The people of Ukraine are also reminding us that democracy is the single most important legacy we have inherited from previous generations who strengthened it and who risked their lives to preserve it. You may have to fight a war to protect democracy from those who would destroy it. And stand up against the powerful who don’t want your voices heard. Or organize thousands to make your voices heard. You may have to knock on hundreds of doors to get out the vote. You may have to march and protest and even risk your life so others may vote, as did iconic civil rights leaders like the late John Lewis and Martin Luther King. You may have to stand in line for hours to vote, as did tens of thousands of Black people in America’s 2020 election. Ukrainians are reminding us that democracy survives only if people are willing to sacrifice for it. They are also displaying with inspiring clarity that democracy cannot be taken for granted. Meanwhile, Ukrainians are showing that Trump’s and Putin’s efforts to turn back the clock on the 21st century can only be addressed with a democracy powerful enough to counteract autocrats like them. But modernity came with democracy, and democracy with modernity.īoth Trump and Putin have shown how wrong I was on this, too. Sure, petty dictatorships would remain in some retrograde regions of the world. It seemed to me that totalitarian regimes didn’t stand a chance in the new technologically driven, globalized world. I formed this belief in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union had imploded and China was still poor. Civilian casualties in Ukraine are mounting. I was persuaded by specialists in defense strategy that it no longer made sense for sophisticated powers to target civilians. Trump and Putin have convinced me I was mistaken.Īdvances in warfare, such as cyber-warfare and precision weapons, will minimize civilian casualties. I assumed this was a phenomenon of the 20th century and that 21st-century governments, even totalitarian ones, would constrain tyrants. Putin is now resorting to dangerous nuclear brinksmanship.Ĭivilization will never again be held hostage by crazy isolated men with the power to wreak havoc. I bought the conventional wisdom that nuclear war was unthinkable. Major nuclear powers will never risk war against each other because of the certainty of “mutually assured destruction”. While skills and innovation are critical, land still provides access to critical raw materials and buffers against potential foreign aggressors.

Competition among nations would therefore be over the development of cutting-edge inventions. I thought that in the “new economy”, land was becoming less valuable than technological knowhow and innovation.

Putin has also cut off Russian citizens from the truth about what’s occurring in Ukraine.Īdvanced nations will no longer war over geographic territory. Trump filled the media with lies, as has Putin. Tyrants could no longer keep their people in the dark or hoodwink them with propaganda. I assumed that emerging digital technologies, including the internet, would make it impossible to control worldwide flows of information and knowledge. Nations can no longer control what their citizens know.

(Putin’s aggression has also ignited an inspiring patriotism in Ukraine.) Both Putin and Trump have exploited xenophobic nationalism to build their power. I expected globalization would blur borders, create economic interdependence among nations and regions and extend a modern consumer and artistic culture worldwide.

Remind me next century