From war to global finance to leadership in the UK, and many places in between, there is much uncertainty. Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s conceptualisation of the known and unknown is particularly relevant right now.

One of the most interesting and thoughtful quotes to go into my notebook in over five decades in international journalism came from the lips of Rumsfeld. He was America’s defence secretary for five years in the George W. Bush administration, a period that included wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld said:

“There are known knowns, things we know that we know; and there are known unknowns, things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns, things we do not know we don’t know.”

It may sound like a statement of the obvious, but Rumsfeld provides us with a useful tool with which to analyse and attempt to resolve the torrid conflicts and injustices the world faces today.

The known knowns about the present crop of world leaders are the easy part. We know that the president of Russia ordered the invasion of Ukraine last February as a precursor to recovering some of the influence and territory of the former Soviet Union. We know he has conducted the war with almost total disregard for the principles of the Geneva Conventions. Dossiers have been compiled with chapter and verse on Russia’s civilian targets in Ukraine, including apartment blocks, schools, and power stations. Vladimir Putin, ironically once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, is now branded as a war criminal who repeatedly threatens to use nuclear weapons.

On 12 October, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, 143 countries condemned Putin’s decision to annex four regions of Ukraine and declare them Russian territory, voting not to recognise the illegally occupied regions and demanding the Kremlin “reverses course.”

Votes against the resolution were predictable – Russia itself, of course, plus Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Syria. Belarus president and Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko is also a war criminal who has fired dozens of Iranian drones from his country at civilian targets in Ukraine.

But what we should worry about are the 35 abstentions. Among them are 19 African countries, including South Africa, as well as India, Pakistan, and China. India’s leader, Narendra Modi, is unpredictable and is now importing large shipments of Russian oil. China’s decision not to support the Russian ambassador to Ukraine, who had declared the UN resolution “unscrupulous Western blackmail,” was surprising. Only a few weeks earlier, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping had declared that their two countries were “friends forever.” Xi is arguably now the world’s most secure leader. His foreign affairs focus is managing the rivalry with the United States, not meddling in the deluded ambitions of his declining neighbour.

The biggest surprise of the UN vote was that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – indeed, all the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council – voted to support the General Assembly condemnation of Russia, having only the week before agreeing to cut OPEC oil production, so ensuring a further surge of oil revenues into Russian coffers.

OPEC’s move, following Saudi prime minister Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s talks with Putin and other Persian Gulf oil sheiks, angered the Biden administration. The US president warned that Saudi Arabia would face undefined “consequences” for defying Washington. “I’m not going to tell you what I’d consider, and what I have in mind,” Joe Biden said to a CNN interviewer. “But there will be consequences. When the House and the Senate get back [after the mid-term elections next month] there’s going to be some consequences.” – a big known unknown.

A more concerning matter is whether Putin will carry out his threat to use a nuclear weapon, or if he is bluffing.  We do not know whether Biden’s recent polling performance is sufficient to allow the Democrats to retain their wafer-thin control of the House of Representatives, or whether former president Donald Trump can be indicted for his role in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021. If not, will the Republican party really select him as its candidate for the 2024 election?

Although these known unknowns should concern all of us, there are also plenty of known knowns to trouble large parts of the world. By far the most significant is the state of the world economy. Most of the world’s finance ministers and bankers have just flown home after their ritual annual eight days of debates and partying in Washington DC centred around the meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

The IMF’s World Economic Outlook made for sobering reading, predicting a slowdown in economic growth, rising inflation, and the risk of recession for many parts of the world. The report records how falling GDP in China and inflationary pressures have damaged the world economy but also details how war, notably in Ukraine, and diseases, particularly COVID-19, have thrown the previous year’s economic forecasts off course. We knew Putin was a land grabber when he snatched Crimea, but we did not anticipate either the February invasion, or the merciless brutality with which he conducted it. Similarly, although the spread of some diseases, like Ebola, were known knowns, COVID-19 was not.

A sideshow in Washington was the very public humiliation of United Kingdom Prime Minister Liz Truss and her friend and chancellor (finance minister) Kwasi Kwarteng, who was called back to London early and summarily sacked by his boss. He took the rap for implementing “Trussonomics” –  Liz Truss’s massive tax cut pledge, made to win support in the Conservative party leadership race. When Truss and her chancellor made good on the promise two weeks later in the “mini” budget, London’s financial markets were plunged into chaos, spooked by the prospect of £45 billion (A$80 billion) of unfunded tax cuts.

Truss was forced into a sequence of U-turns, leading to the appointment of former leadership rival Jeremy Hunt as chancellor. Within 24 hours, he ditched Truss’s costly policies and embarked on a quest to save a further £36 billion. Hunt is now effectively CEO of the UK. By Thursday 20 October, Truss was gone after just 44 days in office, making her the shortest-serving British prime minister ever.  The known unknown here is who will replace her, with some Tories pushing for the return of the man she replaced, the disgraced Boris Johnson.

The turbulence foreshadowed in the IMF report is already being felt across Europe. France has been hit by a wave of strikes, which include refinery workers, ten percent of the staff at nuclear power plants, railway employees, and teachers. In Britain, the Trades Unions Congress is planning a winter of discontent with a series of rolling strikes as workers seek to increase their earnings to match the latest rate of inflation, now just above 10 percent.

When all is said and done, the only known unknown that really matters is whether Putin will deploy a nuclear weapon against Ukraine. Should he do so, we have the word of John Boulton, a former national security advisor, that the United States will execute immediately a drawn-up plan to kill Putin. We don’t know what that plan is, or its consequences.

We have to leave unknown unknowns to the gods.

Colin Chapman FAIIA is editor-at-large of Australian Outlook and a fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He was president of AIIA New South Wales. Colin is a writer, broadcaster, and public speaker who specialises in geopolitics, international economics, and global media issues. He has held executive positions at the BBC and Financial Times.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Licence and may be republished with attribution.