The Russia-Ukraine War Turned Egypt's Food Crisis into an Economic Threat

That's quite a turnabout, they used to supply Rome with wheat two thousand years ago. Now they need to import what they need. Is there not enough land to grow crops?

Every recent large crises (Covid, Ukraine) has shown how fragile a globalized economy is, when countries tend to specialize their production in the name of competition.

It also shows that free markets are not as efficient as they are supposed to be. When a sudden crisis blocks the global supply chain, markets do not provide a solution magically ; it's not easy to replace Ukraine's wheat production or Taiwan's chips. Both require large investments and take years to yield.

We thought that interdependence will lead to cooperation and therefore peace. That as fundamentally the idea when many EU countries chose to buy fossil fuels from Russia. The same could be said about China, where most western countries delocalized their industrial production.

In the end, we have helped past empires (Russia, China) to modernize but they did not turn into democracies as we naively thought. Now they want their empire back and they are more guided by pride than by interest.

That's why we need to simply crush Putin in Ukraine - mainly by the no-fly zone and supplying Ukrainians with food, medical aid and insane deliveries of weapons so that every Ukrainian volunteers, men and women, can fight.

I can't see Putin nuking the EU and/or the USA. That threat is empty since mutual destruction is assured. He might use tactical nuclear bombs tough and wipe whole Ukrainian cities. That is a risk that only the Ukrainians can decide to take.

The West must kick Putin's ass, have all willing European countries join NATO so that frontiers are freezed for ever. The EU integration is a much longer process, that needs to start asap as well - without lowering the criteria required to join.

And the EU's countries must heighten their defense budgets, even if I dislike it so much. We can't rely that much on the USA's protection ; and both OTAN as a whole need to inspire respect to China.

At the same time, we should, as Westerners, make proper excuses to all the countries we colonized or dominated in the past. That's will be painful for our pride, but necessary to avoid revenge. China holds a grunt against the West for what we did in the XIX century and what Japan did in the XXth. The same for India, which power will rise too and to African countries as well.

But we need to be so well military prepared and in a large consensus so that these excuses are understood as a sign of strength and self-assurance, and not as a sign of weakness.

Transitioning our economies to be carbon-neutral and pro-biodiversity means take responsibility for all the damages we unwillingly made to the environment since 1750. The current level of CO2 is mainly due to the West.