Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on BBC Arabic: The Ukraine Crisis Could Distract the World from the Climate Crisis While Having Massive Emissions Consequences #RussiaUkraineConflict #UkraineRussie #UkraineRussiaCrisis #ClimateCrisis @JohnKerry @ClimateEnvoy pic.twitter.com/nsOC1iZeGm

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) February 24, 2022

At the most basic level, realism begins with the recognition that wars occur because there is no agency or central authority that can protect states from one another and stop them from fighting if they choose to do so. Given that war is always a possibility, states compete for power and sometimes use force to try to make themselves more secure or gain other advantages. There is no way states can know for certain what others may do in the future, which makes them reluctant to trust one another and encourages them to hedge against the possibility that another powerful state may try to harm them at some point down the road.

Liberalism sees world politics differently. Instead of seeing all great powers as facing more or less the same problem—the need to be secure in a world where war is always possible—liberalism maintains that what states do is driven mostly by their internal characteristics and the nature of the connections among them. It divides the world into “good states” (those that embody liberal values) and “bad states” (pretty much everyone else) and maintains that conflicts arise primarily from the aggressive impulses of autocrats, dictators, and other illiberal leaders. For liberals, the solution is to topple tyrants and spread democracy, markets, and institutions based on the belief that democracies don’t fight one another, especially when they are bound together by trade, investment, and an agreed-on set of rules.

After the Cold War, Western elites concluded that realism was no longer relevant and liberal ideals should guide foreign-policy conduct. As the Harvard University professor Stanley Hoffmann told Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in 1993, realism is “utter nonsense today.” U.S. and European officials believed that liberal democracy, open markets, the rule of law, and other liberal values were spreading like wildfire and a global liberal order lay within reach. They assumed, as then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton put it in 1992, that “the cynical calculus of pure power politics” had no place in the modern world and an emerging liberal order would yield many decades of democratic peace. Instead of competing for power and security, the world’s nations would concentrate on getting rich in an increasingly open, harmonious, rules-based liberal order, one shaped and guarded by the benevolent power of the United States.

Had this rosy vision been accurate, spreading democracy and extending U.S. security guarantees into Russia’s traditional sphere of influence would have posed few risks. But that outcome was unlikely, as any good realist could have told you. Indeed, opponents of enlargement were quick to warn that Russia would inevitably regard NATO enlargement as a threat and going ahead with it would poison relations with Moscow. That is why several prominent U.S. experts—including diplomat George Kennan, author Michael Mandelbaum, and former defense secretary William Perry—opposed enlargement from the start. Then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were initially opposed for the same reasons, though both later shifted their positions and joined the pro-enlargement bandwagon.

Proponents of expansion won the debate by claiming it would help consolidate the new democracies in Eastern and Central Europe and create a “vast zone of peace” across all of Europe. In their view, it didn’t matter that some of NATO’s new members were of little or no military value to the alliance and might be hard to defend because peace would be so robust and enduring that any pledge to protect those new allies would never have to be honored.

Moreover, they insisted that NATO’s benign intentions were self-evident and it would be easy to persuade Moscow not to worry as NATO crept closer to the Russian border. This view was naive in the extreme, for the key issue was not what NATO’s intentions may have been in reality. What really mattered, of course, was what Russia’s leaders thought they were or might be in the future. Even if Russian leaders could have been convinced that NATO had no malign intentions, they could never be sure this would always be the case.

One need not buy all of Walt’s assertions to realize that liberal foreign policy wonks got Russia badly wrong.

One of the problems with using economic sanctions as your primary tool of deterrence in foreign policy is that eventually you’ll run into a hostile foe or force that does not care about trading with the U.S. or even money at all. In fact, it is fair to wonder how much money motivates any of America’s current foes.

The Taliban certainly don’t particularly care about money; they think they’re on a mission from Allah. Iran has been hit with just about every sanction in the book, and no doubt it’s had an impact on the Iranian economy, but the mullahs don’t seem to care much. Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime have been sanctioned many, many times, and they just keep getting better and better at evading them. The U.S. and China are too economically intertwined to easily enact sanctions that are serious enough to alter the decision-making in Beijing.

And then there’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia — a government that foresaw the types of moves the West was likely to make, and prepared accordingly:

Russia has drastically reduced its use of dollars, and therefore Washington’s leverage. It has stockpiled enormous currency reserves, and trimmed its budgets, to keep its economy and government services going even under isolation. It has reoriented trade and sought to replace Western imports.

But even more than that, for a greedy kleptocrat, Putin doesn’t seem primarily motivated by money or his country’s economic prospects. Putin’s address yesterday was a long stream of grievances, and it is clear that what really enrages him is that Russia is not as powerful as it was when he was a younger man and the Soviet Union existed.

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, is a cooperative of financial institutions formed in 1973 and headquartered in Belgium. It is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium with cooperation from other major central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England and the European Central Bank.

But SWIFT is not a traditional bank and does not transfer funds. Rather, it acts as a secure messaging system that links more than 11,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, alerting banks when transactions are going to occur. (For instance, American banks have a unique SWIFT code that customers use for incoming wire transfers in U.S. dollars.)

In 2021, SWIFT said it recorded an average of 42 million messages per day, an 11 percent increase from the year before. In 2020, Russia accounted for 1.5 percent of transactions.

For the U.S. and its European allies, cutting Russia out of the SWIFT financial system would be one of the toughest financial steps they could take, damaging Russia’s economy immediately and in the long term. The move could cut Russia off from most international financial transactions, including profits from oil and gas production, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the country’s revenue.

“But doing so, which some financial analysts have likened to a ‘nuclear option,’ would be an unprecedented move against one of the world’s largest economies.”

No, a financial sanction for one nation invading another is not a “nuclear option.” When it comes to war, the nuclear option is literally the nuclear option.

Putin will happily trade some short-term economic sacrifice for rebuilding an empire. China will gladly undergo some trade sanctions to take Taiwan. Iran will cheerfully be excised from global trade to destroy Israel.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 24, 2022

There is a reason that Stalin is still the highest-polling leader in Russia. In her Nobel Prize–winning oral history Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich quotes a former Communist factory worker imprisoned and beaten half to death by the regime.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 24, 2022

As an old man, the imprisoned worker said, “When I go into my grandchildren’s room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music…Savages! I want to die a Communist. That’s my final wish.”

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 24, 2022

The West is failing because it not only doesn't understand why other countries feel this way, but because we ourselves have given up any belief in a higher purpose.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 24, 2022

Russia’s stock market has lost nearly 40% of its value today — and at one point was down nearly 45%. It’s one of the biggest single-day meltdowns in modern market history.

— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) February 24, 2022