Russia's looming economic collapse

In the next few weeks, the world is going to get a chaotic lesson in economic interdependence. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Russia and Ukraine together account for about 20 percent of the world’s corn exports and 80 percent of its sunflower oil. More than a dozen countries rely on Ukraine for more than 10 percent of their wheat consumption. Automotive companies rely on Ukraine for wiring systems, and much of the world relies on Russia for oil, aluminum, and palladium, which is used for car parts and jewelry.

As the war breaks Ukraine and cripples Russia, it will send ripple effects across the world, including wheat shortages, food inflation, and rising oil prices.

And those are just the obvious, first-order effects. Bradley Jardine, a global fellow at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan research organization, writes that Tajikistan, a small Central Asian country north of Afghanistan, relies on remittances from Russia for more than 20 percent of its GDP. That means if workers in Russia stop sending money to their families in Tajikistan, that country’s economy could nose-dive into a depression. Economic crises can spark political revolutions, and Tajikistan shares a border with China’s westernmost province, Xinjiang. Russia’s crisis could, then, become a Central Asian economic crisis, which could become a Chinese political problem. What happens in Russia will not stay in Russia.