His war in Ukraine is a foretaste of the struggle for resources we will all face should Putin and other fossil fuel oligarchs get the upper hand. Precisely because Ukraine resisted, important economies have accelerated their green transition. Should Ukraine be abandoned and lose, it seems unlikely that there will be another chance to hold back fossil fuel oligarchy and save the climate. More broadly, Putin's idiotic nation that there is no Ukraine is an example of the kind of oligarchical fantasy wastes time and destroys life as we try to confront the world's actual problems.
Global hunger is an important scenario for catastrophic global suffering in an age of drastic inequality and resource strife. Here no country is more important than Ukraine. For more than two thousand years, since the ancient Greeks, the fertile soil of Ukraine has fed neighboring lands and civilizations. Ukraine today is capable of feeding something like half a billion people. Russia's war against Ukraine has also been a hunger war. Russia has mined farms, flooded others by destroying a critical dam, targeted grain-storage facilities, and blockaded the Black Sea to prevent exports. In 2023, Ukraine was able to win an astonishing victory, clearing the western Black Sea of the Russian navy, and opening lanes for export of grain. Because the Ukrainians did this on their own, it has hardly been covered in our press. But it is a huge achievement. People in the Near East and Africa are being fed who might otherwise starve. If Ukraine is allowed to fall, all of this can be reversed, and suffering and war will spread to those vulnerable and critical areas.
From a different perspective, people fear that our world can end as a result of artificial intelligence, digital propaganda, and the collapse of the human contact needed for political decency. For a decade now, Russia has been in the forefront of digital manipulation. Its first invasion of Ukraine, in 2014, was successful chiefly as a hybrid war, in which it found vulnerable minds in the West and inserted useful memes -- ones which are still in use today. And Russia does find backers today among the digital oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, who has bent his personal account and indeed his entire platform to become an instrument of Russian propaganda. That said, the Ukrainians have, this time, shown how this can be resisted. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi and other Ukrainian leaders, by taking personal risks in time of danger, have reminded us that there is a real world. And Ukrainian civil society has this time taken a playful approach to new media, deconstructing Russian propaganda and reminding us of the human side -- and the human stakes.
Perhaps the most insidious calamity we face is one of doubt: we cease to believe in ourselves, as human beings with values, who deserve to rule themselves in the system we call democracy. For most of this century, democracy has been in decline, and this decline has been accompanied by a discourse of passivity and a lack of resolve. Russia's attack on Ukraine -- the rare event of an armed autocracy seeking to destroy a peaceful democracy by military force -- was a turning point in this history. Which way we will all turn remains to be seen. By resisting on the battlefield, Ukraine has, for the time being anyway, preserved its own democracy, and given new hope to democracies in
general. There is nothing automatic about democracy. People have to believe that they should rule. And this will always involve some risk. By taking great risks for the right values, Ukrainians can and do encourage others around the world. If Ukrainians are killed, maimed, and forced to retreat as a result of U.S. policy, everyone is demoralized -- including us.
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