While Europe complains about the summer heat, the danger of geopolitical overheating is hardly noticed by the masses. Can new generations ensure cooling and prevent nuclear armageddon?
Mark Galeotti, a British Russian scholar whose books and articles are always a pleasure to read, recently referred Viewer To the Soviet joke with Leonid Brezhnev. Beard joke, but still nice.
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the Soviet leader was said to be so demented with eyebrows like Bird’s Nests that he began his opening speech with the words “OOOOO” until a hastily approaching aide announced he was reading rings from the Olympic logo.
Anyone who watches Russian state television, which I still suffer regularly, could have seen in recent weeks how the two presidential candidates’ old age was mocked in the subsequent fateful televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. “It’s like we’re watching a senior citizen reality show.”
Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate in the election race, they are downright racist and sexist in Moscow’s Ostankino TV studios. “A monster with a nuclear button is worse than a monkey with a grenade,” said one intellectual leader unashamedly.
The Kremlin is officially neutral on the upcoming US elections. But of course he would like to see Donald Trump in the White House. Although there are reportedly growing doubts in Russian circles that Trump will once again deliver as president what he previously promised: a quick end to the war in Ukraine through any geopolitical or other horse-trading. Isn’t it great that Europe has now become largely dependent on expensive American LPG? And the American arms industry, that profitable crown jewel of the leader of the free world, is running like a charm, isn’t it?
Elderly Kremlin leaders
After each revolution – traditionally a matter for the young – aging usually begins. Consolidation, stagnation. The young men and women, often of privileged backgrounds, who took to the barricades in 1968 for a more just world, against patriarchy and empire, remained to the end (and sadly still) clinging to the golden towers of power, the prestige of money. .
Things were and are not different in the Soviet Union and its immediate successor, Russia. Even there, power was always linked to status, wealth, and individual security. That’s why the leaders stayed put until the end. Out of fear of ostracism or persecution. Not only does Putin not know this, he and his clan of septuagenarians continue this tradition with gusto.
Of the list of elderly Kremlin leaders of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev, only the last resigned voluntarily. Well, more or less. The rest remained in power until their deaths, with the exception of Khrushchev, who was ousted by the Politburo in 1964 mainly because he had brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster two years earlier with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
A lost generation
In a recent beautiful double interview NRC with Robert Serry, the former ambassador to Moscow and Kiev, and Sergei Vasiliev, a Dutch professor of international law of Russian origin, the latter complains that his circle of 30-40-year-olds left in Russia are lost. generation. “They should actually have the power now in Russia to build a future for themselves and their children.”
Serry rightly points out that Ukraine is also dealing with the lost generation, but in a different way:
I don’t know anyone anymore who hasn’t lost someone in the war. It cuts to that. Fortunately, civil society there like never before. The war has made the country a close-knit nation. Therefore, young Ukrainians are not a lost generation, even if they have it through a more difficult one must learn.
Meanwhile, the 71-year-old quasi-gerontocrat Vladimir Putin, who was excluded from the Paris Olympic party, is warning the United States and Germany against a Cold War-like arms race. In response to Washington’s plans to redeploy long-range missiles on German territory in 2026, relations are now worse than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to both Russian and American diplomats.
Nuclear Armageddon
Although much of Europe is once again complaining about this summer’s heat and advocating a tougher approach to climate change, this overheating at the geopolitical level seems unlikely to reach the masses. We can imagine 50 degree heat on the beaches of France, Spain and Italy. Nuclear Armageddon, the end of civilization, the end of the world, no.
Even though I myself struggle with oat milk intolerance, I enjoy reading about the so-called “oat milk elites”. Privileged people in their twenties and thirties in Amsterdam drinking natural wine, sneaking sourdough bread, riding e-bikes and flying wildly around the world. Consultants, bankers, marketers, successful creatives who through their origins, connections, talents and efforts (or a combination thereof) gradually take over the rest of the country. As I read about these future inhabitants of the golden towers, I keep sighing, “Oh, peace in Russia and Ukraine soon! So a new generation, an elite like oat milk, will come to power there too.
Many oat milkers may think of MAD
a new shoe brand, a cafe or a music band. But for decades it meant this: Mutually assured destruction – inevitable mutual destruction in the event of a nuclear war between the (then) United States and the Soviet Union.
Oat milk elites and their less privileged contemporaries hold the future. But to secure this, the world needs the elderly now more than ever. People who not only have deep historical knowledge and awareness, but above all experience. Diplomats like Robert Serry.