It was the image that future historians will seize upon: a black speck in the pale northern sky, hovering above the gilded domes of St Petersburg, a city built by Peter the Great to be his ‘window on the West’. The drone strike, or the threat of one, did not obliterate the St Petersburg International Economic Forum. It did something far more queasy: it left its mark on the spirit of the event, a metallic tang of modernity’s discontents.
David Rosenberg, the acerbic market sage, warned that such strikes are ‘a symptom of a world unmoored’. Indeed, the buzzing of the drone is the soundtrack of a new age of intellectual and strategic decadence. One is reminded of the duelling knights of the late Middle Ages, their chivalry rendered absurd by the longbow.
Now the longbow is a loitering munition, and the tournament is the forum itself, where Russian oligarchs and their foreign enablers once staged a pageant of globalisation. That pageant is now a ghost dance. The drone is not merely a military tool; it is a symbol of a world where the old certainties of state sovereignty and economic interdependence have given way to a Hobbesian scramble.
To see this as simply a matter of geopolitics is to miss the larger point. We are witnessing the return of the repressed: the violence that liberal capitalism always pretended was someone else’s problem. St Petersburg, that architectural hymn to Enlightenment reason, now hosts a festival of anxiety.
Rosenberg’s warning is not a market fluctuation. It is an epitaph for an era that thought it could exile history. The drone’s shadow falls not only on the Neva but on all our smug certainties.
This, I suspect, is what the Fall of Rome felt like: less a single catastrophe than a slow, droning hum of decline, flecked with moments of terror. But then, I have always been a pessimist. I prefer to call myself a realist.
