Two Thoughts on Ukraine

For your edification, two remarks from Ross Douthat’s New York Times column today. They might feel somewhat familiar, but that is not a reason for not pondering them.

The first involves international interdependence, the linkage of economies around the world.

As we have noted, and as many others have noted, our government is now using this interdependence to punish Russia. No one really knows how this will work out. Many are suspecting that it will not work out to our advantage:

First, globalization has gone further than it ever did in the 19th century. The scale of our interdependence is sometimes exaggerated, but it’s still extraordinary, and so is the scale of wealth at stake in any sustained disruption of the world system. That doesn’t mean that some strands in the vast web cannot be unwound. But to have it happen suddenly and wrenchingly, as is happening to Russia at the moment, is a peril greater than the empire builders of the 19th century faced.

And then there is the replacement question. Both Ukraine and Russia are not replacing their citizens. It means that the birth rate is insufficient to maintain the population.

As has been pointed out, Ukraine, besides being the poorest country in Europe also counts as the one where young people are most apt to leave. This is not the portrait of a thriving democracy with a thriving modern economy.

To be fair, Douthat remarks that Russia is also not replacing its population at a sufficient level.

Then, too, today’s great powers are much older than their antecedents, lacking the youthful population that past empires relied upon for energy, creativity and cannon fodder. As the British writer Ed West has noted, the war in Ukraine is a war between two societies with fertility levels far below replacement, in which families might lose everything when they lose a single son. That raises questions both about how long such a war can be sustained and also what happens in the aftermath.

A good question, rarely addressed.