15 June — The Chinese Yuan, the Golden Horde, the Swiss Summit, Putin’s Demands, and Fight Club

A LOT HAS HAPPENED. Life moves pretty fast, as someone played by Matthew Broderick once said. If you don’t stop, well … Enough of that. I think the one fact/event that is sort of haunting me is the decision in the Russian Federation to make the Chinese yuan the main foreign currency, replacing the dollar and the euro. This was due to new Western sanctions rolled out during the recent G7 summit in Puglia, and it makes me wonder. Maybe these changes are not short term. Maybe Russia isn’t coming back. Maybe its flirtation with the West, backed by a soaring Scorpions’ guitar solo, is moribund. Maybe they are turning Japanese, or rather Chinese.

Maybe I should reduce my use of 1980s pop cultural references. I’ll try.

But seriously — to quote Phil Collins — maybe this is a major realignment underway. The Russian Federation, upset that it is not able to start wars in adjacent countries causing massive refugee issues in the European Union, has folded up and gone home, or rather gone east. It’s turned to the East. Maybe it has turned back to the east. Some say the roots of power in Moscow are the Kievan Rus and their Scandinavian ancestors. That’s Kyiv. Moscow used to be a vassal of the Golden Horde. Is it becoming one again?

I don’t know, but considering the Western security infrastructure is being drilled into place from Finland down to Turkey, and “Nordic neutrality” is history, it does seem like a security realignment is taking place. Perhaps even a cultural realignment. The Russians have looked inside themselves and determined that they are actually an Asian authoritarian enterprise. European values are alien. They like being told by one person what to do.

You have to admit China has benefited from this conflict. Russia grows more dependent. The West grows more distracted. Ukraine is a core conflict for the West. If Ukraine fails, and Russia’s army of convicts and rapists sweeps across those yellow fields toward Kyiv, about 30 million people might flood Poland, the Baltics, Germany, France, and surely the lovely Canary Islands. This is an existential threat/issue for the Europeans. If the Chinese do the same to Taiwan, it won’t make it easier to sleep at night, but it will take a while for those refugee boats to reach Europe.

That’s not the case for Europe and Ukraine.

Now the Ukrainians are hosting their summit in Switzerland. I suppose its outcome will be interesting. Putin issued his conditions for ending the war. He’s feeling charitable and will allow the Ukrainians to live, just as long as they give him all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia. These were territories he annexed in 2022, even though he did not control all of them. He still does not control all of them, and Russians are being slaughtered by the day to make this fake political reality look legitimate.

Or at least irreversible.

As such, this act of political theatre has come back to haunt Mr. Putin. One must wonder in the corridors of power in Moscow, if they even allow anyone to walk there, what his subordinates think of the boss’s big plans. One is starting to recall that scene in Fight Club when it becomes clear that Edward Norton is talking to himself, and his disciples are a bit concerned. Sometimes I think that this undoing of Russia could be some high-level great power play between the West and China. Because both benefitted.

We don’t think of it now, but considering I am writing this from Estonia, the West has grown considerably since the end of the Cold War. All of the old Warsaw Pact countries and three Soviet republics — the Baltics — are part of the West. It’s not a cosmetic extension. In some ways, they are even more developed now than the core of the old West, the Cold War-era West.

It wasn’t always this way though, you know. There was a time when one could travel from St. Petersburg to Helsinki to Stockholm and Copenhagen and on to Paris, and it was all part of a grand pre-World War I Europe, run by empires, which were cemented by shared lineages and cosmopolitans. Nikolai II largely spoke English to his immediate family. This antipathy between the “West” and the “East” was less pronounced. That is a part of the Soviets’ competition with countries that did not have such revolutions. Soviet suspicion of the West has been grafted onto Russian nationalism. But Russia is not by definition in opposition to the West. Only now it is.

And under its current leadership it seems set to continue in that direction.

East.