The West has responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in three main ways: pouring arms into Ukraine to buttress the country’s defence; imposing heavy sanctions on Russia to cripple its economy; and essentially ‘cancelling’ Russia by shutting down its foreign media, censoring its cultural exports, and banning its athletes from international competitions.
The hope seems to be that either one of three things will happen: the Russians will be defeated or forced to withdraw; Putin will be overthrown in a palace coup or popular uprising; or he’ll be brought to the negotiating table and made to accept terms highly unfavourable to Russia. While this strategy may work, I’ve yet to read a cogent defence of it.
In fact, the strategy could have a number of negative second-order effects – i.e., unintended consequences – that haven’t been properly thought through.
As several people have observed, the West’s response seems to have been slapped together on the fly amidst a storm of social media outrage, as opposed to being carefully devised after consideration of all possible eventualities. One Substack commenter noted:
Just as COVID-19 is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, direct U.S. conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. Just as with Covid, we’re seeing the rapid abandonment of longstanding Western policies. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking, lockdowns, and so on.
Let’s deal with each aspect of the Western response in turn. Pouring arms into Ukraine may precipitate a Russian defeat. But it could just as easily prolong the conflict, leading to many more Ukrainian deaths. The Syrian civil war has dragged on for more than ten years and claimed more than 400,000 lives, in part thanks to external arming of rebel groups.
If there’s a good chance the Ukrainians can win, supplying them with arms makes sense. But if they’re unlikely to prevail, why would we want to prolong the conflict?
One possible answer is to deter the next autocratic ruler from launching a similar invasion. But how much deterrence does supplying arms really achieve, especially if Russia ends up winning? Now, entering the war on Ukraine’s side – that would achieve deterrence, but it’s something the West isn’t willing to do (for obvious reasons).
What about imposing heavy sanctions on Russia to cripple its economy? This could prompt a palace coup or popular uprising, leading to Putin’s downfall. But what then? Whoever replaced him could be just as belligerent as he is – or more so. Russia’s President is unlikely to be supplanted by a liberal-minded democrat.
And there’s a potentially much worse outcome than Putin being toppled and replaced. His ouster could leave a power vacuum, with different factions scrambling to take control of the state apparatus. While calm might soon be restored, what if it wasn’t? We don’t want anarchy or civil war in country armed with thousands of nukes.
Another possibility is that crushing sanctions bring Putin to the negotiating table, where he accepts terms highly unfavourable to Russia. And this might work – eventually. But rather than simply giving in, Putin might retaliate with sanctions of his own. And these could be quite injurious. A lesson of economics is that both parties lose from a trade war.
You might say that it’s worth it to halt Putin’s invasion. But what if the sanctions don’t halt Putin’s invasion? Then we’ve simply cratered Russia’s economy, and to a lesser extent those of the West, for no material gain. (Meanwhile, China’s economy will continue growing apace.)
Furthermore, sanctions imposed on Russia could have unintended long-term consequences. One unprecedented step we have taken is to freeze overseas assets owned by Russia’s central bank, while cutting off access to the SWIFT payment system. There’s no doubt this hurts Russia in the short-term, and probably the medium-term too.
But how will this affect other countries’ decisions about where to invest in the future? Will they not be more wary of putting money in the West, knowing that their assets could be frozen at any moment? Granted, we’re in exceptional circumstances. But these kind of downstream effects shouldn’t be discounted.
Another issue is the inconsistency of Western policy. Why are we backing the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen with one hand, while we seek to cripple Russia’s economy with the other? There’s already evidence that Western media coverage is perceived as racist – that we care less about Middle Eastern deaths because the people there don’t look like us.
Finally, by doubling down on the policies that got us here in the first place, we’re simply driving Russia into the arms of China. You might say this is a price we have to pay to punish Russia’s aggression, and you might be right. But remember that Russia is a declining power, whereas China is the West’s only ‘peer competitor’.
So what should we do instead? Though I don’t claim to have all the answers, one thing we could have tried is offering conditional concessions at the war’s outset.
As soon as Putin’s tanks rolled across the border, why didn’t we suggest ruling out NATO membership for Ukraine, and recognising the three breakaway regions, on the condition that Russia immediately withdraw its forces. ‘Then we’d be rewarding Russia’s aggression,’ comes the reply. And I suppose that’s true.
But if the choice is between ‘rewarding Russia’s aggression’ and watching lots of people get slaughtered in a war, perhaps the former is the lesser evil – especially since the ultimate geopolitical outcome could be the same in both cases (i.e., Russia controlling parts of Ukraine).
It’s possible this plan would have been dead on arrival. Putin might have simply rebuffed us, and pressed on with his invasion. But the fact it wasn’t even considered doesn’t inspire confidence in our leaders, who appear to be more concerned with looking ‘tough’ than preventing bloodshed.
At the very least, they could explain what their current policy aims to achieve, and why the various risks I’ve highlighted can be safely ignored.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I salute Chris for keeping going in the face of such dishonesty, his work is one of the major reasons I make a small contribution to the DS.
I agree and thank Chris Morrison and others on here and in some other places for doing something that 90% or more of journalist don’t do, and that is question something that is supposed to be about “science”. ——-In science you question everything. When you don’t question it, you are indulging in politics not science, and nothing today is more highly politicised than energy/climate.
I see the red thumbs down person disagrees with me and thinks that in science you should not question anything. ——Notice how they don’t say why. Probably because they are aware how silly that would be.
I’m firmly of the opinion that “the red thumbs down person” / people is/are probably attention-seeking, insecure vitiates. Ergo, the red thumbs down gesture.
I try to ignore them.
Could it be a cry for help?
Also, please visit https://wattsupwiththat.com/
There you will find a wealth of information about the environments, actual science, weather, the climates and also links to numerous agencies that provide data on ice, sea temperatures, atmospheric temperatures etc.
Likewise. An excellent chap, it was a pleasure to meet him at the DS Christmas Party.
Yesterday I flicked over to SKY NEWS (a rare event). ——On it was the “Climate Show”. They were doing a piece about coastal erosion and painting a picture of rising sea levels threatening coastal villages with lots of images of houses very close to the edge and footage of bits of cliff falling down to the beach etc. ——The whole idea was to give this picture of sea level rise that was all caused by our emissions of CO2 and as a result of “climate change”. There is only one thing wrong with this. Sea levels have been rising throughout this Interglacial period for the last 12,000 years or so but crucially there is no evidence of an increase in the rate of sea level rise as would be expected if humans were adding to natural rises with our CO2 emissions. Any honest reporting would surely therefore conclude that coastal erosion was caused by rising sea levels that are occurring naturally. But on a “Climate Show” that is like a hammer that sees everything as a nail, absolutely everything that occurs is because of humans and that is POLITICS not SCIENCE.
You may know this, but 20,000 years ago temperatures started rise marking the end of the last glacial expansion cycle. Huge quantities of ice melted and the seas started to rise (see the graphic below). Today we are told that humans are responsible for an 8cm rise in seas since the 1800s. Using the same scale and beginning 20,000 years ago nature was responsible for 123,000cm rise in seas. Lets compare that.
Nature – – 123,000cm
Humans – 000,008cm
I struggle to see how nature has stopped suddenly and only since the Industrial Revolution. During the Holocene the seas have continued to rise although much slower and with the occasional drop. We have perhaps 500 years before the next glacial cycle gets into it’s stride and unless the Earth loses all it’s orbital and rotational eccentricities I cannot see what will stop the descent into another 80,000 to 100,000 years of a much much colder, drier planet .
I am aware a lot of this stuff as I have been looking into it since about 2007, but I thankyou for your reply…….All information and knowledge is GOOD.—– It is no knowledge that is bad, and that is why people end up gluing themselves to buildings and throwing tomato soup at works of art.—-Because they know NOTHING
Agreed. I run the risk of writing what people like yourself already know but I consider it better to do that as others that don’t know may be reading.
I went with my son to visit Keele University as part of their open day. We were greeted at Stoke station by one of the students acting as a guide. I asked him what he was studying? As he answered Environmental Studies I thought he would know about the Ice Age we are currently in, particularly the extent and duration of the last glacial expansion. He confessed to not knowing much about it at all. I naively thought that anyone in higher education would be thirsty for knowledge especially everything around the subject they have chosen?
Yes I often post stuff that others may already know as well. But so what? There will always be some people who don’t know or are unaware. The more that we all attack this hijacked environmentalism that is really just politics masquerading as science the better.
I think you’re out by a factor of 10. 120m is 12,000cm, not 120,000 (which would be mm)
Otherwise, thanks for the graph.
Oh yes and thanks for pointing out, but unfortunately I cannot correct and hide my error, so there it is. Either way even 12,300cm is a considerable rise compared to 8cm.
Sky subscription? Cancelled.
BBC TV, Radio 4 Today programme? Do these still exist?
Watts Up With That is all the news that you need:
First three WUWT articles today?
‘……the EU may be realizing that banning internal combustion engines, and replacing them with e-cars, is going to cause a lot more damage than good.’
‘….the models that formerly used WH (Western Hudson) bears as a proxy to predict the survival of all other subpopulations, including the one published last year, are not worth the paper they were printed on. What a surprise!’
‘The subsequent Great Dying or end Permian Extinction 252 million years ago was simply the culmination of “dead clades walking” that began with CO2 starvation, the rain forest collapse, and phytoplankton blackout. The end Permian saw 81% of the remaining marine species and 70% of remaining terrestrial vertebrate species go extinct……….if history teaches us anything, we must ensure that attempts to reduce CO2 concentrations do not result in devastating CO2 starvation ever again.’
Yep. There are also many many books on the issue of energy and climate. —-One of the best is “Hubris, The Troubling Science, Economics and Politics of Climate Change”. by Michael Hart ————-I also like the works of energy experts like Robert Bryce and Michael J Economides who wrote “Energy and Climate Wars”. ——–Good luck with your reading and thanks for your comments on here.
“Watts Up With That is all the news that you need”
Don’t fall into that trap, as true as the statement may be.
Tom Nelson’s YouTube channel is worth a watch. This is a good listen, if you can cope with 1 hr and 40 mins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIrOsjS6_GU
Luckily there is a chapter list so you can find the various most interesting points.
And let’s not forget that humans were vastly vegetarian!
All those thousands of flint arrow heads, fish barbs and knives were all used to hunt apples and wild tomatoes!
https://www.newsweek.com/diets-almost-exclusively-vegetarian-first-european-cities-1856648
If food scarcity is an issue for polar bears (very common for these large carnivorous predators), then why not turn up to their habitat every month or so and feed them? Problem solved. We’ve got an abundance of food, we stuff our faces all day long, many of us are obese, and yet we give almost nothing to the animal kingdom. They live like scavengers, how utterly selfish of us.
Instead these magnificent animals have become the unwitting poster boy for the deranged leftist deindustrialisation plan, where white people (only white people of course) must: decommission our existing power stations and buy Chinese wind turbines; dump all our cars on the scrap heap and buy Chinese EVs; dump all our gas boilers on the scrap heap and buy Chinese heat pumps…in order ‘to save the polar bears’. Mass hysteria.
If the leftists really cared about polar bears, then they would do as above. But it’s clear that they don’t think twice about them, know nothing about them, nor do they care.
I can think of a few people I’d like to send to the arctic to feed polar bears.
Hänsel and Gretel get lost in the turbine forests until they arrive at a ramshackle shed where the evil climate alarmist Claudia Roth lies in hiding who seeks to capture children to use their dead bodies as mushroom beds for yeast and mould fungi she then turns into the vegan meat replacement products which exclusively make up her diet. She captures Hänsel by cunningly luring him into her home under the pretext of wanting to give him a sausage roll but Gretel luckily escapes. Having locked up the boy to let him compassionately starve to death, the Green politician (for that she is in her public life) then goes hunting for the girl through the desolate wasteland of concrete, dripping chemicals and turbine blades whoosing through the air.
The chase goes on an on and Gretel, having tripped numerous times over thick cables laid out all over the ground, is near the end of her endurance when they finally reach the outskirts of the ghastly mechanical forest and approach a huge solar installation composed many highly reflecting mirrors for bundling the sunlight and sending it to water heating chamber in the center of it. Roth stumbles over a concrete ridge while trying to grab the girl who, with a final exertion, pushes here into the circle of reflectors where – with a shriek of absolute terror – the evil Green is incinerated in a bright flash, turning into flocks of grey ash blown away by the wind. Panting, the girl makes are way back to the shed step by step where she finds releases her unfortuntate brother.
What is that? ——–Is it from your imagination or from some book or other? ——-It is very funny and quite appropriate parody.
Thanks. I just wrote that on the spot at that time. I only wish the English was less atrocious.
The politician.
Oooh, she’s lovely!
RW, it works. Freud may ask to see you after class, but you said it well. Your English is way better than my stale, high-school/GCSE German.
If I wrote auf Deutsch, I would feel as humble as you do. Not a problem.
Brilliant! Now it needs to be made into a ‘Blockbuster Movie’. ‘Based on real events.’
Models prove nothing! Why is that so hard for people to understand?
It’s not science, it’s pure bunkum.
I’ve been leading teams of Data Scientists for years. The whole team understands we’re just making sophisticated guesses and that’s how we communicate any results to management. We actively seek to falsify and refine. It’s the only responsible thing to do.
The minute you see “scientists used ‘high emissions’ climate model scenarios to predict ice-free conditions” then it’s clear that the model was designed with embedded assumptions which led to the intended conclusion.
The same crappy thinking led us into lockdown. Big scary numbers produced by fancy models were enough to rob us of our freedoms.
Modelling sounds sexy and mysterious, but it’s just a complex calculation. If I said “my spreadsheet calculations predict thermageddon is imminent”, more people would question my conclusions.
If I said “my AI/ML model has predicted…” then suddenly it sounds all scientific. Snake Oil.
Correct. ——-But when most people tune into their 6 O’Clock news to be lectured about the unfolding “climate crisis” they only hear things like “all scientists agree”. They never hear “All Modellers agree”. ——-A model is NOT science and it is not evidence of anything. Mainstream news has simply become climate activism pretending it is reporting on science.
Chris, why use that silly graph of declining sea ice from 1979?? It starts at 14m/sqKM so it is only the ‘tops’ and exaggerates the decline, this is EXACTLY what the game that alarmists play. Am I missing something?
Yes, it’s exactly their game but “when in Rome,…”
Shrinking the axes is a common ploy for exaggerating data. We saw that late ’20 / early “21 when our wonderful media were pontificating whether us peons deserved freedom.
When things were bottoming out, despite several months prior data, the Beeb zoomed into the previous 4 weeks which showed a ‘spike’ and quizzed ‘The Right Honourless W*nksock MP’ on that slice of the data. Something like ‘given the recent increase in cases [lol, ffs!], why should we let the peons leave their houses?’ – yes, I exaggerated but it’s certainly no more egregious than the panic-whipping tactics of our media over that wonderfully ‘educational’ (i.e. the lying that led to my becoming red-pilled) couple of years.
This myopia ignored the huge decline over the previous months. Instead they focused on the blip, thus exaggerating the severity of our non-crisis.
I think it was then, in response to an impertinent question, Mr W*nksock claimed the ‘journslist’ had ‘got the science wrong’
I wish, at exactly this moment, the inquisitor had asked him to ‘explain the science’ – it would have shown him for the igno-ty-rant he really is.
Instead, I’m fairly sure the general population (gen-pop being prison terminology) were duly scared into clamouring for ‘our’ freedoms [unsurprisingly, not the suspension of the freedoms of the laptop class, which somehow seemed enhanced in those dark days.] to remain suspended for a few more months.
Yeah, even after all this time, I’m still really salty. Cold hard rage.
It’ll take a long while and some humility/repentance from our ‘betters’ to bring me back down.
Why does the Average Monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent graph for 1979-2023 shown above match such a nice neat straight trend line [shown in blue]?
That seems a little unusual. It suggests a linear relationship of the form y = mx + c.
Of course the trend over a much longer period than 24 years might not match s straight trend line.
Taking it at face value, what other single variable might match that straight trend line? Is there some other process responsible for this that is not ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’?
Does the sea ice extent for Antarctica match this or is it different?
What of changing ocean currents? Are they different now? If so is the change linear?
Any thoughts?