War would be stupid, but in this case the West is simply unwilling to close ranks and make economic sacrifices to erect a Schelling point vs obvious misbehavior on the international stage. This should have been done before, and it should be done now. But the West cannot coordinate effectively unless forced vs large players like Russia or China. It was done vs Libya or South Africa, however.
The stuff in the Ukraine is not a trivial matter, it’s a land grab war, 19th century style. We don’t want to reach a new equilibrium where it is ok to do stuff like this. You might not care about this particular instance of the misbehavior, but that is not the same thing as the matter being trivial.
Open question for Moldbug fans in the audience: how do you feel about Putin and Putin’s Russia? I am not planning to engage further on this, I am just curious.
edit: Full disclosure, I was born in the Crimea, and raised in Odessa until 13 yo. I am not ethnically Ukrainian.
Europe could either side with Ukraine and boycott the Russian natural gas, at a huge cost, or side with Russia and force Ukraine into submission by political and economic isolation, effectively rewarding the Russian expansionist attitudes. Looks like a catch-22 scenario.
Or Europe could just do nothing, except maybe avoiding to fly its planes on top of the war zone, which is pretty much what is actually happening now.
It doesn’t look like there is an easy solution to this problem. After all, if politics was easy it wouldn’t be politics.
This sounds like a good question for a political prediction market: Assuming that Putin succeeds to conquer the part of Ukraine he wants, how many years will pass until Russia attacks another country? Which one will be next?
Since I don’t know much about internal power balance and conflicts within Russia, I would only make the rather obvious bet, that the next country will almost certainly be a member of the former Soviet Union.
Europe didn’t learn.
Care to elaborate?
Probably a similarity between Putin 2014 and Hitler 1938.
Or maybe Europe finally learned the lessons of 1914 (i.e. not to start an apocalyptic war over relatively trivial matters.)
War would be stupid, but in this case the West is simply unwilling to close ranks and make economic sacrifices to erect a Schelling point vs obvious misbehavior on the international stage. This should have been done before, and it should be done now. But the West cannot coordinate effectively unless forced vs large players like Russia or China. It was done vs Libya or South Africa, however.
The stuff in the Ukraine is not a trivial matter, it’s a land grab war, 19th century style. We don’t want to reach a new equilibrium where it is ok to do stuff like this. You might not care about this particular instance of the misbehavior, but that is not the same thing as the matter being trivial.
Open question for Moldbug fans in the audience: how do you feel about Putin and Putin’s Russia? I am not planning to engage further on this, I am just curious.
edit: Full disclosure, I was born in the Crimea, and raised in Odessa until 13 yo. I am not ethnically Ukrainian.
Europe could either side with Ukraine and boycott the Russian natural gas, at a huge cost, or side with Russia and force Ukraine into submission by political and economic isolation, effectively rewarding the Russian expansionist attitudes.
Looks like a catch-22 scenario.
Or Europe could just do nothing, except maybe avoiding to fly its planes on top of the war zone, which is pretty much what is actually happening now.
It doesn’t look like there is an easy solution to this problem.
After all, if politics was easy it wouldn’t be politics.
This sounds like a good question for a political prediction market: Assuming that Putin succeeds to conquer the part of Ukraine he wants, how many years will pass until Russia attacks another country? Which one will be next?
(Possibly relevant data point: Transnistria.)
Since I don’t know much about internal power balance and conflicts within Russia, I would only make the rather obvious bet, that the next country will almost certainly be a member of the former Soviet Union.