You have no doubt imbibed an enormous quantity of news and analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine over the last few days, and it’s not the intention of this newsletter to pile further things onto your reading list.
Nevertheless, a few observations pertaining to the study of collapse.
The first is about visibility over the crisis.
We’re once again at close to log-level, experiencing a mere sequential addition of events to an ongoing log rather than a coherent view of the whole situation. This lack of a unified picture is not new. It’s endemic to all wars. What is new is the speed and potential severity of the feedback between events and the responses to them, even as the events themselves become no clearer. Untrammelled and indeed semi-arbitrary positive feedback is a dangerous sign in a situation with so much potential for extreme violence.
This opacity is operating at all levels, from the Russian bombing of the TV station in Kyiv to the hegemonic Manichaeism of the politics of the conflict to the information war between Ukraine and Russia to blurry dashcam footage of convoys approaching Kyiv to the apparent difficulty Russian troops on the ground are having communicating with their officers to the no doubt many mistakes contained in this newsletter.
The most conspicuous event to enforce a log-level view was the early days of COVID, but we’re not quite back to those levels. The reason for the difference is clear: there is more structure now because there’s more strategy from the big players. But also, there’s a long-established way to interpret Russia. Although plagues have been dramatic news events for a while, the discourse around the threat that Russia poses to Europe is some centuries-long - plenty of time for the thinking around it to develop a full range of articulations and predictable positions. Those predictable positions run the risk of being just as obscuring in effect as the lack of verifiable information on the ground.
In times of collapse risk, visibility is key for avoiding catastrophic failure. Much of the risk of excessive action on all sides comes from precisely that which the other side keeps obscure. Past doctrines have perversely turned the deliberate opaqueness of political conflict into an effective de-escalatory mechanism. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) turned the fact that neither side knew if the other side would retaliate with nuclear weapons into a guarantee (never perfect) that they would not use them first.
My intuition right now is that obfuscation in this messier multi-polar world is monotonically correlated with increased risk, but I’m very willing (some might say desperate) to be dissuaded of this.
What are the risks of nuclear conflict? Although the simple fact that we didn’t blow ourselves up collectively in the Cold War should shed some light on the likelihood of doing so now, there is also a survivor bias at work. We’re really not that far from the end of the world. As Robin Hanson would no doubt remind us, the promising output of the recent Mars missions suggests that the Great Filter might be in front of us rather than behind. I’ll expand that thought another time.
Existential risk research (which is arguably something of a generalisation of the discussion of the risk of nuclear war) has often argued for non-retaliation in the event of a nuclear strike: at least someone should be left alive. Why? Perhaps because it seemed likely that those survivors would be capable in the very long run of instantiating something like a good civilisation. How does this argument play into the calculation of the risk of nuclear conflict now? Both sides evidently thought this at the levels where the decision making was done during the Cold War as well. Might the overarching nihilism of our time - that is, the very lack of an ideological gloss to these new Cold War dynamics - shift that calculation? Who thinks life is worth living now anyway? Why not just end it?
Certainly, the readiness of pundits across the political spectrum to discuss the truly pathological idea of a No Fly Zone over Ukraine suggests this line of thought is buried somewhere in the mix.
Crucial to watch will be the responses of political outliers in the US to Russia’s threat of nuclear weapons readiness. At the time of writing, the US hasn’t responded in kind, but according to the NYT, Officials were still debating whether to alter the status of American nuclear forces.
In other news, bets on the collapse of the Putin regime and perhaps the Russian elite more widely are in. What signals this?
Switzerland, which for you zoomers out there was a kind of proto-Ethereum, a thing called a ‘country’ whose principal export was its credible political and legal neutrality, agreed to back all the sanctions imposed by the EU against Russia. Previously it had only agreed to UN security council imposed sanctions (required of it by international law). Obviously, there weren’t any of those against Russia in Crimea in 2014 because Russia sits on the security council and there won’t be any this time.
Reuters summarises the usual Swiss position as a “balance between showing solidarity with the West and maintaining its traditional neutrality that it said could make it a potential mediator.” Although the decision to back sanctions this time has been put down to popular pressure (Switzerland being balanced between its populace and its banking sector), the move placed in a long view might suggest something quite fundamental has shifted in the relationship between finance and geopolitics.
Much as the failure of insurance companies would be a sign of fundamental shifts in the risk landscape, the politicisation of Switzerland shows that neutrality - at least with respect to Russia - no longer pays. Perhaps this is just a sign of Russia’s diminishing importance for Switzerland in the long-run, but it seriously undermines the trust that other groups will place in Switzerland in the future. Are we moving back towards such stark Cold War dynamics that even the pretence of neutrality is no longer profitable?
Questions I am mulling right now:
What might a post-Putin Russia look like? If this is as tricky to conceptualise for him as it is for us, what off-ramps can there be?
More speculatively: did the Cold War actually have nothing to do with communism? Was it just another gloss for geopolitical competition? If the same dynamics can emerge now it certainly seems that way.
Until next time, good luck, and I hear potassium iodide is good for minimising radiation sickness.