Brave New World Order

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine to build a totalitarian empire. Instead, he’s ignited a global consensus against that sort of thing.

Living in frigid Minnesota teaches a person to hope for spring. But we also know that when the warm weather arrives it’s often accompanied by floods and the occasional violent storm.

One of the best lines in poetry comes from T.S. Elliott’s The Wasteland, where he warns those anticipating spring, “April is the cruelest month.” In 1913, theatergoers in Paris rioted in the streets after attending the opening night of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. His modern take on music presented the crowd with a spring they hadn’t been anticipating at all.

Now the temperature has climbed above the freezing point in Minnesota and the water from the melting snow runs in tiny rivers down the hill outside my window. I sit inside and read news stories about Ukraine.

With each new story about the heroic fight President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his outgunned army of soldiers and citizens have put up against the invading Russian tanks our hearts break all over again. None of us can know what this spring will bring. We’re told the shooting war cannot end well for the brave Ukrainians, and the rest of the world will sink into a bitter Cold War even more terrifying than the last one.

That gloomy scenario is probably the realistic one.

Kids already have to practice active-shooter tactics in their classrooms. Now one wonders about a revival of the old duck-and-cover drills from the last century, designed to put a wooden school desk between children and a thermonuclear explosion

Along with the renewed worry of nukes hanging over our heads, we live in a world that is losing its love of freedom and democracy. According to the most recent Global State of Democracy Report, three times as many countries are sliding toward authoritarianism as in the more hopeful direction, toward democracy. That includes serious concerns about the world’s oldest democracy. We all heard the former U.S. president and the top voice on the Fox News Network cheering on Vladimir Putin as laid his plans to bomb Ukraine into rubble.

And yet something big changed in the first week of March. It may make all the difference in what sort of new world order we end up with in the months and years ahead.

Actually lot of somethings changed. The brave example of the Ukrainians defending their homeland, certainly. We’ve grown unused to witnessing that level of courage on the world stage and it’s astonishing to see.

Accompanying that — in so many ways because of that — there is newfound resolve in what used to be called The Free World. We suddenly find ourselves living up to the moniker again. World leaders threatened painful sanctions if Putin made his move. Then actually delivered, with a level of unity that is working like a weapon of mass financial destruction on the Russian economy. Even famously neutral Switzerland has gotten into the act. And so it seems are all the rest of us. The corporations are pulling out of Russia. Oligarchs that once prided themselves on their look-at-me yachts are looking for a place to hide them. Russian athletes are disinvited from world competition. The Munich Philharmonic ditched its Russian maestro.

Anyone paying attention can feel the rules of the world order getting rewritten, and maybe not the way Vladimir Putin intended. A global consensus has emerged that here, three decades into the 21st century, unleashing an unprovoked war against a peaceful country crosses a line that the community of nations will not accept. In our interconnected world it brings consequences that we weren’t sure existed a week ago — that can be used to call even a nuclear-armed power like Russia to account.

No one can know if this will be enough to deter Putin in his brutal ambitions against Ukraine. That’s a tragedy, and short of an armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia it has no quick answer.

But the strength of the effort isolating Russia from the community of nations, the damage it is doing to Putin and his country, has gotten his attention. He recently called the sanctions “akin to declaring war.” It has also no doubt gotten the attention of China’s authoritarian ruler Xi Jinping, who has his gunsights set on the peaceful people of Taiwan.

This has turned out to be one of those unpredictable springs and we’re all wondering how violent the storms might get. But we can know this. Standing with the brave people of Ukraine has become the collective effort of everyone, not just our governments.

We have new economic and cultural weapons that are blunt and unfair and will require massive amounts of resolve to make work, but they are non-violent and that is why we’ve been able to use them to good effect against the brutality of Putin’s armed might. It’s not necessarily a benign new world order. But it’s the best alternative we have to the dark winter envisioned by totalitarians like Vladimir Putin.