It’s here because we did not learn the lessons from WW I and WW II.
Of course there were reasons for Germany to enter both wars in 1914 and 1939. The world was occupied by colonial empires (with Germany itself late at the game). The way the world was occupied and divvied up was not beneficial for Germany.
The English and the French benefited the most, and these nations would have been the super richest nations in the world today, dwarfing all others by far, had World War I and World War II not happened. Only after the USA supported self-rule for all colonies in the world, after WW II, only then was Germany able to show the world its natural strength. All empires lost their most valuable colonies and, to declare this in overly optimistic fashion, the playing field leveled out for all.
Russia is making the same mistakes today that Germany made in the past. First, it tried to be good and then, when this did not result in a desired continuation of increasing their wealth, the Germans and the Russians ended up going mad, as in angry mad.
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How come they were not able to join the world as it was performing already?
For the Germans (and the Italians), their nation did not even exist when much of the world had been occupied by other European nations already. Germany and Italy had to come into being, just to keep up with the Joneses. They needed to organize themselves into larger national versions first. From an economic perspective, there was not much of a choice. It was either join the global occupation movement or live in relative poverty. They had to grow big in order to compete, which turned out to their not being big enough still.
For the Russians, the fall of the Iron Curtain appeared to give them the freedom to become a modern nation. Yet the first things done involved selling off the big pieces of capital, establishing an upper elite that did extremely well yet without much of a trickle-down effect. The average Russian is doing better than before, but the elite simply raked it in. A disconnect, not dissimilar to what we have in the United States, occurred with the rich living ‘on a different planet’ from the rest of us.
And now, the Russian rich are not able to make greater inroads; they are stuck with what they have, and…
