"Russia's decision to halt gas supplies via Europe's key supply route in the wake of the Ukraine conflict has increased the chances of power shortages." Europe's decision, Germany especially, to be reliant on Russia for energy when they could have not shut down nuclear plants and built more.
There is a penn and teller episode where they argued that globalization was creating world peace. Basically, when everyone’s economies are so entangled, they said, nobody would want to go to war because of how expensive it would be. Their model, I think, only works for democracies. When a dictator controls a country, and their quality of life remains unchanged and revolves mostly around delusions of grandeur (like an…
Completely agree but I suspect democracy is not enough. When a leader manages to assume a power that can be kept by other means like nationalistic rhetoric or cultural issues they can too engage in economically irrational politics.
People often rally behind ideas about god, identity or ideology. In fact this is very natural and expected because otherwise people could have accepted offers like "if you let me exterminate this group of people I will give you gas at discount".