Pro-Democracy, Anti-Autocracy
We join the millions around the world whose hearts extend to the people of Ukraine, who are weathering a lethal attack ordered by authoritarian thug Vladimir Putin. We admire those in Russia who have bravely stood up and publicly protested the actions of a power-hungry tyrant fearful of democracy, and people in Berlin and other cities who have demonstrated solidarity.
Putin exemplifies the strongman ethos and conquering example typical of the Empire Age of Extraction. Of course, the West generally and the United States specifically have also played the game of nations, extracting land and human resources with imperial intent.
But no need for a facile one-to-one correspondence of sins. Leaders must make decisive choices; as we’ve stated from our very first blog post, we favor democracy over autocratic totalitarianism, collaborative leadership over top-down, fear-based rule. That’s why it’s imperative that democratic alliances across the globe employ short-term to long-term strategies to counter authoritarian to tribal regimes that use hard power to line the pockets of elites as their populations suffer.
In Ukraine, the short-term strategy thus far points to sanctions against Putin and Russian oligarchs, hitting them in their bank accounts, as well as military and strategic aid to Ukraine’s government to deter Russia’s intent to kill or depose Ukraine’s courageous President Volodymyr Zelensky and take over the capital of Kyiv and the entire country.
Long-term, part of the strategy should be a transition from fossil-fuel dependence so European powers aren’t as dependent on energy from Russia. The current sanctions are doing economic damage to the Russian economy and their elite’s collusion with Putin’s anti-democratic aims. With less dependence on energy from Russia, the European Union can act even more decisively to curb Russian advances in the region. More public and private investments in solar and battery technologies for distributed energy generation and battery storage to replace a centralized electric power system are necessary steps in this direction.
How the United States and the Western powers respond to the first war on European soil since World War II will determine the world order to come. As we envision a necessary transition from an Empire Age of Extraction to a potential Planetary Age of Freedom, our sincere hope is that the bloodshed and painful suffering from this war will, in retrospect, be seen as contributing to the latter in opposition to the former.