. It’s also an enormous gamble on his part that he can take control of four of the most resource-rich regions of Ukraine, call a truce and wrap up the conflict before his own people turn on him.
At the moment, Russians are growing more nervous and irritable. Protesters have burned a number of recruitment centers, and someone shot a recruitment officer. The Russian people refer to the call-up as the “mogilizatsia,” a combination of the word “mobilization” and “mogila” or “grave,” reports Foreign Affairs.
While the Russians are soothed daily with Kremlin happy talk, the high price of Putin’s war is coming into focus. In August, some 70,000-to-80,000 Russian troops have been killed or injured fighting the Ukrainians, according to Pentagon reports.
As Putin announced his mobilization and annexation, he called for a “holy war” against the West and rattled his nuclear warheads at Western Europe and the United States.
To understand how he got here, you have to understand the public humiliation Putin has endured, the undressing of his vaunted Russian army by the Ukrainians, and the public rebukes from friendly world leaders.
Putin has begun to feel the cold shoulder of leaders in the geographic East such as China’s Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The latter issued a public warning that “Today’s era is not of war.”
His mobilization is a stark development in the Russian-Ukraine war. It fundamentally alters his regime, reports Der Spiegel, explaining that Putin has ended his pact with the Russian people that he wouldn’t interfere in their private lives if they didn’t interfere in his politics.
On Sept. 26, seismic stations in Scandinavia picked up the tremoring lines of some kind of powerful event beneath the Baltic Sea. Almost immediately pressure began to drop to zero in Nord Stream 1 and 2, a series of four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Germany. In what most European authorities now believe was an act of sabotage, explosives destroyed three of the Nord Stream lines, making them inoperable.
The leading consensus in Europe is that it was the Russians, either using a submarine, underwater drone or ship to place the charges, perhaps months before they were detonated.
Some Americans have begun to raise doubts.
Columbia economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs told Bloomberg Financial News he believes the United States possibly with Poland sabotaged the pipelines. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor told Andrew Napolitano on his podcast that it is preposterous to believe the Russians did this.
As the world awaits the results of ongoing investigations, Sachs said we find ourselves in "the most unstable geopolitical era in many decades."
"We’re entering the first escalation to the nuclear precipice in 60 years, 60 years exactly this month was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s an extraordinary overload and we see no attempt to tamp this down, to quiet it down."
We have already felt the Russian invasion of Ukraine in America through the disruption in global supply chains and high price of gas and other goods.
While hardly the only reason for our present inflation, it has exacerbated the problem, especially with soaring oil prices. Much of the inflation we’re experiencing today comes from years of suppressing interest rates during the Great Recession and pandemic.
With inflation rising rapidly, the Federal Reserve has finally begun to raise rates to try to put the brakes on soaring prices.
"We're in deep trouble," billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said at CNBC’s Delivering Alpha Investor Summit in New York City on Wednesday. “I will be stunned if we don’t have a recession in ’23. I don’t know the timing but certainly by the end of ’23.
If we do face a crashing economy, we’ll do so with a political culture that is deeply divided. Americans are already on edge with conservatives accusing liberals of rigging elections and liberals accusing conservatives of semi-fascism.
How would we manage an economic crisis in such a tinder-dry political environment? How would we endure the twin burdens of inflation and high unemployment?
Economic pressures could severely stress our brittle system and provoke even greater conflict.
Unstoppable inflation. Surging interest rates. An escalating war in Ukraine. Unimaginable consequences can touch us here in Arizona.