Best case outcome?
- Ukraine & Russia agree to cease-fire
- Ukraine says they won't join NATO (they don't need it, clearly)
- Putin gets to declare a "win", pulls back
- Nuclear crisis averted
- Then, @navalny allies with @VitalikButerin to win a real election and rebuild Russia
I'm serious on the last bit. It must be a fair election, or else it'll feel like US regime change.
But as an idealist, the Russian people & world deserve better than Putin. And as a realist, it's a security threat to leave their economy like this:
Winning the war is also about winning the peace. The Russian people won't want a repeat of Yeltsin. That's why many supported Putin. But a free & fair election (perhaps monitored by neutral observers) where they vote out Putin & vote in Navalny + Vitalik? That'd be an upgrade.
This is a financial neutron bomb. Bankrupts people without blowing up buildings. Hits all 145M Russians at once, every ruble holder. In a maximalist scenario, possible collapse of the Russian economy.
If these (unconfirmed) visuals are real — as seems plausible given the news — it’s the complete opposite of what Putin may have contemplated in terms of a “limited” intervention like Georgia 2008 or Crimea 2014.
This is now something every Russian is harmed by. They’ll be angry.
I don’t know how bad it gets. Maybe the purported ~$240B they have left is enough to keep the Russian economy from collapsing. Maybe China extends them a special Belt and Road deal, a $100B credit facility in return for rights in the Russian Far East.
Depending on the degree of financial nuking, Russia may need an Iran-like relationship with China. It will buy all its products, take a cut, and resell them whitelabel on international markets.
China has sufficient scale, so it can’t be sanctioned.
Russia is at war with the dollar ecosystem, and doesn’t culturally have enough connection with neutral Bitcoin, so will throw in with the Chinese yuan.
Those are the three ecosystems with the scale to survive.
Camp 1 are those who dispute the US is in decline.
Many people are in denial. Some get mad if you point at qualitative and quantitative evidence.
But only the paranoid survive. Denial of decline means you cannot even diagnose the cause, let alone take measures to reverse it.
Camp 2 believes the US has declined, but it can be reversed.
While they have *very* different visions of what that reversal means, both centrist liberals like my friend @Noahpinion and MAGA types want to see America “awake from its slumber” and start kicking butt again.
This proposal is essentially privatized cyberwar on millions of innocent Russians. In my view, better to do targeted positive acts (offering asylum, helping dissidents) or targeted negative acts than untargeted broad attacks.
Using US tech power against millions of Russians in this way isn’t like a typical deplatforming, where it's a consequence-free act by a huge company on a powerless individual.
In a 51% democracy you just barely pass the bar, and then assume all will do as you say. They won't.
The ideal is actually a ~100% democracy. An opt-in society, where everyone has chosen to be there. And can leave.
Set aside the question of whether ~100% democracy is practical for a second. (The ~ indicates that 100% is an asymptotic goal, even if not fully achieved.)
Once you agree it is desirable — and morally superior if feasible — then you start thinking about whether we can build it.
The fundamental concept is that democracy is about the *consent of the governed*.
If you have only 51% support, you have the absolute minimum necessary level of consent.