In 1979, the United States was preparing to witness the last total solar eclipse of the millennium. A prominent news agency’s TV host, while wrapping up his show, said something that appeals to me even though I’m a full three generations younger than him. He said,” It will not be until August 21, 2017, that another eclipse will be visible from North America. That’s 38 years from now. May the shadow of the moon fall on a world at peace.”
It’s easy to understand why he would say such a thing. The 20th century had witnessed the two most horrific wars in human history. It’s kinda ironic that my previous statement conveniently ignored the nuclear tensions between the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union. Back in the day, the West went to sleep at night not knowing if it would wake up the next morning — the threat of the Cold War was real. By the late 1970’s, tensions were still high, but had significantly reduced since the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the Vietnam War and several other brush-fire conflicts showed that humanity was just one big war away from losing the plot. Given the historical context of the scenario, the TV host was hoping against hope that 40 years would be long enough for humanity to realize the mistakes it had made and work towards world peace. Unfortunately, his wish of a world at peace was left unfulfilled.
Calling today’s world a peaceful place is like calling Fortnite a genre of dance moves. To me, those correlations are plain stupid. It is true that progress has been made towards achieving world peace but we are one bad decision away from a global disaster. The presence of several ultra-powerful mega-nations does not help this notion.
Take Russia, for example. One would think that the fall of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union would have sent the Russians back decades in terms of development and global influence, but they managed to retain most of their arsenal — both militarily and politically. Some people claim that Russia is in a state of political flux, but when the polls rolled around a couple months back, there were only 3 candidates who stood a chance of winning the election — Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Putin. The Russian President enjoys tremendous support from most of the population. Russia is back in business.
But how does the current Russian Revolution affect the world today? Well, we live on a planet where humankind is one bad decision away from catastrophe, and bad decisions aren’t exactly in short supply if we consider the historical track-record of humans messing up. There are a few people who believe that the United States’ days as a superpower are numbered, but this belief is misguided. The US is easily the most powerful country in the world. US-Russia relations are not very cold right now, but both sides are wary of each other. Both of these nations have developed advanced digital armories and the fear is that one day, tensions will rise to such an extent that cybernetic war will ensue and US-Russia relations could go back to the aforementioned Cuban Missile Crisis.
It is quite clear at this point that the world is nowhere near the age-old goal of universal peace. The modern-day Russian Revolution does nothing to deny this notion. We may feel that by forming trade unions and diplomatic alliances we are promoting unity and integration, but this could be counterproductive. For example, Europe was once a war-zone between the traditional European powers, but these countries put aside their differences to form the European Union. The EU may have united (most of) Europe, but divisions still exist and the member states do disagree over major policies- namely the refugee crisis, Brexit and a whole lot of other issues. Importantly, the EU has replaced a bunch of powerful yet small nations with a single, superpower-worthy bloc. The EU is now powerful enough to assert its own influence, independent of the will of foreign agents. Europe is now able to stand up for its own interests.
A similar scenario has played out in China. The Chinese groomed their economy to take over the manufacturing world, thus making themselves an economic superpower. The by-product of this is that their military might and global influence has also been boosted. China is now strong enough to hold its own against any country.
The endgame from the growth of these blocs is that we have 2 major schools of thought prevalent in the world. The US and the EU tend to have similar views on many topics and may support each other in the case of a conflict. The same applies for Russia and China. However, we have 4 superpowers now and this two way conflict could quickly become a four way battle for global supremacy. This is a stark difference to the world of the 1970’s, where the US and USSR were the only two superpowers. Now, the stakes have doubled, and so have the participants. The outcome of this all, is that peace in our time remains a dream unfulfilled.
Analytical Abhiram 