How the heck did we get to this place, where we’re standing by, wringing our hands, as we watch decent people get slaughtered? When Ukraine became an independent state in 1991, it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world. They bought into disarmament. In 1994, according to Arms Control Association (armscontrol.org) they “committed to full disarmament, including strategic weapons, in exchange for economic support and security assurances from the United States and Russia.” Fooled them, didn’t they? Those assurances look pretty damn weak today.

The Prime Minister of Lithuania, Ingrida Simonyte, has written a terrific article which was published in The Economist. She documented a trail of Putin’s aggression. I’ve added a few notes of my own, so between us we’ve noted these things:

• Invasion of Chechnya, 1999
• Murder of Alexander Litvinenko in Britain in 2006
• Cyber-attack Estonia 2007
• Attack on Georgia 2008
• Assault on Ukraine (Crimea) 2014
• Malaysia Airlines flight shot down over Ukraine 2014
• Nerve gas attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Britain in 2018
• Assaults on the Donbas area of Ukraine 2014 – 2022
• Installation of puppet government (Lukashenko) in Belarus 2021

Putin has shown that he is always trying to keep one foot in the office of the leader of a civilized major world government, and the other foot on the throat of anyone who disagreed with him. What did we really do while he carried out these attacks and he and his friends grew rich? Of course, we decried those aggressive acts and we imposed some sanctions. But none of the sanctions that were imposed on Russia between 1999 and 2022 deterred Vladimir Putin from his course. We bought his oil. We looked the other way while he robbed Russia of its riches and amassed what many believe to be the largest personal fortune in the world. We sold ostentatious yachts and villas to his friends and provided them with banking services outside Russia. In short, we did nothing effectual.

Given that Russia and the US had provided assurances to Ukraine in 1994 when they gave up their nuclear weapons, why did the US not intervene more strongly in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014? Did they not owe it to them to stop Putin in his tracks right then and there? Why did other western countries not act and insist that the US act?  (Let’s not put this all on the US even though they were the ones who’d provided assurance)

The easy answer is the one that we’re hearing now on a daily basis. We cannot afford to poke the angry bear sitting there with his finger poised over the nuclear weapons launch button. And remember that the US, and indeed the world, was preoccupied with post-9/11 war on terrorism and Islamic extremist groups like ISIS. The US, I think, has stepped back from its role as guarantors of the world order and has grown tired of losing young people fighting wars on foreign soil. And no-one else really stepped forward, and so Putin was allowed to grow strong unchecked.

Could the economic sanctions and measures being taken today not have been applied then? And if they had been applied then, would Putin have mounted the full-scale invasion he’s enjoying so much today?

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Russian State was weak. Their economy was failing. Yes, they had a nuclear arsenal, but the cold war was over and they were in economic collapse. There was a body of opinion at the time that said that we should avoid NATO expansion, and work to bring Russia into the European Union. That didn’t happen, and Russia remained outside the club. And so, they came to regard NATO expansion as a threat, and Putin came to view the reunification of the Soviet States as his life’s work (when he wasn’t busy filling his own pockets).

While we waited and profited, Russia grew stronger. Its economy recovered, and Russia became a big player in the European energy market. Hindsight, always 20/20, informs us that we should have stopped him in 1999 when he flattened Chechnya.

The current war informs us how we could have done that. We could have applied crippling sanctions that threatened to destroy Russia’s economy at that point. There’s a kindergarten message here – “play nice or we won’t let you play in our game”. 

Of course, Putin isn’t the only bad actor in the world that we have to worry about. Should we be using the economic war tools more often to educate the world’s bad actors when they step out of line? 

There are numerous bad actors on the world stage. You just have to read some of the summaries on the Human Rights Watch web-page:

• North Korea – “one of the most repressive countries in the world.”
• Myanmar – “has carried out a brutal nationwide crackdown on millions of people protesting its rule”
• Equatorial Guinea – “Mismanagement of public funds and credible allegations of high-level corruption persist, as do other serious abuses, including torture, arbitrary detention, and unfair trials.”
• Azerbaijain – “The space for independent activism, critical journalism, and opposition political activity has been virtually extinguished as so many activists, human rights defenders, and journalists have been arrested and jailed, and laws and regulations restricting the activities of independent groups and their ability to secure funding adopted.”
• Venezuela – “The Nicolas Maduro government’s brutal repression continues”
• China – “The government imposes particularly heavy-handed control in the ethnic minority regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. The government’s cultural persecution and arbitrary detention of a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims since 2017 constitute crimes against humanity.”

Ah yes, China. China ought to scare us all. China is now the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. They’ve achieved great economic growth over the last thirty years, some would argue, on the backs of forced low-cost labour. What makes China different from the others in that short (and by no means complete) list of bad actors is that China is becoming an aggressive nation. They now have quite a large and modern navy. They are threatening the territorial sovereignty of the Philippines and other south east Asian countries. They actively support the lunatic government in North Korea, and have been luke-warm at best in their criticism of Russia’s actions in Ukraine.  

There is a considerable body of opinion that says that Russia will be driven to closer economic ties with China. China would like a big gulp of that Russian oil on favourable terms. If China engages more and more with Russia, they are likely to become subject to secondary sanctions as they violate the primary sanctions against Russia. Can we win an economic war with China? Are we heading back to the East Bloc/West Bloc world of largely separated economies of the 1970’s?

Economic power cannot be used as a control mechanism to make the world run the way we want it to without military power to back it. If we hammer down on any nation’s economy and we really piss them off, and they look at us and find that we’re a bunch of angry farmers with nothing more than pitchforks to back our economic power, they are likely to respond in the way that aggressive nations have always done – with a display of military might. So, it seems to me that the backbone of any attempt to form a world economic control group must start with NATO. But there are many countries, such as New Zealand, Australia, and Japan that sit outside NATO which could also be invited to join the club.

“The club” might well be considered to be built around the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. There is a significant overlap between NATO and the OECD. What would happen if all of the OECD countries got together into a formal military and economic bloc alliance and said “we will trade with you only if you meet the following set of standards”? Those standards would include some aspects of recognizing international rule of law, but might also be stretched to include some controls over the more egregious violations of human rights around the globe – child labour, slave labour, religious or ethnic repression. And yes, there might be some nations inside “the club” that would need to clean up their own act a bit. Does that mean we’d have to revisit the World Trade Order agreements? Yes it does – just paperwork; should be easy.

In the spirit of “stop the bully at the earliest opportunity”, we would then simply tell China what we consider the sovereign boundaries of South-East Asian nations such as the Philippines to be, and inform them that we will impose economic sanctions if they violate those boundaries. And if they cross the line, and the majority of the world’s large economies act together and subject them to economic sanctions, then maybe they will be stopped without a bullet ever being fired.

It is a bit more presumptuous on our part to judge another country and impose sanctions for “repression” and “abusive practices”. There are repressive practices that are sponsored by the state, but there are also non-state repressions that the states simply accept (don’t care), and repression that states don’t accept but maybe are fighting a losing battle with (think of the states that are trying to control rogue Islamic fundamentalist terrorists like Boko Haram). Those standards for international trading partners might have to be a little weak compared to our own internal standards, at least at first.

If we established such an armed trading alliance, we would also need to ensure that we didn’t further the differences between “have” and “have-not” nations. We should want to bring the poorest nations in the world into the club, and that might involve holding our noses while we try to educate them out of some of their more disgusting abuses of power until they achieved our lily-white standards of purity. That having been said, I don’t believe there is any compelling need to trade with nations like North Korea or Azerbaijain until they demonstrate a willingness to abide by rule of law and provide some evidence of fundamental human rights.

We’ve seen in the Russia/Ukraine conflict that concerted economic actions seem to offer a way to influence another country’s behaviour without having to cross borders or risk lives. That can work for a nation with conventional arms and normal distance limitations. What about a nation with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads? Sadly, nothing stops Putin from invoking his nuclear war threat. If he starts an aggressive action and we respond with crippling sanctions he can threaten to pull the plug on civilization as we know it. But intuitively, it seems less likely that he would take that action for crashing his bank than for killing his advance troops. Still, when dealing with a nut-bar it would be wise to consider that they might do anything.

I have to confess that I’m a little wary of what I’m proposing and how it would work. I’m suggesting that favoured nations create an organization dedicated to using economic power to enforce adherence to international rules and maintain international order. I’m suggesting that those favoured nations need to build and maintain substantial military might to back up the use of the economic enforcement tools. I’m suggesting that such an alliance would sit in judgement on their neighbours and decide who they will and will not trade with, and why. And all of that sounds rather Orwellian, even to me. 

It’s scary really. If we formally built such an international organization and committed to the naked use of economic power, would we have sufficient wisdom and restraint to avoid abuses of the power we had harnessed? But if we don’t build and use such an organization, how do we prevent nuclear armed nations like Russia and China (and the United States) from violating the world order with impunity? What is happening today in Ukraine is abhorrent to the entire civilized world. If the threat of nuclear war renders conventional military power helpless to stop such atrocities, then we need to embrace the tool that seems like it might work, and that is expulsion from the world’s major economies. Right now, the world is doing that on an ad hoc basis. I think we need to make the use of that power a lot more controlled and predictable so that just the threat of sanctions is enough.Send me a comment. Tell me what you think.