New Zealand often plays an insignificant part in greater geopolitical schemes. But we've been part of the current world order since before the outbreak of the Great War. At the time New Zealand led the world as the most productive nation, a small dominion on the edge of history's greatest empire. Today we languish behind and are even a laughing stock among our allies: "four eyes and a wink" as a friend recently referred to our place in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
World War 2 was in many ways a continuation of World War 1; unfinished business from the war to end all wars. The post-war order left its own unfinished business that dragged on into an extended series of smaller wars: Korea. Vietnam. The Gulf. The Balkans. Afghanistan. Iraq. Ukraine.
It has been said that we'll look back at the territorial conflict between Ukraine and Russia as the start to World War 3.
Vladimir Putin's cultural critiques of the West are correct. Our leaders champion the destruction of the family, erosion of cultural and national identities, and embrace every perversion. He laughs at the Anglican gender-neutral "god" in his most recent speech. Meanwhile our media has spent the year running stories about how Putin is on the verge of dying. The Russian army is on the verge of collapse. A coup against Putin is on the verge of execution. Any moment now and the global order will be restored so that you may resume your scheduled programming.
While many simply dismiss Putin's forays in the culture war as a mask to hide his imperial ambitions, to do so would miss the point. No war can remain cold, unless one side simply collapses from exhaustion before they realise their defeat. Taking a war hot is more reliable. Russia knows it cannot compete against the Americanisation of the globe on purely cultural grounds. Nation after nation has fallen to the forces of globohomo through a combination of exports courtesy of McDonalds, Hollywood, and Lockheed Martin.
In the wake of WW2 and the shadows of the Cold War, a cancerous cultural rot filtered through to an unsuspecting West, finding that capitalism was even more conducive to its degrading and perverted aims than communism had been.
We use a very one-dimensional calculus for war: the number of lives lost and the economic damage caused. Rarely can we count the spiritual cost of not going to war. How do we calculate the price in souls destroyed by peace with the current world order?
United Nations resolutions condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine consistently show the world's most populous nations side with Russia. There may only be two dozen of them, but they represent over half the world's teeming masses.
I'd be the first to say that Xi Jinping's technocratic state isn't the answer; or that life in Vladimir Putin's Russia wouldn't be objectively better; or that Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalists combined with Bollywood won't simply change the geographical location of the driving seat of globohomo. The grass on the other side of the fence isn't always greener.
It's not so much that I want Moscow to win as I want Washington to lose.
Perhaps a fitting conclusion to a century of "forever wars" will be the literal culture war between two nuclear-armed powers with nothing left to lose.
Whatever happens, our unique advantage in New Zealand is now our insignificance.