So it turns out that being at a turning point in history is nauseatingly dizzying, even here, in a quiet English suburb, a continent away from the horror and destruction that Vladimir Putin has only just begun to rain down upon the people of Ukraine.
Prognostications are cheap, but as the news came through in the early hours of the morning of air attacks by Russian forces along with reports of Putin’s deranged speech and his thinly veiled nuclear threat, it was clear that 24 February 2022 will be far more of a hinge moment than even 9/11.
The entire global calculus has changed. Anyone with the slightest sense of history will now be frenziedly recalculating their world view, and considering that what was until yesterday unimaginable, never mind impossible, may indeed come to pass. As we busily familiarise ourselves with the flashpoints, the question is what other parts of the globe might now be up for grabs by naked, criminal aggression.
From the Baltic states - where Lithuania has declared a state of emergency - to Taiwan to the Gulf, who can confidently say that anything is off the table? The United Nations may effectively be considered over, finally buried at the UN Security Council session chaired by Russia at the very moment that its forces had begun an unprovoked and insanely needless war upon a sovereign state.
The invasion of Ukraine denies us even the consolation of the theoretical predictability of rational self-interest in the international order. Russia seems doomed to economic ruin for the foreseeable future; the notion that the kleptocracy at least kept the Kremlin's oligarchs tethered to Western-led globalisation is gone and exposed as the lazy illusion it always was.
Just days ago, the clever analysis was that Putin had played a blinder, at least on his terms, deploying military personnel purely as a show of force that would allow him to cannibalise Ukraine bit by bit - Luhansk and Donetsk to add to Crimea, with more to come at his leisure - and quietly ensure Kiev would never be granted NATO membership. Which expert now would dare to venture with any degree of certainty an explanation for the actions of this strangely inhuman hybrid of tsar and KGB apparatchik who rules from the chilly isolation of his vast, echoing Kremlin chambers?
Whatever happens in the coming days and weeks in Ukraine, the collateral damage and fallout is certain to touch all our lives, however parochial our interests. Oil has just topped $100 and who knows where it will stop; natural gas prices too are skyrocketing into nosebleed territory; inflation will inevitably return with a vengeance unseen for half a century.
In other words, the economic order is being shaken just as the geopolitical order is quaking to its very foundations: a potent cocktail that is perfect fuel for the populism that has already loomed as a growing threat to democracy in recent years.
Truth be told, we’d long known who Putin was - look to Chechnya, Georgia and Crimea - but chose to ignore the inconvenient facts. We all know the parable of the frog in the pot of water, complacently oblivious to the growing heat. A simmering crisis has come to the boil, and if here in the West we’re rapidly starting to feel the heat, you know who’s the frog.
Ben Felsenburg is the JC’s acting deputy editor & foreign editor
