Who will be the winners and losers from the Ukraine crisis?
A stark question, given that one possible answer involves the potential physical devastation of much of continental Europe, and Britain too.
As things stand, though, there are still many ways in which the ground war could play out.
And they are not easy to predict.
Which is why in this new and frightening circumstance, the fabled modelling expertise of Imperial College London is nowhere to be seen, even though many of the people who supported Imperial’s conclusions about covid are the same ones who are pushing for a more aggressive posture towards Russia. ‘Political science’? – non-sequitur.
So, what then, can we say?
First, whatever happens in this war, the West will end up weaker.
That may not seem obvious. After all, a scenario in which a no-fly zone is instituted and a hot war precipitated might yield initial successes for the might of NATO.
But how would the West actually win?
Even if it pushed the Russians out of Ukraine, who says the Russians would stop fighting?
In fact, would they ever stop fighting?
It’s worth remembering that Russians have in the past made excellent partisans, so even if NATO and its allies did take ground in Russia or in ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine, their ability to hold it is open to question.
More seriously, there’s the wider question of legitimacy.
Outside of the western media, memories of Iraq and Afghanistan loom large. Maybe the Russian invasion of Ukraine was wrong, but no-one not in India, or in China, which combined represent most of the world’s populations, are prepared to put up with any lecturing of the west.
This wider insouciance towards western posturing has thus far gone largely unremarked by the US and European media.
But there may soon be a broader awakening.
Populists on the American right and left have both been noticeably much quicker to wake up to the potential iniquities of a war with Russia than they were to the threat the covid crisis posed to civil liberties.
Which means there might be an organized opposition to war, sooner.
It also adds the interesting possibility that of a largely right wing anti-war movement might emerge in the US - a mirror image of the original left wing anti-war movement of the 1960s. That 1960s anti-war movement, which was of course also wrapped up with civil rights, features now as a major cornerstone in the foundation myths of the American liberal left.
But the liberal left weren’t in power then. They are now. They are the establishment, and it’s right wingers and populists who run the counter-culture. It’s an irony not lost on the likes of the left’s Jimmy Dore or the right’s Tucker Carlson.
It may not be long before their voices stir up a broader movement.
After all, history can now be had at the touch of a Youtube button, and memories of previous wars still linger in any case.
When the initial shock wears off, Americans will remember how Vietnam forced them to upend and ultimately destroy the gold standard.
That move heralded the rise of fiat currency and a period of high-order inflation. Sound familiar?
But now, even the fiat system seems to be coming to an end, as everybody from the lowliest citizen to nuclear states has become vulnerable to financial cancellation, with the likes of the owner of Chelsea football club now rubbing shoulders with Canadian truckers and Russian Mastercard users.
Russia, inevitably, will be pushed into a new financial bloc with China. But don’t rush out and buy the Little Red Book quite yet.
Russia’s overall economy is worth slightly less than the economy of Texas, so in terms of financial firepower it’s overly significant. What’s more, if Russian warmongering accelerates a face-off between the West and the rest, the Chinese will take significant incoming fire.
On the sidelines, meanwhile, sits India, watching as its potential adversaries in the twenty-first century global economy set about destroying each other.
The western media has been noticeably quiet about India’s position in regard to the Russian invasion, but the Indians themselves are untroubled by their nuanced position.
In 1948 India emerged from its colonial status as a functioning democracy that leaned leftwards enough to be on good terms with Russia for much of the second half of the twentieth century. And that relationship, though not often highlighted by the world’s international power-brokers, still has resonance.
Who in the West now remembers that Coca Cola and McDonalds were locked out of India for decades, and were only allowed access at around the same time they were more famously penetrating the Russian market for the first time, at the end of the Cold War?
India may be English-speaking, and share with the West a suspicion of China. But it can also stand on its own two feet. It has a fast-growing economy, the sixth largest in the world, and is liable shortly to overtake the UK.
Its military is not to be trifled with either.
The Indians, of course, inherited much of their army culture from the British, and it’s stood them in reasonable stead over the years in flashpoints with Pakistan and China.
What’s less well-remembered in the UK is that India carried the British war effort against Japan between 1941 and 1945 almost on its own. In other words, India has been a regional power for a long time, and arguably a great one too.
The only reason it doesn’t have a seat at the top table of the United Nations is because of an accident of timing – the UN was set up three years before independence.
And this new realignment in the global order may ring the changes on that score too, assuming that the UN has any relevance left at all.
And India has one final factor going in its favour.
In the great conflicts of the twentieth century the powers that did most of the fighting, Britain, France, Germany and Russia, didn’t emerge as the ultimate winners.
On the contrary, it was the up-and-coming economic power that was able to sit on the sidelines for large portions of the two world wars, the USA, that did best. The circumstances are somewhat different, here. But there are similarities too.