https://twitter.com/TimInHonolulu/status/1501442692537995265
https://twitter.com/PentagonPresSec/status/1501336445729968129
https://twitter.com/PentagonPresSec/status/1501336448204775425
https://twitter.com/PentagonPresSec/status/1501336450012528647
https://twitter.com/PentagonPresSec/status/1501336451195277314
How have I never seen this? Oh yeah, because I never watch random youtubes. First comment says this clip is part of Ukrainian culture now.
Scholars who study the effects of economic isolation on states — whether through sanctions, wartime blockades, or other mechanisms — find that economic isolation rarely causes its targets to capitulate outright. Rather, economic pressure can lead states at war to adopt riskier strategies, often involving escalation. Call it economic inadvertent escalation.
Yeah, this is a big concern for me. I read a piece in noted Iraq War enthusiast magazine The Atlantic called The Strategy That Can Defeat Putin by noted Iraq War enthusiast Eliot Cohen and it said:
Ideally, this conflict will end with the overthrow of Vladimir Putin, who bears singular responsibility for it not only morally but also politically. This was not only a war of choice—it is his war of choice, and he has been dangerous and malevolent in its conduct. His fall from power could come about as a result of elite discontent leading to a coup of some kind, or mass upheaval.
However, neither outcome can be predicted and, for the time being, neither seems imminent. Moreover, although Russian dissenters from the war have shown remarkable courage, the regime is skillfully tapping deep reserves of xenophobia and chauvinism through its complete control of Russian media outlets. In that respect, Russia is in many ways a functioning fascist state, in the grip of a nationalist ideology and an all-powerful leader. For that reason, then, and barring a new Russian revolution, the Western objective must be to leave Russia profoundly weakened and militarily crippled, incapable of renewing such an onslaught, isolated and internally divided until the point that an aging autocrat falls from power. Targeting Putin alone is not enough.
Now I am not a Very Smart And Serious Foreign Policy Analyst like this guy, but I don’t think that’s how this works? Like I have not observed that economic sanctions against North Korea, say, have significantly weakened Kim Jong-Un’s hold on power. In fact, I went looking for occasions on which sanctions have led not merely to concessions but to the toppling of a regime, and I turned up… Guatemala in 1993. That’s all I could find.
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Previous sanctions on Russia have caused Putin’s popularity to go up. That’s likely to happen again. We shouldn’t have any illusions about that. He will lash out.
Destroying oil industry and basically ceasing all European/American business with Russia is way more than the previous sanction regime was.
That’s true. But the majority of people will see it as an attack on Russia and it will unite them behind Putin. Dissidents will be harassed, beaten and jailed. It’s a proven program.
Sanctions are still right even if they’re not without downsides and risks.
Arguably, one point of sanctions is to induce Putin to lash out so that NATO can claim to not be the initiator of any violence.
Which I’m fine with.
If you don’t use harmful sanctions, either you end up with a fellowship at the Susan Collins School of Strongly Concerned Diplomacy or you move to military action. Sanctions provide a way to avoid escalating immediately to war.
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Have sanctions ever been used against an “advanced” consumer society that had relatively free media (as Russia did from like 1995-2014)? I can’t see Russia going down the whole North Korea rabbit hole, but I can see it becoming a good deal worse that it has been recently, and that’s already pretty bad. The debt defaults will be starting soon.
It seems critical that Ukraine be given the authority to put sanctions relief on the table in peace talks. More generally, the goal of sanctions should be to return to some version of the status quo, not to destroy Putin’s regime.
I read that years ago. It was terrible.
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Weird, you would think a book with two authors would be twice as good as a normal book.
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https://twitter.com/shustry/status/1501468215247085569?t=ByNEOLzucFew3OFzhCEiIg&s=19
1.5M views in 22 hrs for Russian language YouTube channel. 15k comments.
Have a look at the comments using translate. A lot of native Russians are freaked and trying to leave. They blame Putin, some comparing Russia to WW2 Germany “now I understand”), others wishing they could get out, others from abroad saying life is better in foreign countries they moved to. They know more than you’d think and Putin likely understands this to an extent. Youth culture is pretty global.
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I think this is basically right. Ultimately his goal is to assert control over Ukraine, and I think peace will come if and only if his army gets beaten up enough for him to realize that’s not going to happen. Ukraine has recently signaled openness to some sort of face-saving compromise on the pretexts for the war, so perhaps that’s the off ramp. It’s unclear how close Putin is to accepting the L on control of Ukraine though.
EDIT: This thread is interesting too:
https://twitter.com/bretdevereaux/status/1501423400899813379?s=21
Right, exactly. The justification tends to be that they are punitive sanctions, the point of which is to discourage powerful countries from doing stuff like this. But I think this hits ordinary people as hard, if not harder than the regime. And punitive sanctions past a certain point don’t achieve anything and carry a considerable risk of forcing the adversary to escalate out of desperation.
Isn’t the pretext for war stopping Nazis and genocide? How do you compromise on those?
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It’s a dictatorship. They will create their own reality. Imagine a country where Fox News is the only news service ever broadcast.
That stuff isn’t even a pretext, it’s just the ritualistic trappings around Russia’s announcement that it intended to install a puppet regime in Kyiv. The pretext was Minsk and Crimea and NATO.
Here’s a thread arguing that Russia has pivoted back to those issues in its propaganda:
https://twitter.com/dannynis/status/1501492815968321536?s=21