not trying to be glib here. people pushing Ukraine for a settlement should consider how an international system that tolerates nuclear-backed territorial conquest creates massive incentives for unstable nuclear proliferation /1
nukes have always been the ultimate defensive deterrent (hence “nuclear peace” arguments) But if nukes or nuclear blackmail become an offensive tool of territorial conquest we are now in a world in which:
/2
Aug 5, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
not an economist so please explain if i’m getting something wrong bc it feels like i’m taking crazy pills. Due to supply chain issues and the Rus-Ukr war, things cost more. Especially basic things like fuel and food. As a result of these price increases, inflation goes up. 1/4
to deal with this, the government raises interest rates. This helps freeze real wages and increase unemployment while making things like mortgages more expensive. People now have less money to spend on everything, and spend more money on things like paying off debts. 2/4
Jul 27, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Walt is now calling Russia’s invasion a “preventive” war. He knows full well that’s a specific term meaning a war designed to head off a future attack. Is he implying that Ukraine was on the path to invade Russia? Because I’m failing to understand the mental gymnastics here
not much objectionable in what Walt says in his new column - it's more what he leaves out. Because he names me as one of the “haters” let me say why his argument in defense of realism is a big dodge. 🧵 foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/13/why…
walt rolls out the usual reasons realism gets criticized - gloomy, amoral, etc. Fine, but that’s not the issue. One problem he conspicuously avoids is the inconsistent way leading theorists of realism employ its principles to justify their position.
Mar 11, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
looks like the FSB provided terrible intel on Ukraine because they were worried about angering the boss and told Putin exactly what he wanted to hear. an *extremely* common dysfunction of personalist regimes
as @adam_e_casey and I argued in early Feb., the increased personalism of Putin’s rule would lead to over-optimism, weak subordinates, and bad intel in case of an invasion. we are seeing all this and we will see more foreignaffairs.com/articles/russi…
Mar 3, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
the head of Russian foreign intelligence just said the West is trying to “cancel” Russia and I’m trying to think of a better way to demonstrate the absolute hegemony of american cultural power
this is being done by the "liberal-fascist" circles fyi. full transcript here svr.gov.ru/smi/2022/03/di…
Mar 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
putin's advisors scrambling to adjust their invasion calculus in response
a week ago the guy that demanded an immediate Batman embargo on russia was roundly mocked. now it's just policy
Mar 2, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
no deathblow like in some interviews but in many places Mearsheimer doesn't actually get pushed that hard. One big example, on Ukraine as a "threat" to Russia.../n
The unasked question: what is the actual existential threat to Russia? How does Ukraine joining NATO and/or EU actually threaten the *existence* of Russia? Do ICBMs stop working when they join? Do the tanks melt away?
Mar 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
this is an aside but the decorative optics in the kremlin are just repellent, a mix of tsarist rococo and 80s office furniture
very little feng shui in that place
Feb 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
protests across 53 russian cities, more than 1700 people detained tonight. the regime did not bother with counter-protests. I wonder if Putin underestimated just how unpopular this would be
I suppose when you lose a million a people in excess mortality to covid and no one protests you start to think of yourself as invulnerable
Feb 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
to be transparent I had thought the chances of full scale invasion were low until recently. but I also thought, and Adam & I argued, that if one did happen it would be because of the specific dysfunctions of putin's personalist rule, namely...
a tightening and more aggressive inner circle, weak subordinates (witness the struggle session earlier this week), informational filtering leading to over-optimism and underestimating of costs. This is sadly all looking more likely.
when the uncertain part of the crisis is over, whatever the outcome, you will see people saying “in retrospect it was inevitable that…” DO NOT trust those people
it is remarkably easy to construct plausible ex post narratives given the number of facts available to you
Feb 14, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I am once again asking people to not retweet things like this: second-hand sources without any links. The “breaking” story in question was something a news org had posted three hours before. Good hustle but this is how disinfo happens
in general, i would not trust any tweet that starts with BREAKING and provides no source unless it's wire service or a joke
Feb 13, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
in general if you force the wealthy to park their money inside their country they care more about what happens in it. A lot of what we call democracy started because elites were worried about the monarch taking their stuff.
so if you want a more democratic russia put sanctions on the oligarchs. Let them take their kids out of Swiss boarding schools and into Moscow Public No.41. Let them sail their yachts on the Volga instead of St. Tropez. Let them deposit their money in Sberbank not Barclays
Dec 12, 2021 • 9 tweets • 1 min read
here are some things GPT-3 has said to me since I've been messing with it for a few months (a thread)
Never speak ill of yourself; even if true it’s valuable information.
Nov 16, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
a frustrating piece bc of a contradiction the author never addresses. The framing narrative is of innocent democracy (the West, aka the good guys) being subverted by shadowy foreign autocrats. only much later does the article note that
the "West" is what makes global kleptocracy possible in the first place, or that Western firms regularly sell surveillance tech "to the bad guys". This is, in other words, a co-dependence and not a battle of good vs evil.
May 17, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I wrote about Israeli apartheid, BDS, academic freedom, and targeted sanctions as the way forward hegemon.substack.com/p/so-its-apart…
targeted sanctions are the precision-guided weapons of economic statecraft. Broad boycotts of the kind supported by BDS are, instead, indiscriminate bombing runs — and it for this reason, perversely, that Bibi benefits from BDS.
Jun 19, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
the debates over face masks remind me of the “debates” over seatbelts the 70s and 80s, especially the performative masculinity of risk acceptance
here is a beautiful illustration from a 1985 washpost piece. Note the similarities (but also how outdated the anti-belt people sound) washingtonpost.com/archive/politi…
Apr 13, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
by shifting the blame from failed institutions and lying political leaders to shadowy Russian threats, this article achieves exactly the kind of disinformation it seeks to condemn nytimes.com/2020/04/13/sci…
disinformation is not a Russia problem, it's a democracy problem warontherocks.com/2020/02/the-gr…
Apr 10, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I think we really need to distinguish between failures of the liberal order, which are clearly on display, and failures of liberal democracy, which are much less so
at the global level the US has consciously stepped away from a leadership role. So of course you get echoes of Kindleberger and the interwar period, “Britain couldn’t and the US wouldn’t” etc warontherocks.com/2020/04/afters…
Mar 30, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I can think of at least three ways in which the collapse of the USSR led to the current problems in American politics /n
1. eliminated bipartisan FP consensus 2. facilitated overstretch of LIO 3. lessened concerns about socio-economic inequality
in general, i would not trust any tweet that starts with BREAKING and provides no source unless it's wire service or a joke
