Helen Thompson on Ukraine, energy and the roots of today's geopolitical fault lines
An interview with the author of 'Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century'
Fault Lines has been on a short hiatus due to holidays and to digest the implications of the war in Ukraine. The normal rhythm of publication will resume soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to share my recent interview with Professor Helen Thompson for the Currency that is now free to listen to.
The Currency is Ireland’s leading business, finance, economics and public policy publication and I am proud to be a contributor. If you are not already a subscriber, I strongly recommend you consider becoming one. It will give you an edge in understanding Europe’s fastest-changing country.
Helen Thompson’s new book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century comes at a critical juncture for the international order. Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, with echoes of Europe’s darkest days, has brought history roaring back to life.
History, as the former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer put it, “is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.” What Disorder conveys so powerfully is that the structures that have developed since the 1970s to govern the world economy have produced unavoidable consequences in democracies, energy and geopolitics that we are now only beginning to grapple with.
In our conversation, we spoke about the historical origins of the political shocks of the past decade, and how many of the crises now unfolding have been decades in the making. We started with why Ukraine was always the fault line of post-Soviet Union Europe.