The lesson of waiting till tomorrow
According to the proverbs, we should never put off till tomorrow the stitch that if sewn today will save nine in the future. In my own experience, by the time I realize that a stitch is needed, a good number of its siblings will also be required, but the principle is sound. Jesus may have believed that today’s troubles are sufficient, but that may have been with the unstated assumption that such troubles are in fact dealt with in a timely manner, rather than leaving them to carry over into tomorrow.
If only these bits of folk wisdom could have an influence on politics. As things currently stand, the leaders of many nations find seeing past the next election in democracies or past the present agitations of underlings in authoritarian regimes to be a task beyond their capacities. This is often the result of the mistrust that politicians have for the people, motivating those who are in charge to withhold information, which then makes the uninformed population ever more clamorous for all the wrong things, reinforcing the distrust that politicians have for the people. Thus a crisis that is looming on the horizon and not hovering directly overhead—take climate change and Russia’s stalled attempts in the 1990s to move toward a liberal democratic government as examples—gets any thoughts about solutions put off till later, since there are problems lesser in scope or potential consequence, but bright and shiny for voters that demand our attention today. How could we move energy generation to renewable methods that will only make life better in the decades to come when, say, we need to pass a law to forbid same-sex marriage right now?
Alternatively, we can put off to some vague point in the future such research and development of new ideas and technologies on the argument that they will provide no immediate benefit. The war in Vietnam or a program to feed hungry children looks to various constituencies as more important that missions to the Moon or a large space station, and while in many cases, the proposed programs are not mutually exclusive, even with constrained budgets, many people suffer from a lack of imagination and cannot see the value in long-term projects.
An illustration of this is to be found in Ming China’s withdrawal from exploration and trade in the 1430s. Anyone contemplating Earth from outside in our year 1400 would have seen China as having the greatest potential for uniting the planet politically and culturally, given the empire’s inventiveness, natural and human resources, and fleets. Retired British submarine commander, Gavin Menzies, was rightly lambasted over his claims, but his books do make an interesting kind of science fiction alternative history, an examination of the what ifs had the right wingers at that time—the Confucian scholars who saw reaching out beyond the boundaries of China as a threat to their power—not managed to wall off their country from outside influences and from participation in the external world.
I consider all of this as a lesson while watching the bizarre events in Russia on the 24th and 25th of June. The mutiny/coup/weekend festivities of the Wagner Group were perhaps predictable if we allow enough years for them to take place, since a mob boss such as Putin ought to expect that the thugs he has hired are likely to desire to replace him, assuming that the whole thing was not a bit of political theater to move Prigozhin and his fellow mercenaries into Belarus while keeping the motives obscure.
What motivates tyrants and the people who work for and eventually against them can be an interesting study in itself and is worth the time of those who have to fight them, but ultimately, ego, an exaggerated need for adulation, and panic explain a lot. This, however, is not what I am thinking about for present purposes. My concern here is what might have been had we in the west shown a greater interest in Russia’s attempted escape from authoritarianism in the early 1990s.
American foreign policy at the time bounced between a continued willingness to intervene if we could do so on the cheap and an attitude of “we broke it, and we’re now backing away to another aisle in hopes that no one will notice.” Thus our bumbling about in Somalia, our well planned fight against Iraq up to the point at which Saddam Hussein was defeated, at which time we reverted to incoherence, and our on-again-off-again interactions in the Balkans. And thus our desperate attempt to find someone, anyone, who could bring stability into Russia, settling at last on Vladimir Putin.
The Russian people have their own measure of blame to swallow here, having bought into Putin’s promise that if they would leave politics to him, he would guarantee their security and make them feel better about themselves as Russians. But as with so many cases over the decades since Woodrow Wilson decided to use American power as a messianic force, we have made bargains with strongmen so long as they mumble some right words in the direction of our current ideological stance without any regard to future consequences, the latter being seen as too difficult or, what is more often our feeling, too expensive to solve. This, of course, creates later problems that are then used as excuses for yet more ill-considered compromises with whatever strongman is available at that time. And on and on.
Some will accuse me of being an imperialist for what I am about to say, and so be it. Each nation ought to think through its own interests when interacting with other nations, and each nation has the right to do so. But more than that, for the sake of humanity, we should all have the goals of global cooperation and progress in mind as we act. Allowing tyrannies such as Putin’s to fester because they are presently convenient is an untenable policy choice when people, viruses, greenhouse gases, and ballistic missiles can circle the globe in minutes to hours and when we all can communicate with each other in an instant.
If we are to live up to the promise of liberal and social democracy, we have a role and a duty to promote those things on the world stage. We have too long shirked these, only to see the need to fulfill them grow ever more urgent. History’s lessons are often complicated by multiple causes and results, but one is clear: What needs doing today ought to be done today.