Can the Russian invasion in Ukraine change how the entire World is doing Business? It should and it will. It already started.
There is no better way to change than failure. total failure, destruction, losses. with failure, you get the commitment to change that you cannot get from simple problems, temporary issues, market downturns, or setbacks.
With failure, it is hard to justify your incompetence, blame someone else, try to fix things, set meetings, or draw a new strategy. If it is actually a failure and you didn’t just panic and drown in a glass of water, failure is there to remind you that to move forward, change must be radical.
Interconnections
The business world, the politics world, and the rest of the world run and interact in a nice balance, interacting with each other group usually in a delicate way, sometimes in a more aggressive way, and very rarely in a brutal way. Businesses offer products and services, citizens buy them, the politicians are happy. Entering in this nicely ‘hallmark’ image, a game-changer: a catastrophe, a failure. in this case and time, a War.
When war is conducted in a faraway land between small groups or countries, with no significant geopolitical value or economic gravity, the rest of the world usually send condolences, issues some statements using the United Nations, sends supplies and medicines, and when things cool off, they might issue some economic assistance to rebuild and move forward.
But when war includes the Biggest Country in the World, an economic and nuclear power with huge energy reserves, and a neighbour with significantly less power, the rest of the World is starting to get not hiccups but heart attacks. The situation becomes more complicated when the attacker is a major supplier (and customer) of the entire planet in vital commodities such as oil, gas, grains, and food. All the elements are present to create a difficult puzzle.
Russia’s invasion in Ukraine created a storm that the western world wished it could ignore, just like other ‘milder’ conflicts around the world. It put the so-called western civilization in an unprecedented dilemma to choose between oil and war, gas and casualties, wheat or bombs. and all these talks about the European continent being ‘war-free’ since the second world war is only believable by the blind, deaf, and uneducated. Do I need to remind you of the Balkans?
Strategy
From a strategy point, I need to give credit to Putin. and I only give credit to Putin and not Russia as a country because I strongly believe that not all Russians are in favor of this aggression. Putin chose the moment to invade, right at the time when the global economy is going through a logistical hell because of the pandemic, when every single country is trying to rebound, in economic and social terms, when NATO is fat, bold, weak, and disgraced by its recent humiliation in Afghanistan. For Putin, the moment is right to strike to gain more than he has to lose holding a lot of cards from a deck that is already short. He chose to advance now before the ‘controllers’ accumulate the stamina or willingness to react. Or so he thinks.
If Russia was just a big country with no nuclear weapons, low energy reserves, and minimal economic power you can be sure that the EU, NATO, and every other non-Russian affiliated country of the western world would jump in to fix the situation by playing the benevolent and righteous saviour of the planet. But today’s Russia is not weak. It is big, strong, cornered, rich, with a full money chest, and with a leadership that moves somewhat different from what we believe to be logical and politically correct.
So, how do all these fall in place to fix this situation and at the same time make us better?
It is like a kid that suddenly grows up, moves out of the house, and needs to rely on its own strength and brain to survive. it is like a lazy socialite that loses access to a rich dad and needs to go to work. it is like when you over-rely on ‘friends’ for support.
Even now, with all this destruction, the economic superpowers of the world are reluctant to take clear sides and measures in fear of getting cold or hungry if they react too strong, too humane, too civilized.
War, this war, will change the business world as we know it. it will change it from a world depending on oil and energy tycoon countries to a world that promotes (finally) more aggressively the renewable energy solution that we need. This war will again bring in the discussion of self-sufficiency instead of global trade and relationships. This war will measure up how economic sanctions can be as lethal or preventive as brute force. This brutality will give a lesson to politicians, countries, citizens, to stop half-solutions and go all in.
This war will at some point end. and what will be the lesson learned? Will this failure based on the fear of economic stability make us any better than yesterday? It will. or at least I hope it will. And for this war to be the great catalyst, unfortunately, we will need more escalation, more vivid images, more loss, more blood. Unless this conflict becomes a total failure for the way things are, any possible countermeasures, solutions, and political/diplomatic/economic successes will be temporary, shallow, and insufficient.
Unless this conflict escalates to a World War where everything, including this article, will be redundant and irrelevant, the outcome of this war, I believe, will make us all, in the long term, better and stronger.
The western world has a rare opportunity through this catastrophe to finally adopt renewable energy as a solution and not a ‘hippie-MBA’ call to save some river or forest. We will become suspicious of those bearing gifts, not as a self-isolation practice but as a way to self-sufficiency and own resources utilization. This failure based on our fear to lose our comforts will lead us, as Europeans, and the rest of the World to a changed new world. This situation can be the wake-up call from celebrity presidents like Trump, bully leaders like Putin, coward fellowships like the EU.
