Yevgeny, we barely knew ye

Yevgeny Prigozhin's untimely yet predictable demise is all the evidence one needs in support of the proposition that the world can be a dangerous place.

I’d kind of like for my kids not to inherit a dystopian future.

A few months back, in an unexpected series of events, an element of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the Wagner Group, headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, changed the direction of their tanks and armored vehicles from Kiev to Moscow with the intent of sacking a few Kremlin leaders. They made it to within a couple of hundred kilometers of Moscow, shooting down Russian Army helicopters and planes in the process. It is rumored that anticipated defections from the regular Russian military failed to materialize, thus stopping the attempted coup.

Yesterday, Yevgeny Prigozhin met his end when he and nine others perished in the mysterious crash of an Embraer Legacy jet just north of Moscow. When the Wagner Group staged it’s mutiny a few months ago, I wrote: “My guess is that Prigozhin’s days are probably numbered. Putin and the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) don’t seem to possess much in the way of an excess of humor when it comes to cracking down on political enemies.” I expected it to be an open window; I guess the FSB decided to add vertical distance and jet fuel just to make sure.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, a thug, was as brutal and immoral as Putin himself. If there is such a thing as “having it coming,” Prigozhin surely did. Few will mourn his death, and fewer will miss him. The world is an indisputably better place for his passing. It’s a concept known as addition via subtraction.

Putin’s lone statement regarding Prigozhin’s death is priceless. Putin described Prigozhin as a "talented businessman" who "made serious mistakes in his life." I’m sure that will make a wonderful epitaph.

Yevgeny Prigozhin's untimely yet entirely predictable demise is all the evidence one needs in support of the proposition that the world can be a dangerous place full of risk, tricky nuance, and the unexpected. It’s an example of why we need sober, intelligent people dealing with national and international affairs, not knuckleheads like we’ve suffered for the best part of the past decade. We must learn to look beyond our own immediate desires when selecting national leaders. We must learn to support those with whom we may have some disagreement but who nonetheless have the chops to guide us safely through the considerable perils that unfortunately exist in the world.

Putin isn’t the only bloodthirsty lunatic out there with the means to do a great deal of harm to everyone else. Given, in fact, the manner in which the Russian military has been exposed by their lack of success in Ukraine, Putin may not even be in the top three. But there are others. And we ignore them at our own considerable peril.

As you read this, China is ramping up threats against Taiwan and attempting to establish numerous dubious territorial claims in the waters off it’s coasts. It’s military is engaging in dangerous displays of force in international waters and airspace. From a rational geopolitical point of view, all of this makes little sense. It makes sense only in the context of the squeeze that the communist leader of China, Xi Jinping, finds himself in.

Xi is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. The Chinese economy is teetering on the edge of it’s own Lehman Brothers moment. The Chinese workforce is the oldest in the world, and the aging problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, decades from now. The reason I’m not more worried than I need to be about China taking over the world is simply because they don’t seem to be able to even deal with their own internal problems. COVID exposed the Chinese Communist Party for what it is: a third-rate system of government that substitutes paranoia and control for rational solutions to urgent problems.

But none of this means that China is not extremely dangerous. I think that there is a good chance that China will try to force “peaceful reunification” on Taiwan sometime before 2027, the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army. With the Chinese economy going to hell in a hand-basket, what better way to distract from the systemic failures of Communism than a war with a breakaway capitalist province—a war that China would almost certainly win, though at a very high cost. And even though Taiwan is half a world away from our shores, the economic and supply chain consequences of such an action would be devastating.

So yes, I think that we should all be paying attention to what’s going on in the world beyond our borders. The proposition that we can either use our resources to secure our southern border (and wage war on Mexican cartels) or fight in Ukraine is a false choice. We need to do both.

The thing about big trouble that arrives on your doorstep is that it always begins as small trouble somewhere else.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth