To paraphrase Mark Twain, history never repeats itself but it does often rhyme. The 2011 Arab Spring witnessed the geopolitical and domestic collision of incompetence (or often corruption), food insecurity, and generally rising prices.

It came just after the height of the world financial crisis, and also followed a period of poor leadership in the Middle East and North Africa region.

In the years just before 2008, food prices in many regions of the developing world increased at an annual rate of more than 20 percent, while efforts by governments to continue to subsidize fuel (and other commodities) were failing.

These subsidies were then cut in a bid to “liberalize” the sectors. Global markets in everything from wheat to housing, were also becoming precariously detached from demand, and the political structures in the MENA region seemed either oblivious to the brewing discontent, or were blissfully confident in their abilities to contain it.

It seems that we are perhaps following a similar path in 2022, but this time across Europe and the US.

What I see today in the financial, macroeconomic, and political “first world,” seems very much to rhyme with what I experienced nearly a decade and a half ago in Cairo.

In January of 2022, US inflation hit 7.5 percent, its highest level since 1982, in part because US food price inflation is the highest it has been for 25 years, including the mid-2000s run-up to the financial crisis.

Energy inflation is also at its highest in two decades, while producer prices have risen by over 30 percent since 2010. Household utility prices have also increased by around 33 percent since 2010 and transport costs have increased by roughly 18 percent since just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Imports have not eased the problems faced by the American consumer either, since import prices are up over 10 percent year on year as measured last month. To aggravate matters, the booming, and increasingly financialized, American real estate market has pushed the average home mortgage in America from less than $250,000 in 2013 to over $450,000 today.

Also, while the unemployment rate is sitting at 4 percent in America, US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell himself has speculated that the actual rate is much higher than statistics indicate.

The labor force participation rate in the US is well below levels in the decade before COVID-19 while average wages for those who do work have only risen from about $19 an hour in 2010, to $24 an hour in 2020, and only roughly $27 an hour today.

What this shows is that housing and inescapable household costs account for a much larger portion of family budgets compared to a decade ago, with all of this taking place in a rather weak labor market.

In addition, food prices have increased by 15 percent over the last two years but individual wages have increased by only 12 percent. Energy prices have jumped by more than 26 percent since last year while individual workers’ wages have increased by roughly a quarter of that.

What’s more, it seems that those rather weak individual wage gains are further eroded when distributed among households, due to unemployment or lower labor force participation rates. This is demonstrated by the fact that median household income in America rose by less than 4 percent in 2020 and only 3.4 percent in 2021.

On top of this, the half of the working population that is, by definition, earning lower than the median income likely saw lower wage increases in percentage terms, more job insecurity, and less ability to absorb rising housing, energy, and food costs.

There is more on the horizon. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, oil is now, perhaps by a substantial margin, likely to remain above $100 for the foreseeable future. International transport costs have already spiked, sometimes tripling, in response to this political and economic reality.

Even absent a COVID-19 resurgence and/or a hot war in Europe directly involving more than the two current participants — three if we rightly include Belarus — supply shocks and continued easy money seem the order of the day. This will surely translate into higher prices, more protracted joblessness, and lower standards of living for the average American.

The result of all the above could very well be a more pronounced tearing of the social and political fabric in America and perhaps Europe. I suspect Russia knew this when choosing to invade Ukraine at this time, and at least tacitly hoped for an American Spring, while simultaneously rolling its tanks westward in pursuit of territory.

This is most certainly now an economic war and America did not fire the first shot.

• John W. Salevurakis is an associate professor of economics at the American University in Cairo and an author.