It's good that the world is so intertwined: if they really want it, Europe and America can quickly change how other countries fare.
When the Russian regime has only limited access to its foreign exchange reserves, the value of the ruble falls rapidly, Moscow people queue up in front of ATMs, rich Russians suddenly fear for villas, luxury yachts and foreign accounts, foreign companies cancel investments or divest business and on platforms like Facebook or Twitter Telling those affected directly what is happening to them in this war – then all of this is possible because delicate connections have been established around the world that link your own well-being with the well-being of many others.
That is why sanctions such as those the West has now launched are possible.
Taken on their own, the mechanisms behind them have fundamentally provided and continue to provide more stability.
This core of globalization hopes, once packaged in maxims such as “change through trade” or put forward much earlier by Immanuel Kant, still applies.
At the very least, it cannot be concluded, as is sometimes done in the face of the current horror, that the world would automatically be a more peaceful place today if post-Cold War Western Europeans and Americans slowed trade with Russia or did not let China into the WTO had.
Unfortunately it's not that easy.
It matters who specializes in what
Are the measures now decided enough to stop the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Vladimir Putin?
Probably not.
Globalization achieves a lot, but it does not protect against madness.
It does not protect against powerful people who (can) walk over tens of thousands of corpses or reject any form of constructive cooperation.
Hopefully those who in the recent past basically only propagated more free trade as the central goal of German foreign, domestic, development, financial and economic policy and believed that even the basest despot only had to live up to the promises of the been taught about the international division of labor in order to turn into a flawless democrat.
In addition, it was and is of course not irrelevant anyway
Recently, some discussions about game theory strategies with which Germany or the EU could remain credible were somewhat misguided.
This failed to recognize that Putin has long shown little interest in words and deeds in Nash equilibria or Pareto improvements: In the struggle for geopolitical power and control, it is not “win-win situations” that are attractive, but such further developments in which the own position improved and at the same time worsened that of the other.
And now?
As is well known, political and economic decision-makers around the world have long since reacted to the much harsher global political environment that has reached a hideous new level of escalation with the Russian attack on Ukraine.
The USA and the EU are now promoting key industries such as the semiconductor industry and technologies such as artificial intelligence more, are taking a closer look at supply chains and are investigating threatening dependencies based on the historically documented certainty that technological and economic advances seamlessly merge into political and military power opportunities.
Even Berlin, which has long found it more difficult than its more experienced partners in Paris, London or Washington, is now taking action.
The additional billions promised to the Bundeswehr are right and important.
The Federal Republic needs the most advanced defense systems that protect against AI-based air forces and cyber attacks, for example.
And the German or at least the EU economy must be able to produce and master the most important components for this.
That costs what it costs.
In any case, another figure of thought that is still widespread and can also be found in the pandemic or in monetary policy does not help: the idea of a “return to normality”.
World history knows no reverse gear.