Thursday news

Today is the 24th of March, 2022. I write about “what if” and share yesterday's visuals.

Drawing by Charlie Mackesy

I don’t think I will share any news today, because there’s literally nothing to share. I think that at the moment a lot of opinions and articles are written from the position of “what if”.

“If we add more pressure, they will change their minds”. “If we introduce another pack of sanctions, they will be hurt more, the protests will start the revolution”…

There’s a logical algorithm in programming, it always has an option “else” in case “if” comes back with a false response. I don’t understand why in all that race with hybrid war escalation people don’t think about what “else” can be done.

Now it’s getting obvious even to those who invented those packs of sanctions that they don’t work as they expected. And instead of rethinking and changing the strategy, trying to neutralise the impact on their own economies and to prevent the worst scenarios to happen with countries that don’t have votes in that process, they continue to exaggerate. And the most funny thing is that the major moves are made. There’s little left to cut and as soon as that happens, no one can predict the results for Europe.

The paradigma in which we used to exist is that there’s nothing important around us - just some tiny or poor countries with their tiny economies that are seen mostly as charity opportunities. The greatest wake up call will be when after 30 years of globalisation the West will discover that it can’t live its relaxed privileged life without those tiny countries. And the 60% of the world economy (i quote “Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism” published on Bloomberg) is the number that only shows it as dominant. But look inside it and you will see that the threads between the countries are far more diverse than in the 80s and those 60% can easily drop in absolute values if some of them fall out.

Drawing by Charlie Mackesy

Goods, food, fruit and vegetables, coffee and tea, crops and mining minerals, outsourced production, workshops that work for European big names and small businesses with the same success, all the digital related subjects - from chips to programmers - everything is connected and comes from all parts of the world except Europe and the USA and you can’t just switch off one component of this worldwide network without destroying the system. The bigger the piece you need to withdraw from it, the more radical and unpredictable the result will be. Russia is huge. It doesn’t matter the percentage in the economy, it’s huge geographically and historically and it’s a buffer between East and West. 

There are no switching scenarios, nothing to secure the change. Just lame political agenda. It gives new opportunities to those who can see them, and fortifies more conservative parts of the former world order because those will suddenly find new friends. But for us who were looking into the future without borders, with democracy all over the globe, that will mean a step backward. It’s not just prices and a rearranged energy market. It’s the overall sense of “nothing is sure” that economical difficulties bring to the people and they choose to close up.