Who would have expected Biden and Putin to start publicly pecked and retorted, as it was written as two hot teenagers? Reagan and Brezhnev certainly did not love each other but – this has also been said – they never got down to personal insults. Even if the air is cold, however, it is too early to say that we are back in the Cold War.
Diplomacy has certainly overcome worse incompatibilities and Putin is aware that Biden’s shots are mainly for internal use: a way to increase divisions among Republicans, many of whom have always badly tolerated the opaque relations between the Trump White House and the Kremlin. From this point of view, the bickering signals, in fact, the difficulty of recalibrating the Washington-Moscow relationship after a presidency that, on the one hand, left the field open to Putin, for example in the Mediterranean or on intrusions in the American elections, but, on the other hand, it has deliberately emptied the inestimable heritage of the agreements on the downsizing of nuclear arsenals, which represent the greatest threat to peace in the world.
How much this threat still exists, however, is hard to say. It is likely that Biden and Putin will sooner or later find an agreement on the arsenals that will reassure us all: neither of them has an interest in resuming the arms race and shaking the balance of terror. But also because, perhaps, those arsenals have already been consigned to history.
The more complex a society becomes, the more fragile it becomes. And the next war – if unfortunately there ever was one – will revolve around this inherent weakness. It is doubtful that the soldiers of the future will ever fire a shotgun. Or even more, they will drop bombs. Why bomb a power plant or an airport when you can simply knock them out with a click? There is no supermarket that does not work with the on-time delivery method and therefore, practically, without a warehouse. It was then calculated that three days without the Internet are enough to empty supermarket shelves and condemn entire cities to starvation. And the Internet is entrusted to everyone’s good will. Starting with the submarine cables that carry them across the oceans. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission expressed its distress over the four cables that carry the Internet across the Pacific and land in China, with shared oversight with Chinese state-owned companies.
Above all, we’ve seen in the past few weeks in Texas what it’s like to cut off electricity while snow falls. Throughout the American electricity grid, the counterintelligence men say, Russian digital bugs are crouched that could, if they wanted to, shut down the power plants, as they have already experienced, even if only for a few hours, in Ukraine. And they could do, the US counterintelligence always says, even more: there are software codes implanted by Russian hackers in the systems that control the switches of nuclear power plants scattered around the United States.
In short, the war of the future will be fought in anonymous rooms full of computers and the victims, more than the soldiers, will be millions of civilians with their lives devastated. It is no longer a science fiction scenario. This is also the current Cold War. Because, if the Russians have their bugs along the pylons of the power grids that serve the United States, even the Americans, the Pentagon’s Cybercommand discreetly let it be known, have theirs. And not from today. Since 2012, the Pentagon has installed software in the Russian electricity system that monitors and supervises the production and distribution of energy. But, in the last two years, the Americans have taken a step further, what, of course, the Russians had already done: the spy codes, today, said the New York Times without the Pentagon denying, they have become malware that can plunge all of Russia into darkness. Other than a briefcase with a button that triggers the nuclear attack. The fatal finger is the one that can hit a mouse button. This is the balance of terror of the 21st century.
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