What comes next is unlikely to mirror the Cold War’s distinct blocs. Even as the global economic order fractures, no rival ideologies compete for supremacy. And China’s harsh authoritarian turn under President Xi Jinping co-exists with extensive commercial ties to the United States, Europe and Japan. But governments, corporations and investors all are adjusting to a new reality.
“It’s the end of one era and the beginning of another, which is a less complete form of globalization than we had ambitions for in the immediate post-Cold War era,” said Michael Smart, managing director of Rock Creek Global Advisors. “We have to think differently about what we mean by the global trading system. There are certain requirements that, if you don’t meet them, you’re not part of it. You can’t be in the club.”
With the United States, Europe, Canada, Britain and Japan uniting to punish Russia with unprecedented financial sanctions, the war has triggered a “major geopolitical realignment” akin to the aftershocks from the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to Citibank analysts.
Virtually overnight, most major Russian banks were blocked from moving money across borders. Moscow’s stock market has been closed for a week. Russian customers are cut off from much of the world’s most advanced technologies.
On Friday, Russia’s isolation deepened as the country’s communications regulator blocked access to Facebook, one of the few sources of information that the government already did not control, saying it had discriminated against Russian media.
In Washington, top Democrats and Republicans have begun demanding that the United States stop importing oil from Russia, a move that would intensify Moscow’s financial plight if European nations followed suit. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund warned Saturday that the war and rapidly accumulating sanctions on Russia would “have a severe impact on the global economy.”
“This event does seem to be one that is a game-changer and will be with us for a very long time,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell told Congress last week.
Together, Russia and Ukraine account for 3 percent of global output, according to JPMorgan Chase. Putin’s brutal invasion of his neighbor, however, will have broad economic repercussions, economists and government officials said.
“There’s a chance — which increases with every human rights outrage that Putin commits — that Russia is shut out of the global economy for a long time. … You are removing this big chunk of the global economy and going back to the situation we had in the Cold War when the Soviet bloc was pretty much closed off,” said Maury Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world can’t be tightly integrated in terms of trade and finance.”
Expectations for an enduring era of peace and prosperity were high in the early 1990s. After the Soviet Union ceased to exist in December 1991, Russia embarked on a helter-skelter series of economic reforms, including establishment of the country’s first stock market, and welcomed foreign investors.