Destabilized Saturday Edition #7

Russia, the new iron curtain, vertigo, and rose-colored glasses.

Mar 05, 2022

I was planning to shift this week to offering practical advice about navigating this period of turbulence, but the Russian war against Ukraine, and what appears to be the real-time dropping of a new iron curtain, has been too distracting to focus on much else.

Nataliya Vasilyeva @Nat_Vasilyeva

My story about Russians fleeing the country as the Iron Curtain is about to fall. "We were all shocked. I got scared and thought what if we can never get him out. He would be 18 in May, which means he could be conscripted."

telegraph.co.ukPanicked Russians flee to the West before fall of new Iron CurtainChaotic airport scenes ensued over the weekend as European countries began cancelling flights from Moscow one by one

Like many, I’m trying to wrap my head around what Russia’s invasion means. So much is happening so fast, and much of it has potentially huge implications. The experience has been vertigo-inducing.

For now, a couple reflections.

What disorients me the most as an American is the recognition that on the one hand we may be in the early stages of some kind of new cold war, with China and Russia and their allies on one side and the U.S., Europe, Japan, and allies on the other. And on the other hand, the person who could be our next president, Donald Trump, is, by the plain meaning of his own words, sympathetic to Putin.1 It’s so bizarre I’m tempted to dismiss it. Either Trump won’t win because of it or he’ll distance himself from Putin or, if he wins back the White House, he’ll be politically constrained from siding with Russia. One of these may prove true, but if we’ve learned anything in the past several years it’s that things that seem unthinkable happen not infrequently.

If you squint, the 21st century can look like a time when we consistently viewed the world through rose-colored glasses. The widespread belief that Trump could never win in 2016 is an obvious example. The (ongoing) assumption that before climate change gets bad people will come together and collectively agree to make the needed changes to stop it is another. The belief that Putin would keep Russia in the good-enough graces of the international community and, therefore, would never go too far is still another.

My point is not that things are bad, it’s that for 20 years we’ve systematically understood things as better, safer, and more dependable than they really were. This isn’t surprising given that the United States traveled an upward trajectory for 60+ years after WW II.

But for multiple reasons – some I can explain and others I’m still trying to understand – the underlying stability of the West between 1945 and the 2000s is over, and we’re now in the early stages of a new era. The norms, institutions, systems, relationships, and power dynamics that held things steady for decades are being tested, and in some cases they’re proving to be weak or ineffective. It’s part of why Putin thought his half-baked plan to invade and take over Ukraine would work.

My Work

America’s presidential system is brittle – “[I]n the three decades since Linz wrote The Perils of Presidentialism, these two qualities have dramatically reversed. America’s two major parties are now both highly ideological – politics today is far more about principles than patronage – and sharply polarized ideologically.

“The sorting of the American political coalitions has resulted, in other words, in the U.S. developing two political characteristics that make presidential systems vulnerable to breakdown: 1. highly polarized and ideologically distinct parties, and 2. frequently divided government. To be clear, this doesn’t mean the U.S. political system is necessarily heading toward collapse. The United States is different in several important ways from many failed presidential democracies, including being economically prosperous and having a robust civil society.”

The world is destabilized – “A politics that’s highly polarized around identity and ideology, and a media ecosystem that incentivizes conflict-oriented rhetoric, demonizes out-groups, and reinforces in-group identity, is a volatile combination. The two create a self-reinforcing cycle of disunity with no obvious mechanism to disrupt it.”