WE ARE LIVING IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL FRAGILITY / THE FINANCIAL TIMES MAGAZINE

We are living in an era of global fragility

Today’s world is like a giant train set. If any piece of track malfunctions, the global train can derail

Simon Kuper

© Harry Haysom

Today’s world is like a giant, fragile train set. 

From about 1990 to 2008, as China, India and the former Soviet bloc joined the global economy, we essentially took almost every unused piece of track out of the box and joined them all together.

The new enlarged circuit turbocharged global trade. 

From 1992 to 2008, Russian gas exports rose nearly eightfold. 

From 2000 until Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian corn production jumped more than tenfold. 

New containers made shipping cheaper. 

Humanity had never lived so well, nor so long. 

There was just one problem: if any piece of track malfunctioned, the global train could derail. 

And that’s been happening ever more often, most recently with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

We’re living in the age of fragility.

Just since 2001, inter­connectedness has produced four serious derailments. 

First, a Saudi-bred perversion of Islam killed nearly 3,000 Americans and prompted misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that eventually helped send the US into an internal breakdown. 

Then, subprime mortgages in the US sparked a global financial crisis. 

Next, a virus in Wuhan, exacerbated by Chinese secrecy, shut down the world. 

Now Putin’s late-life crisis is decimating Ukraine, closing off Russia again and making two human necessities — food and fuel — unaffordable for many.

Contrast this with the era when these countries were closed: their implosions, such as the killing by Stalin and Mao of millions of their own people, scarcely affected the outside world. 

Indeed, hardly any foreigners even heard the screams. 

Given the fragility of today’s system, you’d want a globally appointed stationmaster, but that’s become inconceivable.

The strongman grows old, isolated and starts obsessing about his place in history. 

More than boring economic growth, he seeks greatness

After 20 years of turmoil, we’re all deglobalisers now, including even the politicians mocked by nativists as “globalists”. 

Trade peaked as a percentage of the global economy in 2008. 

Now Joe Biden promises “to make sure everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails is made in America from beginning to end. 

All of it.” 

Emmanuel Macron wants France to make its own pharmaceuticals. 

The EU pledges to wean itself off Russian oil, gas and coal by 2027. 

Each new bloc — the west, and China with its unreliable Russian junior partner — aims to build its own, smaller, self-contained train set.

Even the globalisation of the mind is being reversed: Russia is following China in shutting out the global internet. 

And lord knows when the pre-2020 hordes of Chinese tourists and students will return to the west. 

Deglobalisation is already making us poorer. 

Just as many Europeans in the late 1940s remembered 1913 as a golden age of plenty, so our generation may yearn forever for 2007.

But global fragility will persist despite deglobalisation. 

That’s mostly because of strongmen, their nukes and climate change.

As my FT colleague Gideon Rachman notes in his new book, The Age of the Strongman, Putin is not a one-off but a harbinger. 

Several other strongmen are likewise trying to set themselves up as leaders for life — most notably China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and next perhaps Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman or India’s Narendra Modi.

The strongman grows old, isolated and starts obsessing — as Putin did — about his place in history. More than boring economic growth, he seeks greatness. 

And he’s increasingly likely to be nuclear-armed. 

India, Pakistan and North Korea all first tested workable nuclear bombs between 1998 and 2015. 

Iran and Saudi Arabia could be next. 

If the strongman decides to press the button, who’s to stop him? 

As Rachman points out, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia have all shifted away from collective leadership (politburos, vast numbers of Saudi royals) to one man’s whims.

The Russian army’s incompetence in Ukraine may only heighten dangers. 

Six weeks ago, Putin thought he had a strong military. 

Now, to adapt the cold war jibe about the USSR, Russia looks like Burkina Faso with nukes plus a brutal artillery. 

That could encourage Putin to use his one unbeatable weapon: nuclear. 

We may, God forbid, start getting used to isolated nuclear attacks, after which we move on, like after the atomic bombs of 1945.

The next derailment could be Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, especially if he then lets his old pal Putin have eastern Europe. 

In that case, the world’s two largest economies and strongest militaries might both have Russia’s back. 

But other global threats haven’t gone away since this war began. 

We’re just ignoring them. 

In an age of constant crisis, the urgent shoves aside the important, which in our case is climate change. 

I don’t see how we fix this.