Where We Are This Week
Putin and Kim make a buddy comedy, and I lose all credibility by making jokes only I will laugh at.
The hour is running late my friends. I had intended to write a piece about Juneteenth and a unique piece of history from Tennessee but as I storyboarded the essay in my mind I realized it would require much more bandwidth than the early AM hours allot for.
Therefore, unfortunate as it may be, you’re left with my fever dream ramblings of World War III and 2000s Nickelodeon programming. What’s that? Your interest is piqued? See you on the other side — and soon!
World War III Watch
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, a third world war is inevitable. It’s not as if I want one, or if I’m cheering the next one on from the sidelines. I’m not death-obsessed like many are in the culture, I’m just being realistic.
On a walk sometime after the Ukraine-Russia began in earnest and citizens shook the world over from all of the saber-rattling, I talked to my wife about the prospect of nuclear war. Yes, pleasant conversations are always to be had whilst we listen to the cooing of a small child in the gentle breeze.
It’s just the odds if you think about it. Man creates weapon, man uses weapon, man never uses weapon again?
We’ve had eighty years or so of avoiding nuclear holocaust but all it takes is one maniac at the helm of a nuclear power to launch us into an end-times scenario. Pats on the back are well deserved thus far, but America elected Donald Trump and Joe Biden consecutively and is poised to send another one of these buffoons to the White House at the end of the year. And that’s just the United States.
Russia has Putin. China has Xi Jinping. North Korea has Rocket Man, and Iran has the Ayatollah. Rationality and diplomacy deteriorate rapidly as you get to the end of that list. Oh, and India has Modi — all nuclear powers.
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but if all the West can muster in response is the revolving door of the Prime Minister in the UK, Macron in France, and the lumbering ficus that is Joe Biden, we’re toast.
History errs on my side of the argument as well. As a species, we’ve never been that apt at avoiding conflicts between major powers. A third world war isn’t out of the question solely because the ‘last’ one was in the last century. Plenty of wars have been fought throughout history that, if you allow for the contemporaneous conception of the ‘world’, would have been considered global affairs — the wars of Alexander the Great and the conquests of the Mongols were all-encompassing affairs.
More recently, Napoleon embroiled the entire West and parts of the Middle East in his exploits, and the Seven Years’ War is widely considered the first ‘world war’ as it shaped the colonial empires that would touch the majority of the earth’s continents for the next three hundred years.
It’s not pessimism. It’s an attempt to understand human nature, and a modest attempt to ascertain what is coming next based on what has happened before. Having said all of this, World War III isn’t fait accompli — but if one were around the corner, it might look a little like this:
The Fairly Odd Couple
Every once in a while I craft a piece of artistry that is so perfect, so nuanced, so topical that it demands to be explained in detail.
This next article is about the burgeoning relationship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean cool-guy dictator Kim Jong Un. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided to title this section The Fairly Odd Couple. You see, the egg-shaped man with the funny haircut and the ex-KGB agent don’t seem like they should be friends, but they are.
The turn of phrase I so expertly quipped in the aforementioned headline is a combination of the Nickelodeon series of my youth The Fairly OddParents and the 1968 film The Odd Couple — which I’ve never seen and with whose premise I’m only vaguely familiar. It makes sense because it’s odd, but only fairly odd due to the circumstances and how despotic both rulers are. It’s current, it’s hip, it’s on-the-nose.
At your next dinner or cocktail party, you may find yourself remarking about a fascinating article you read on the complexity of 21st-century geopolitics and how the return of the archetypal strongman is both feared and lusted after in polities in the West and the East. Your companion, rapt with your astute comprehension of matters far and near and the cool way you eat the Caesar salad (with your bare hands) will implore you to divulge the methods with which you came to be so wise.
Naturally, you point them to this very newsletter — thereby making you the object of envy of those in attendance. The Common Denominator thanks you for your continued patronage and unrivaled patience.
On Wednesday, reformed communist Vladimir Putin and our respected comrade Kim Jong Un announced they were going steady. Previously, in this newsletter, we discussed North Korea’s supplying of Russia with ammunition and military materiel.
Now, only a couple of years after committing to a ‘no limits’ relationship with China, Russia and the Hermit State have agreed on a suicide pact deal to provide their counterpart with aid in the event either one of them were to suffer an attack. Though the intimate details of the agreement have not been released, the elevated rhetoric regarding it is sure to be matched with concrete obligations to one another.
The last decade or so of geopolitics has been like watching the Monstars assemble in real-time. (I know I’ve made this reference before but no one is stopping me from doing it again.) The BRICS nations are slowly expanding to include other member countries and to circumvent the United States’ sphere of influence. At first, the only unifying element of the partnership was their contempt for the West and America.
Now, however, a new, broader alliance is forming in part due to NATO expansion, Russia’s imposed isolation, and four years of foreign policy failures. Iran, China, and North Korea have all been providing aid to Russia in its war against Ukraine (aka Democracy!) but the language surrounding China’s relationship with the transcontinental nation and the recently announced partnership with North Korea read a lot more like NATO’s Article 5 than a promise to just be BFFs.
If you’re curious, Iran and North Korea have been ‘getting away’ with aiding the war effort so to speak because they’re already sanctioned nations, what’s a little more time-out? China, however, has been only aiding Russia with ‘dual use’ items. Imagine that! The Biden Administration maintains that China would be subject to hefty financial penalties if it started distributing weapons to the embattled nation.
I’m sure that’s the straw that would break the camel’s back. I’m also sure that no loophole or leniency would be granted to the country that makes our medicine, our technology, and all of our favorite slave-labored wardrobe items.
Speaking of slave labor, North Korea has been sending workers to Russia as a form of foreign aid, which, if you know anything about North Korea’s notorious foreign exchange program, they only ship out those who have been sentenced to work camps. So, for those keeping score, add slavery to the growing list of Russia’s grievous sins.
On a positive note, the whole thing smacks of desperation from both parties. North Korea will partner with anyone who’ll have them since their only diplomatic relations of note are with China and Sweden when they stole a bunch of Volvos in the 1970s. Kim Jong Un is the type of guy who will conduct missile tests, not tell anyone, and fire them straight over South Korea and Japan sending the citizens of each nation scrambling for cover. Hitching your wagon to that loose cannon can only mean you’re running out of options.
Things aren’t exactly sanguine amongst this inchoate axis of evil. Venezuela is still threatening to invade Guyana. Russia, in addition to killing dissidents and political opposition, is conducting military exercises with Cuba in the Caribbean (some habits die harder than others) and China is literally and figuratively circling Taiwan. Thankfully, Iran hasn’t been up to anything dastardly as of late.
I nearly forgot to mention that North Koreans may have ‘inadvertently’ crossed the DMZ into its southern neighbor prompting South Korean troops to fire warning shots at its long-separated brethren. In response to Wednesday’s announcement, South Korean officials have suggested they will reconsider its current ban on supplying aid to Ukraine due to North Korea's increased involvement. Soon, we will have the answer to the age-old question: how many proxies can a proxy war accommodate?
The global stage is rife with conflict that could easily spill over from local entanglements to much broader engagements. Some may disregard the news coming from our two new lovebirds as nothing new or nothing more than a symbolic show of defiance to the West. Some might not see it as a very big deal. The guy who willingly made a children’s cartoon reference in precisely this article does, however, and you can take that to the bank.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA