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Thomas Friedman
By Thomas L. Friedman
Opinion Columnist
This article has been updated to reflect new developments.
There are many ways to explain the two biggest conflicts in the world today, but my own shorthand has been that Ukraine wants to join the West and Israel wants to join the Arab East — and Russia, with Iran’s help, is trying to stop the first, and Iran and Hamas are trying to stop the second.
Although the two battlefronts may seem very different, they actually have a lot in common. They reflect a titanic geopolitical struggle between two opposing networks of nations and non-state actors over whose values and interests will dominate our post-Cold War global era, in the wake of the Pax Americana/globalization era. It was inaugurated after the fall of Berlin. The 1989 Wall and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, America’s main rival in the Cold War.
Yes, this is not a geopolitical moment.
On the one hand there is the Resistance Network, committed to the preservation of closed and autocratic systems where the afterlife buries the long term. On the other hand is the Inclusion Network, which seeks to forge more open, connected and pluralistic systems where the long-term career buries the afterlife. The winner of the fights between those two networks will largely be the dominant character of this post-Cold War era.
What’s scary is that this confrontation is growing. On Sunday, we saw militiamen from the Iranian-backed Resistance Network launch a brazen drone attack on a U. S. military base in Jordan, which belongs to the Inclusion Network, killing 3 U. S. service members and wounding 25 others. .
(And in case you’re keeping score at home, China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resisters but their heads are with the Includers.)
Ukraine is trying to break away from the choking Russian sphere of influence to become part of the European Union. Vladimir Putin is trying to block it, because he knows that if Slavic Ukraine — with its vast engineering talent, land army and agricultural breadbasket — joins the European web, his thieving Slavic autocracy will be more isolated and delegitimized than ever. Putin will not be easily defeated, though, especially with the help of arms from his network allies Iran and North Korea, and passive support from China, Belarus and many members of the global south hungry for his cheap oil.
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