What were the 90s like for you? 

I had Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and a Biggie mixtape. I had a Michael Jordan jersey and foam nunchucks. America was the best place to be from in the 90s, and Chicago even more so. 

The worst thing any politician did to us was lying about an affair or handing out state licenses for money. There were no purges in the 90s. 

Things were not so awesome if you lived in the post-soviet block, especially in Russia and Ukraine. A currency crisis destroyed Russian savings in 1997, and organized criminals were blowing up the rich. The KGB became the FSB, and now they run the country. There is the potential for a wider conflict. And I have been up late at night pondering this entire situation for weeks.

The Marshall Plan.

In 5th grade, Mr Hanlin told us about the Marshall Plan. He was a remarkable Illinois transplant. I was from Illinois, too, and we bonded on that. We were both Cubs fans. 

“The Marshall Plan,” he said, “was how the US helped Europe rebuild after WW2.” Min-Sun, my desk mate, was listening intently. Her father was a diplomat; he worked at the South Korean embassy. I’m sure her father told her all about the Marshall Plan. I was hearing about it for the first time. Or so I thought. In a way, my world was shaped by the Marshall Plan and its consequences. 

My grandfather was on a Navy submarine in the South Pacific. My father studied languages and made his way into the Middle East. Here I was in a leafy suburb of Cairo, at the American School, listening to Mr Hanlon, my teacher and fellow Cubs fan, talk about the Marshall Plan. I dug it. 

I also knew that the lives of the average Egyptian were quite different from mine. As bad as people had it back in Chicago, I knew that we didn’t have 100,000 people living in a necropolis. 

America drives global culture.

What I have always admired about the American Way is the quality of the people it produces. You do not get a sense of this if you have not spent time overseas. You only see what is in your frame of reference, and the American frame is bigger than a sunset in Texas.

After all, in one country, using one language and one currency, you can experience a stunning kaleidoscope of lives. This is what freedom brings. It doesn’t run on desperation. It runs on opportunity. It is a beautiful property of our system in a way. It is a quality that net-net, creates happier and more prosperous people at scale. 

The American Way is what drove the formation of the UN. The United States took the lead in building the post-war world. The goal was to avoid the mistakes of Versailles and avoid the cavalcade of political violence in interwar Europe. It eventually hit us with a Blitzkrieg and Pearl Harbor like a metastasis. It’s why my 18-year-old grandfather found himself under the Pacific Ocean in a hollow tube, listening for pings on a sonar. 

After the war, he and many others at the time thought, “I wonder how we avoid this whole situation again?” The UN and the Marshall Plan emerged. They were crafted to avoid another global war. They sent grain, building material, tractors, and opportunities. Not just in post-war Europe but in the Middle East and South and East Asia. They stabilized the global currency system, worked to lower tariffs, and educated millions of international students. Even more millions immigrated here. That was our side of the curtain.

Contrast that with the experience of the average East German, Romanian, or Estonian after the war. Their experience under Soviet domination was relatively poor. Closure of the mind, self-propagandization, and paranoia dominated the social, political, and economic spheres. Participation presumed ideological rigidity buttressed by propaganda. East Germany, Romania, and Estonia were not even the worst. There are 20,000 dead Polish academics, writers, and other elites buried in the Katyn forest that can attest to that. Things got a bit better after Stalin died and Beria was done away with but not before they killed millions of their people. In each family, you can find victims and perpetrators. Often both. 

Russian millennials had a currency crisis at age 10. They did not get a Marshall Plan or a GI bill. No rock and roll, no IHOP. Things didn’t get better after the collapse of their system. In the 90s, the national wealth was privatized in many post-soviet states. Today, it is held by a klepto-oligarchic-authoritarian complex. The average ex-soviet citizen endured enormous hardship.

From Russia with Love.

I love Russia and Russians. I regret not taking past opportunities to visit. The people are very warm, and you will never go hungry travelling in their land with a good local friend. There is a no-bullshit realism that, when mixed with their indigenous generosity and sense of humor, makes for a night like no other. There is one in Busan I will never forget. Tolstoy was arguably the first pacifist. They defeated Napoleon and truly bore the brunt of WWII. The palaces are splendid, and the churches dazzle. There is a lot to admire about Russia, just not the political economy.

So why not draw up a New Marshall Plan for a Post-Putin, post-war world? What would that look like? For Ukraine, it will be building materials, health, expertise, and economic aid. For Russia, economic aid and real political reform. Finance an alliance between civil society, cultural, professional, academic, and religious institutions. For the rest of us, a model of how to mend a place, and a people, Ukrainian Russian, and more who have been brutalized by the last century. Sanctions have their limits. Russians have lived without iPhones before, and history shows they can endure if motivated by nationalism. 

We need to wise up, too, though. There is a tendency in our political and social culture toward isolationism. This exists in every society, but it has become somewhat more ardent and unproductive in ours. They have advocated removing ourselves from the very international order that we helped create. Calls to leave the UN, leave WTO positions vacant, undermine the work of the European Union, and go on arrogantly into foreign adventures are all self-destructive. Even worse, it is stupid. We need to get better at being the global leader if we want to protect our system. Reversing course, becoming an isolationist power, ceding people and territory to political/criminal gangs will bite us in the ass. We need to train ourselves to be more global. 

The New Marshall Plan.

Interestingly, our core values and concepts, the constitution, the bill of rights, the pursuit of happiness, and free thought, have nothing to do with money or consumption.

The American Way emerges from these values and facilitates innovation, free markets, and ultimately the prosperity of ourselves and many others worldwide. It is a tradition that rejects dogmatism and arguments from authority. From it, everything else follows. It is a tradition to be proud of. It is a tradition to be thankful for. A Marshall Plan for Ukraine and Russia that brings together the best of our societies and the best of theirs is a strategic national security task worth pursuing. 

Indeed, there were eruptions of violence, but generally, things were pretty stable for NATO-aligned countries during the Cold War. But the low-grade fever of conflict narrowed the aperture of opportunity for the global community across the board.

The consequences of Putin’s rule are not just theoretical now; it’s economical. The first group is the Russian population, many of whom are just clenching their teeth. The second group are the educated elite. They will give those within Putin’s inner circle a way out. Obviously, they will have to keep some amount of their wealth. Russians have no voice right now; allow them to at least leave. We missed the boat after the fall of the Soviet Union. Let’s not make the same mistake now. Let’s think more like our grandparents and export opportunity to eastern Europe.

We are seeing a continuation of that tradition today in Ukraine. They are fighting against that soul-crushing paranoid system. It is a system where it is easier to believe lies than to be shackled to your truth. No free press, no free enterprise, political opponents jailed, enemies poisoned. And at the top, a geopolitical extortionist. It’s not a good situation. The fundamental problem with Russia is corruption which makes it impossible to conduct business. The system also incentivizes rot as you go up the power ladder. Such a system has an uncanny ability to manifest truth out of lies. Hence the invasion of Ukraine.

Instead of building monuments and engaging in an absolute orgy of brutality, slavery, and gulags, they went with grain shipments, building material, money, and a growing trade network. So let’s all come to our senses. We do not need to export our ideology or religious beliefs or create some absurd tapestry of a nationalist history based on even more absurd lies. We examine, we reflect, and we move forward. You don’t experience the grinding depression that comes with a chronic lack of opportunity. Certainly not at the scale you see in conventional authoritarian systems. You don’t experience the slow personal death that comes with being told what your options in life are. You can imagine how many hopes are suffocated as one becomes successful in an authoritarian system.

The longing for the prior state.

The best-case scenario is that the fighting stops today, troops return home, and Ukraine is allowed to rebuild. There will be more than 80 years of fierce ethnic tensions along a flat, 1000 mile border running from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And Russia has an enclave tucked right in the middle of Nato members Poland and Lithuania. It is not precisely the Balkans, but it doesn’t take a great leap to think a putative “Suwalki Gap Incident of 2022” could become the “Sarajevo 1917.” We don’t have archdukes in open-air Rolls Royce’s these days. In any case, that’s the best-case scenario.

Let’s lay all outcomes on a scale of 1-10. Say the net outcome of this war was (O) the net average of the cascade of events from this invasion. O resides on a scale of 1-10. Let 1 be the best case, and 10 be the worst case. 1 is your version of the first paragraph, your best-case scenario and 10 we can all agree is nuclear armageddon. We evolved ourselves to extinction a mere 30 years into the digital age. You thought we would last longer but also not surprising. Wait. Why is it 1-10 and not 0-10? Well, zero no longer exists because that was the prior state. There is no zero; the prior state is not an option. 

There are many iterations of the prior state, and it’s different for many of us. Whether it’s to pre covid, pre-2016, pre-summer of 2019, pre your last amazing birthday, or pre 9/11, we all have held onto the hope of returning to the prior state. Our lives are marked by these cracks in time, permanently altering the country’s direction and increasingly influencing our daily lived reality. Looking around, it is ok if you feel like you are seeing more cracks than you thought you would have over the last 5-10 years. We all see it. Take care of your skin, by the way. 

So how does this turn out? What is O, and where will it be on that 1-10 scale? I am pretty certain that no one knows right now. Not the President or his advisors and adversaries, not Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and not Chairman Xi. They are all weighing a range of outcomes and optimizing their plan based on the information they are getting. 

Their information percolates through the filter of their chain of command. That chain is incentivized to gain the favor of its bosses. Naturally, one asks what incentivizes a bureaucrat more than anything, especially in an authoritarian system? The favor of their boss. So it makes sense that Putin overestimated his capabilities, his perceptions skewed by the very lackyism, cronyism, and corruption that his system incentivizes. 

Our collective future.

It’s times like these to really lean into that ethos that makes our country and quality of life exceptional. It is the ability to innovate. Putin is stagnation. Authoritarianism is ossification. We are witnessing the slow, self-inflicted deflation of a Ponzi scheme built on lies. Because as chaotic as it seems, I see the United States building, scaling, and innovating its way through these challenges. It is not bombing and shooting people in the streets and concentration camps. We can accommodate a wider array of opinions, cultures, foods, and languages than any other country.

This topic will likely go through the grinder that is our political-cultural-entertainment complex. Ever self-centred, the consumer will try to make sense of this conflict. Unfortunately, many folks have been eating the informational equivalent of high fructose corn syrup—empty calories of conspiratorial clickbait that monetizes rage, both the fake and real versions. 

The cultural power of the United States is a source of and, to my mind, it’s about to change, syncopation, and innovation. It’s a symbiosis of the old and the new, a process where the past and the present conspire to create something new. That tendency is evident at all levels of American culture. That beat creates a plate at Safta where you can have Tahdig with Lebanese wine. It creates Tarantino films and the music of the Notorious B.I.G. That beat informs our zeitgeist, making me optimistic about our collective future.