Echoes of war

It's over six months since Russia invaded Ukraine. The first two months saw dramatic advances: Russian forces swept into the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, and after fierce fighting in Mariupol against the Azov battalion, controlled the Azov Sea's coast all the way to Crimea, which Russia had annexed back in 2014. Meanwhile, Russian forces attacked the Ukrainian capital Kiev from the north (from Belarus) and from the east, but withdrew in early April. 

Since then, the front lines have barely moved. But behind those lines, transformations continued. Ukraine itself was the most affected. Millions of women and children left the country (most to western countries like Poland, but some to Russia too) as it became a nation at war, with all men of fighting age conscripted. Military aid poured in from North America and the European Union, a radical strengthening of ties with NATO and the EU. 

Russia too became a nation at war. Officially, the fighting in Ukraine is not a war, it's "special military operation Z"; but the real war is against America, its European allies, and its worldwide power. China is considered a strategic ally in this struggle, concerned as it is to prevent Taiwanese independence. India is expected to remain neutral out of self-interest, and is respected for this. Iran is China and Russia's radical ally against America in the Middle East, and Turkey (like Hungary) is a NATO member which nonetheless needs Russia strategically. 

It's a struggle between unipolar and multipolar world orders that has been happening at least since 2014, but which finally turned "hot" in 2022. Among the thousands of military and civilian dead, there was one in Moscow that stood out to me: Darya Dugina, daughter of multipolarity ideologue Alexander Dugin and a rising figure in her own right, killed by a car bomb which (according to Russian intelligence) was placed by Ukrainian infiltrators, and which was probably intended for her father. 

Away from the battlefield, the war was mostly economic. Russia was cut off from western financial systems, accelerating its turn towards payment systems that don't use dollars or euros. Russia in turn got ready to cut off the gas to Europe, threatening not just a cold winter for ordinary people, but high prices and economic havoc as business and industry had to pay much more for energy. Ukrainian grain and Russian fertilizer had trouble making its way to world markets, increasing food prices and threatening food shortages in a number of countries. The worldwide economic effects of the war blended with other forms of post-Covid havoc, such as inflation and supply chain disruptions. 

Despite its worldwide effects, for now the war was mostly a Russian and European affair. It drew a new bloody frontier through Ukraine, between the "Russian world" of tradition and national sovereignty, and the "western world" of progressivism, globalism, and environmentalism. It loomed over West European politics: Germany's new red-green coalition, Italy's besieged technocracy, France's renewed struggle between Macron and Le Pen, Britain's new prime minister (fourth Conservative PM in a row). Central Europe, previously more concerned with EU diktats regarding immigration and gay rights, mobilized to prop up Ukraine against their historic Russian foe... 

But elsewhere, the war was not quite the center of attention. Even in America, where Ukraine (along with Taiwan and Iran) was considered a crucial front in the global struggle for democracy and American primacy, the political class were mostly concerned with the continuing threat from Trump's populism, which opposes elite values on a startlingly wide range of issues: race, gender, immigration, guns, abortion, foreign policy. The famous American culture war continued, as bitterly polarized as ever, with Congress and Senate elections due in November, and presidential elections two years after that, and the balance of power entirely up for grabs. 

Outside Europe, Russia, and North America, the war was viewed through the lens of self-interest, as just one more factor in the ever-shifting global landscape. 

China steered its economy through the rigors of continuing Covid lockdowns (pursuing a minimum-Covid policy long after the rest of the world had capitulated), the threat of a huge financial bust in real estate, and the post-Covid, post-Trump reorganization of world trade. The next party congress is due in October. 

In July, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, heir of a political family stretching back to the militarist era of World War 2, and de facto leader of the nationalists in Japan's perennial ruling party, was assassinated by a loner who claimed to be motivated by Abe's connection with a Korean fundamentalist church known for its anticommunism. A third of the government's ministers then resigned, because of their own connections with the church; but the death of Abe was also a blow to the Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral of America, Japan, India, and Australia, that was set up to contain China, and which had only recently broadened its agenda from security to economics. 

India engaged in military cooperation with America and with Russia (and really, with anyone they could except China and Pakistan), and saw industrial tycoon Gautam Adani rise to third richest in the world, behind America's Musk and Bezos. Pakistan's fractious opposition united to vote no confidence in celebrity PM Imran Khan, replacing him with the brother of exiled former PM Nawaz Sharif; but Imran's party said this was a plot orchestrated by the Pakistani military, afraid of Imran's multipolar nationalism and America's wrath, and promised to fight back. The powerful Rajapaksa brothers, who ruled Sri Lanka since ending the bitter civil war in 2009, were themselves brought down by their own experiments with eco-progressive nationalism, which proved to be ill-adapted to the economic rigors of Covid and the Ukrainian war, and bankrupted the country, leaving it at the mercy of China and India. 

Brazil prepared for October elections: current president Bolsonaro, the "Trump of the tropics", and former president Lula, the popular union leader whose era ended in the massive exposure of all-party political corruption that originally brought Bolsonaro to power. Israel prepared for November elections, the fifth in three years, all of them a struggle between supporters and opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, the main face of Israel in the era of Iran's nuclear program. 

The Labor party returned to power in Australia after nine years of conservatism. Trudeau's government in Canada did a deal with the progressive New Democratic Party in order to solidify its support. In the Philippines, strongman Duterte was replaced as president by Bongbong Marcos, son of a former strongman, with Duterte's daughter as his vice president. 

In May, the disk around the Milky Way's central black hole was imaged by an array of earthbound radio telescopes. In July, the James Webb Space Telescope, located a million kilometers beyond Earth's orbit, began to send back images of the earliest galaxies ever observed.