The 7 stages of Western "concern"
1 We are concerned
2 We are very concerned
3 We are gravely concerned
4 There must be answers
5 There will be consequences
6 It is important to engage
7 We should separate this from commerical issuesRinse. Repeat https://t.co/37Cvkq0e1X
— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) May 23, 2021
So far the responses to Belarus’s abuse of the air traffic control system; the declaration of an emergency on a flight not scheduled to land in Belarus, but flying over Belarusan airspace; and the act of war that is forcing an air plane from an air carrier from Ireland to make a forced, emergency landing in order to seize a Belarusan activist and journalist that the Belarusan dictator is mad at, have been insufficient.
For instance, the European Union Commissioner for Transportation could do better:
The @Ryanair flight took off just now from Minsk bound for Vilnius. Great news for everyone especially the families and friends of people onboard.
Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, did a bit better:
Closely monitoring forcible landing in #Belarus of flight to Vilnius & reported detention of opposition figure Roman Protasevich. This is a serious & dangerous incident which requires international investigation. Belarus must ensure safe return of crew & all passengers.
As did Egil Levits, the President of Latvia:
The forced landing of the Ryanair aircraft in Minsk is a grave violation of international law, which must be investigated. The European reaction must be clear and firm.
And Gitanas Nausėda, the President of Lithuania, which is where the Ryan Air flight was bound when Belarus forced it down:
Unprecedented event! A civilian passenger plane flying to Vilnius was forcibly landed in #Minsk. Belarusian political activist & founder of @NEXTA_EN was on the plane. He is arrested.
regime is behind the abhorrent action. I demand to free Roman Protasevič urgently!
And:
leaders will discuss a state-sponsored terror act in #Minsk tomorrow at #EUCO. My suggestions: airspace over
While the debate will now rage about how much of this was done by Lukashenko versus how much of this was known or approved or even planned by Putin, the simple reality, which we have seen demonstrated over and over and over and over again since 2011, is that leveling sanctions, issuing demarches, and tweeting about it are not going to make a damn bit of difference with Lukashenko or his patron Putin. Especially because Belarus’s air defense are fully integrated into Russia’s:
?? Air Defenses, including this ?? MiG29 “escort” are fully integrated, with ?? Air Defenses, meaning Kremlin Command&Control. Besides EU action, this illegal act is among many Indications/Warnings about why NATO must upgrade its #BalticAirPolicing mission to #BalticAirDefense https://t.co/1UlXDQfs9a
— Ray Wojcik (@wojcikrp) May 23, 2021
The only discussion that should be going on at the EU right now is one of who, among the EU’s members will join a coalition of EU members under NATO to conduct denial of flight operations against Belarus until Protasevich is released.
The DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines area denial as:
An action to hinder or deny the enemy use of territory, personnel, or facilities to include destruction, removal, contamination, or erection of obstructions.
JP 3-52: Joint Airspace Control defines No Fly Zone Area as:
Airspace of specific dimensions set aside for a specific purpose in which no aircraft operations are permitted, except as authorized by the appropriate commander and controlling agency.
The EU and NATO response needs to be that nothing takes off or lands in Belarus. Nothing flies over Belarus. Anything flying near Belarus is escorted by a combat air patrol (CAP). Nothing flies into or out of Belarus until it is interdicted by coalition air assets, escorted to the nearest coalition forces air base, inspected, and determined to not being carrying anything illegal or contraband. If Belarus activates its air defense system, coalition air destroys it and, if necessary, bounces the rubble. If Putin doesn’t like it than his air force assets can be escorted back to Russia’s borders and can then do figure eights till they have to go and refuel.
This cannot be business as usual. It can’t be nice sounding diplomatic language that achieves nothing. What Putin has learned for the past decade is that no matter what he does, no matter who he does it to, no one – not the US, not NATO, not the EU – will actually do anything to stop him that could actually stop him. And it is what his clients like Lukashenko and Orban have learned as well.
The US and our EU and NATO allies and partners decided it wasn’t risking a larger war when Putin scarfed up Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine using his special operations forces and Wagner mercenaries – the little green men – back in 2014. All this did is embolden Putin because it taught him that short of formally and openly invading another nation-state with Russian forces, that he could do whatever he wanted because no one would do anything to stop him.
It is well past time to teach Putin and his clients like Lukashenko and Orban a new lesson. Or you can resign yourself to more commercial, passenger air planes, as well as private jets and planes, being forced down if they stray anywhere close to Belarusan or Russian airspace, including Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.
Open thread!
Gin & Tonic
Thanks for a comprehensive post, Adam.
Note that among the people who did not continue on the flight from Minsk to Vilnius were Protasevich and his girlfriend, and four Russian nationals. For anyone still wondering about the degree of V.V. Putin’s involvement.
hrprogressive
Gonna guess nothing will happen, precisely because nobody wants to give Vlad whatever impetus he needs to formally invade anywhere he wants, or Press The Button or give the Chinese cover to invade Taiwan, etc.
Trying to prevent a theoretical WWIII is a complicated game.
And, while I admit that sounds hyperbolic, when you’re dealing with a terrorist like Putin, it’s hard not to keep that level of conflagration on the table, at least in the realm of “well, maybe”.
No, that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to do anything.
But such is the complex game of Realpolitik. Not really knowing what, if anything, is the correct action, or inaction, to take.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: The Russian nationals, were, I’m sure, either Russian intelligence, Russian special operation, or Wagner mercenaries that were on that flight specifically to make sure Protasevich and his girlfriend didn’t get away.
Adam L Silverman
I’ve removed everything but two tweets, instead linking to the EU and NATO leader tweets and copying the text of the tweets into quote boxes. That should, hopefully, make things run a bit more smoothly for everyone.
Gin & Tonic
@hrprogressive: Plenty that can be done short of “boom-boom” stuff. Cut Russia out of SWIFT. Confiscate and nationalize Russian-owned real estate in London and Miami. Deny US/EU visas to all Russians/Belarusians. Deny landing rights anywhere in the EU to all Belavia flights.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: Absolutely.
Another Scott
VOA:
Possession is 9/10th of the law, so it doesn’t look good for Pratasevich. :-(
Biden and Blinken (and Nod) need to get their ducks in a row before proposing anything like an exclusion zone. But I hope they are considering some strong and sensible responses. As everyone says, this cannot go unpunished.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
TeezySkeezy
@hrprogressive: Adam can weigh in (obviously, and preferably), but really figuring out how rational Putin and Russia are versus how impulsive, emotional, and non-risk averse they are versus how much of each quality they want to give us the impression of has been the long standing question when dealing with Russia.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: As a French colleague pointed out, the Russkies own a shit-ton of lovely real estate on the Cote d’Azur. Confiscate every damn square meter.
Mike in NC
We’ll probably never know how much classified data the Trump family handed over to Putin.
hrprogressive
@Gin & Tonic: Very good points, and actions I definitely think should be taken. Bleeding their assets dry and making life otherwise miserable for any of these people ought to be top of mind.
To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting “Do nothing and let the despots get away with murder” but rather than I wouldn’t expect a massive show of force in response, either.
hrprogressive
@TeezySkeezy: Yeah, I mean. I think this has always been the million-dollar question with respect to the Russian Federation / USSR.
Just how committed to “MAD” are they?
If Vlad really wants to rule the world, nuking it doesn’t do him any good. But if his aim is to pull the “If I can’t have it, nobody can” trope of supervillany…
I’m definitely not an expert, but I certainly think there’s a reason why Russia has remained such a complex and formidable geopolitical conundrum for decades, if not centuries.
Adam L Silverman
@TeezySkeezy: At this point I don’t think it matters. Putin and his clients and his trusted agents and his catspaws are all going to proceed as they’ve been proceeding until we make it abjectly clear that doing so is painful and will continue to be painful.
bbleh
All true. And meanwhile behind the scenes, every airline that flies a north-south route in that part of the world is burning up the lines to every politician they know insisting that one damn Belarusian gadfly is not worth the ruinous cost of diverting around Belarusian airspace, and of course the usual financial and real-estate interests are fighting the usual fight against anything that would inhibit even slightly the flow of yummy-money-who-cares-how-they-got-it from the Russian kleptocracy and their Belarusian buddies, etc. and so on.
There will be lots of stern finger-wagging, a period of the Russians pulling their claws in a bit, and then it will all be forgotten and everything can go back to normal.
Adam L Silverman
@bbleh: Correct. Which is why the solution to this is not going to be seizing assets, rerouting flights, and/or economic sanctions.
War is now and has been upon us for the better part of a decade. We’ve just decided we’re going to ignore that unfortunate reality.
Cameron
Screw it. Throw a few nukes their way. I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed……
Mary G
I vote for bouncing the rubble.
debbie
I wasn’t aware until skimming Twitter a while ago that there were American citizens on the flight. There better be a response or this country will have little or no credibility in the world.
Roger Moore
@TeezySkeezy:
You can only tell if Putin lacks risk aversion if there is actual risk involved. If the worst consequences for his actions are people saying “Tut, tut! You mustn’t do that again!”, he will continue to act on impulse. It’s only when there are serious consequences that you’ll be able to tell.
Mike in NC
@Cameron: A very stable genius once mused about “what’s the point of having nuclear weapons if we can’t use them”?
Fair Economist
Absolutely. An act of war needs to be treated like an act of war.
natem
Loving the
Big Brained CentristsPutinistas lighting up Twitter whatabouting about the U.S. force landing Evo Morales’s flight back in ’13 because suspicion he was smuggling Snowden to Bolivia.Citizen Alan
Has a single Republican said anything? Because I assume they’re all waiting to see what Biden does before they work backwards to explain why it’s the worst possible decision.
Cameron
@Mike in NC: Proper!
bbleh
@Adam L Silverman: Wait what? Are you the real Adam Silverman? War? With Russia or its de facto protectorate? Over what exactly? A Russian version of “extraordinary rendition”? Russian adventurism in Ukraine and elsewhere, something that is … um … totally not a new development in the entirety of European history? And with what objectives, and to what end? Are the EU going to liberate Minsk? The Crimea? Are they going to get Putin to throw Lukashenko to the wolves? Or are they going to threaten war in Europe over a single Belarusian dissident when they did nothing remotely similar for Navlany? And just as an aside, where are they going to get all that nice natural gas?
??!?!?
Ruckus
Who here has any good ideas about what to do?
The world has grown more connected, more dependent upon each other to exist and we have politicians who have been around for decades making bad decisions on a lot of things, some of them so bad they can’t be trusted to find a restroom to piss in. Vlad is old school, as are a lot of the leaders all around the world. Is blowing up a country good for any one any longer? Is our military not stretched rather thin as it is, what with being at war for the last 20 yrs or so?
I am not saying what Vlad has done and will continue to do if not corralled is in any way good, I’m saying that is it possible that the old ways are not the best ways to get done what needs to get done.
RaflW
I’m not holding my breath, but I think Commerce Sec. Gina Raimondo should suspend the export license for Boeing customer Belaire, the Belarusian flag carrier, so that they cannot get spares or technical assistance for their 737 fleet, nor take delivery of two B737 MAXs that they have on order.
International trade with air pirates is just not a good look.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus:
I thought that in the past, Adam has repeatedly suggested hitting Putin where it hurts: his and his oligarchs’ overseas investments and accounts. Expropriate them. And his comment about this above (ISTM) argues that even though that’s still a good idea, nobody’s going to do it, b/c too many Westerners are wetting their beaks. So nothing will be done, but not for lack of good things to do. This comment: @Adam L Silverman: and this one: @bbleh: seem to make that case.
Adam L Silverman
@bbleh: I have been watching this over and over and over and over and over and over again for years. At one point I watched it from US Army Europe headquarters. Until and/or unless Putin and his clients and his catspaws face some real painful repercussions they will continue to act as they have been.
I’m not suggesting this on a lark. I’m not suggesting it for shits and giggles. I’m suggesting it because Putin has been very explicitly saying that Russia is at war with the US since, at least, 2014. He has been waging war against the US, albeit in a low intensity manner, since, at least, 2014. And he will continue to wage war against the US until or unless he faces painful repercussions.
Gin & Tonic
@bbleh: So hijacking commercial airliners is ho-hum now?
Adam L Silverman
I’m off to walk the four foots. Back later.
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: Attempted coups are ho-hum for lots of big corps, so why not hijacking too?
bbleh
@Ruckus: @Chetan Murthy: I certainly DO think economic sanctions targeted at the kleptocracy would be a good idea. They’re very precise, multi-dimensional and thus with a wide array of options, targetable almost to the individual level, can be imposed or withdrawn almost instantaneously, are more difficult than almost any other means to convert to some nationalist cause, and can be implemented anywhere from entirely secretly to with the greatest of collateral shaming.
Also, y’know, the kleptocracy really do care about their money.
BUT, I don’t think the EU will impose them because they are captives of their own financial oligarchies. (And also the natural gas and the airline routings and other things.) This is something that would have to be led by the US, implemented across the entire western financial and legal systems over a sustained period, and have clear objectives. And right now I see neither the last nor the will for either of the first two
ETA: @Adam L Silverman: now, if this is “war,” then ok, semantic difference only; I was taking it more in the literal sense, like the crunch-creak-bang-boom stuff. And @Gin & Tonic: come on, the question is not “is it bad”; of course it’s bad. The question is, what is an appropriate response.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t disagree. But your point is my point as well, so much of the world is tied together by trade and by agreement not to do exactly what Vlad has just done. And my point is that a lot of innocent people can get dead by the old ways, because of that. A fucking lot. And will that stop Vlad? I doubt it because he’s like a lot of politicians these days, they give a fuck about no one but them. We have a number of these here on our shores, some of whom seem to be sleeping in Vlad’s bunkhouse. And in our legislative ranks. Vlad is old school, steal everything you can, he’s reported to be one of the wealthiest humans on the planet. He’s not looking out for his country, he’s looking out for his bank account, which he believes his entire country and the ones he controls are. And he’s willing to use any means to do that. Blowing things up just gives him an excuse to blow things up which gives everyone else an excuse to blow up more of his shit and we are off to a not good rendition of tit for tat.
We have to come up with another way.
BruceFromOhio
@RaflW:
While this is certainly clever, it inconveniences people and organizations that have little control and even less influence over what happened.
As has been said better elsewhere, until the people or person in charge of making these decisions suffers direct consequences from decisions made, nothing changes.
In the interim, journalists traveling by car, in disguise, or not at all becomes a new norm.
Ruckus
@bbleh:
I think that it’s really the only way in this day and age. The money is far, far more important to the upper levels of humanity in most countries these days, like ours, like as you say the EU, and to those who run Russia and it’s “holdings.”
Gin & Tonic
@bbleh: See my comment at #5.
The Moar You Know
The EU had better quit leaning on NATO (i.e…the United States) for their defense. Three years from now, they may get nothing or worse again. They need to seriously up their spending, manpower and defense manufacturing and get ready for some bullshit, because Vlad wants some of “his” territory back
Shorter me: arm up, motherfuckers.
Gin & Tonic
As an aside, everyone who knew the name Roman Protasevich before today, raise your hand.
Villago Delenda Est
Turn Minsk into a radioactive parking lot?
Well, that might be a bit much…
bbleh
@Gin & Tonic @Gin & Tonic: Then as long as we’re not talking about bombings and invasions, or even cyberattacks on electrical grids, I don’t disagree.
BUT, as targeted as financial sanctions on kleptocrats are, they also have very “targeted” effects on Western interests — financial, real estate, other assets, basically everybody who’s getting their beaks wet in the river of Russian cash — and those interests are going to have to be resisted or compensated. And that becomes even more politically difficult when we’re talking about — as you observe — somebody whom nobody knows and whose name many people couldn’t pronounce without a lot of practice. (Hell, how many Americans know what a Crimea is? Sounds like a Nissan.)
Chetan Murthy
@bbleh: Vladimir Ilich Lenin — ‘The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.’
Subsole
@Adam L Silverman: Would it also be fair to suggest the reason he is pulling these indirect destabilization/disinfo campaigns attacking our social fabric and using proxies, etc. is because he has…grave misgivings about the Russian Army’s effectiveness, should push come to shove?
I mean, if we hurt them badly enough, either by trading fire or by your suggested (and preferable) course of attacking their money (which would basically be a campaign against their logistic base, yes?) the loss of prestige may prove terminal on its own. After all, king thug is only king thug if everyone believes he can hurt them.
Is there any reason Uncle Sam can’t go ahead an do what you said, and tell the business folks to suck it? Or are our actions pretty much limited to following Europe’s lead? Are we basically the Arsenal of Democracy for a continent full of 1940-era French Republics?
Subsole
I would argue that his name is less important than the fact someone pulled his plane out of the air and yanked him off it.
Like, if I was flying CA to NY and the governor of Florida contrived to force my flight down so his paid bullyboys could black-bag my ass into some basement dungeon because I expressed disappointment with his Covid policies, I would not expect you or anyone else to know, remember, or express the tiniest sliver of a fuck about my name.
I would expect you to care that a man with power was kidnapping people for matters of vanity.
J R in WV
Vlad is a monster, like the Prince Vlad of long ago, staking (impaling) people along the roads into his domain. I don’t know what to do about a monster in control of massive armaments like this Vladimir Vladimirovitch… but we need to do something that causes real pain.
Confiscating real property in western Europe sounds like a good start — you can’t spend the summer in France this year. Next year neither…
Stopping Russian business interests from using international banking communications systems also sounds pretty good. Closing down the Belarus airline industry works also. Putin isn’t the primary actor in this affair, Belarus is, and making Belarus suffer by shutting their international travel off sounds like a non-violent method for bringing them to see the light… as in don’t do this kind of shit, anymore, assholes~!!~
Thanks for your viewpoint on this crazy shit, Adam~!!~
Subsole
Adam,
How long would we need to maintain the pressure?
I know nothing of the grey faces surrounding Putin, but I cannot imagine the boyars are going to stand around losing their money for the sake of the tsar for years on end.
Would that end in a palace coup kind of deal? Or is such even feasible anymore? Is there any real powerbase Vlad has not coopted?
Dan B
@Adam L Silverman: The fog of war is a concern. What do we do if a Lukashenko decides to dramatically escalate? I can imagine a number of scenarios up to shooting at planes, military or civilian. How can leaders of democracies prepare themselves and their citizens?
debbie
Since it is an open thread, Don Winslow on ending police violence.
Adam L Silverman
@Subsole: His special operators are very good, but most of his military is middling at best. His conventional army wouldn’t last long against the US and NATO. His air force can’t match hours. His Navy is basically a joke. And he can’t very well spend more money on this stuff because Russia, as a nation-state, doesn’t have it. It doesn’t have it because he doesn’t treat it like a nation-state, he treats it like a pass through corporation for his and his oligarchs bank accounts.
So for pennies on the dollar he does what he’s been doing. And he does it very effectively.
Adam L Silverman
@Subsole: We’ve been sanctioning a lot of those “grey faces” as you call it for almost a decade. And their companies and corporations. Doesn’t seem to have much effect on their behavior.
jl
” The EU and NATO response needs to be that nothing takes off or lands in Belarus. Nothing flies over Belarus. ”
Wow, I guess that would get their attention.
I was thinking US and EU ban all flights between their territories and Belarus, passenger and freight. Edit: and government and NGO aid. And military aid, if we are sending that to Belarus.
jl
The big bossman of Belarus says covid can be prevented and cured by drinking lots of vodka, going to soccer matches and breathing in the brisk outdoor air, and strenuous exercise of Belarussian manly will.
And he seems be continuing that line after his country got as sick as anywhere else. So, he doesn’t need flights for help on that either.
Morzer
I very much fear that the EU will bring a letter-opener to a flame-thrower fight. Much indignant squeaking will ensue, but no measurable action. I hope that I am wrong, because if not, expect the Baltics to be the next target in the near future.
Raoul Paste
I’m looking forward to an update on this, preferably describing effective countermeasures . But I fear the next update will describe how the journalist has died in a Belarus prison Yes, it is an outrage
Ksmiami
@bbleh: Semantic point- uh “The Crimea..” but carry on.
Cheryl Rofer
There will be no response for a day or so. We are no longer in the Twitter world of foreign policy. Governments must confer within themselves and with others.
It would be good for Europe to take the lead on this. It’s primarily their problem – yes, there were a couple of Americans on the flight, but sorry, we’re not going to war over two Americans.
And no, neither Europe nor America will go to war over this. Yes, sanctions are getting tired. We need to rethink them. What kind of war would it be? What kind of action would we take? Invade Belarus? Mount an operation to take back Crimea? Nuke a Russian airbase?
It’s frustrating to have Putin and his lackeys nibbling around the edges, but I doubt that war is the answer, particularly between two nations that have practically all the nukes.
I don’t know the full answer, but the place we need to start is to get covid under control in this country. We’re working on that. When we see that clear, and maybe get policing more in line, then we can talk about larger steps to deal with Russia’s role in the world.
And it’s not up to us to control Putin’s behavior nor any other country’s. They are sovereign and have their own priorities and interests. What we need to do is to find where we can work with them. The idea that America is the world’s father who punishes his children for bad behavior hasn’t worked well.
Morzer
@Cheryl Rofer: Maybe part of the answer is shutting Putin and his jackals out of high-publicity international events/groups and showing conspicuous, generous goodwill to countries on Russia’s borders like.. oh, I dunno, Ukraine.
Chetan Murthy
@Cheryl Rofer:
Cheryl, while I agree with your first sentence, it seems to me that to the extent that Putin uses our systems and esp. our financial system to attack us, it’s up to us to put a stop to it: we can’t expect him to stop of his own accord. And I don’t see how we can work with a guy who’s actively trying to destroy our way of life and our governments.
bbleh
@Ksmiami: Yes the point is about political will for sanctions. It would be tough to escalate and sustain economic sanctions on individuals because many well-connected oxen would be gored, but at least most of them are reasonably well-informed and cognitively unimpaired. They could have their arms twisted &/or be bought off, or some combination of the two, they’d understand what was happening, and it could all be carried out reasonably quietly.
But if we talk about military action — of any sort, even flight interdictions, much less bombings — it would be all over CNN and Fox (Biden’s military adventurism endangers American soldiers and so on), and that would mean expending a lot of political capital and effort. We’re doing this for the sake of … a journalist? Or the Crimea, which I’d bet more Americans would identify as a car model or a coffee drink or something than as a Black Sea peninsula that’s been the object of strategic intrigue for a thousand years or more.
I’m not saying Putinesque klepto-nationalism isn’t a challenge, and even a threat, on many levels. Hell, they’re interfering in our elections, (and by some accounts funding one of our political parties, but I digress). But if we’re going to go to some form of “war” with it / them, we’re gonna need something more than a kidnapped journalist or the interception of an aircraft or even a chunk of land that people Over There are squabbling over. Otherwise, it’s unsustainable and hence will achieve nothing.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Mike in NC: AOTK.
Ksmiami
@bbleh: no war but heavy sanctions and start reinforcing the Ukrainian borders… there’s been insufficient pain inflicted on Putin and Lukashenko and they need a vigorous non military response right now.
Cheryl Rofer
I read a post by, I think, Peter Beinart in which he traced how he learned foreign policy. It was during the 1990s, when America sat astride the world like a giant. The lone hegemon. And told countries what to do. The author was just beginning to realize how abnormal that was and how badly it prepared him to think about a world in which countries acted in their own interest and thumbed their nose at those attempts to change their behavior. I don’t like it, but that’s where we are.
I think that Biden and his people are trying to deal with this. Biden has been involved in foreign affairs for most of his career. He’s been involved with arms control, which is one of the most ornery parts of foreign affairs. Until 1991, when President George H. W. Bush could magnanimously dispose of a large part of our nuclear arsenal and have the Soviet leader be grateful. And work with the US for a decade or more to get their arsenal under control.
I’m not mocking Bush. He did a brilliant job of handling the demise of the Soviet Union. Biden knows exactly how anomalous those times were. Secretary of State Antony Blinken grew up more like the author of that piece. He’s become more humble this time around.
It’s going to take a lot more than targeted goodwill. I don’t understand why there hasn’t been more done around financial assets, but then I don’t understand that part of things very well.
This isn’t the schoolyard, and it isn’t the competition between Apple and Microsoft. The answers have to be different, and they have to be different for Putin than they were for Yeltsin.
YY_Sima Qian
What Lukashenko did is pretty brazen. I would think no country wants this kind of precedent to stick.
Huawei’s CFO (and founder’s daughter) Meng Wanzhou was arrested at Vancouver in 2017 while on transit to Mexico, under an extradition request from the US. The extradition case is still being argued in Canadian court, but China immediately retaliated by arresting two Canadian nationals in China, and led to a rapid deterioration in relations. So now executives from Chinese companies in the cross-hairs of the US government have stopped transitting through any Five Eyes countries, never mind flying there. However, it is hard to avoid US airspace flying from China or Russia to South America. Likewise, it is difficult avoiding Chinese and Russian airspace flying from North America to South Asia.
If this was 2016, it might be possible to work with China and other world powers (even those not aligned with the US) to put pressure on Belarus and Russia (behind the scenes in the latter’s case), to ensure a precedent is not set. As Putin still has plausible deniability in this case, he could let Lukashenko take the heat. However, given the current state of Sino-US relations and global geopolitical dynamics, as well as the Meng Wanzhou case from 2017, such sort of peer pressure is not likely forthcoming. Instead, China will stand watching from the sidelines trying to reap whatever benefit to be found, while letting Putin take all the risks.
Of course, the US would have been in much strong position without the sordid history of extraordinary rendition (remember those?) during GWOT. Not suggesting equivalence or excusing Lukashenko’s & Putin’s actions. However, when GWB & Trump were voted out and left office, most Americans think the page had been turned and the sins redeemed. Not how most of the world (especially outside of the western alliances) see things.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Gin & Tonic: Who? //
Subsole
@Adam L Silverman: Ugh. That is…not good. I imagine any real chance at fixing this would require action from within Russia.
I mean, even if we went in and thoroughly reduced their capability, we’d need some local collaboration to make it stick, yes?
Thanks for the reply, and the analysis.
Subsole
@YY_Sima Qian: re: Bush and extraordinary rendition.
It is a sad fact, but we Americans tend to assume everyone else’s memories are as short as ours.
Subsole
@Cheryl Rofer: And thank you for your analysis as well! Really makes this blog something special.
jl
” 1 We are concerned
2 We are very concerned
3 We are gravely concerned
4 There must be answers
5 There will be consequences
6 It is important to engage ”
It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
Here’s an idea: nominate Collins to a high profile position in the State Dept. Get her out of the Senate finally.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@YY_Sima Qian: Technically, GWB was never voted out of office, he was prohibited from running for a third term by the 22nd Amendment.
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: +1
Adam makes a good case that Putin has been poking and proding and trying to punch above his weight in an effort to reassemble something approaching the USSR to increase Russia’s (and his own) power at the expense of the West. And not getting a lot of push-back so far.
But I’m still uncomfortable calling it “war”.
Before doing anything with the military, [klaxon] especially in that part of the world [/klaxon], one needs clear achievable goals and a definite end-state. When would we be “done” with this hypothetical exclusion zone??
I’m willing to let Biden and Blinken and their colleagues see what they can come up with, in consultation with our friends and allies in the region. If all they can say is “let’s you and him fight”, well, … :-/
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
@YY_Sima Qian:
Thank you both for your comments.
I was in the military during the Vietnam war, however I never got near any fighting, they sent me somewhere else. I didn’t mind.
But I was in a navy hospital for 2 months during my last 6 months in the navy. I use the VA for my health care. I’ve seen a lot of wounded men (women didn’t go into combat other than as docs/nurses then and yet 8 women died in Vietnam), I saw a lot of Marines in that hospital and I see the after effects 50+ years later all the time at the VA. Most of the WWII vets are gone, it was far less rare to see a WWII vet 9 yrs ago than it is now. But they are still around. War takes a much larger toll than just death. And it should be a last resort, or a response to attack but not as the first line of diplomacy, because war or war tactics are not diplomacy. War should be a last resort, always because it’s rare that the reason for an attack, like this one would be towards Vlad, would likely kill a lot of people and accomplish little. It sounds like it would work, but how often does it without massive deaths to people that had nothing to do with the reason for the attack? There are better ways, financial is one of them, political is another, even as many of our citizens seem to be beholding to Vlad over their own citizens.
YY_Sima Qian
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You are right, but his GOP successor (which practically disavowed him, as well) lost by a wide margin.
I was very sympathetic to Obama Administration’s decision to turn the page on the abuses and crimes committed (including invading a sovereign nation under false pretenses, remember that?) during the GWB Administration, in order to focus on saving the US’ and world’s economy. However, in hindsight, I think the critics of the decision had a much stronger argument than I thought I at the time. Not prosecuting these crimes meant failing to establish these actions as crime and morally (and more importantly, politically) beyond the pale, and would make it easier for future administration to take such actions again.
So now when the US loudly criticizes China or Russia for taking aggressive actions and challenging the “international order”, its forcefulness is undercut by all of that history and failure to truly account for it. Imaging if China or Russia had invaded a country half way around the world under false pretenses, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, creating millions of refugees, leaving behind a failed state, with ripple effects that destabilized an entire region and creating challenges for neighboring regions. Likewise with the Libya intervention, and its reverberations across parts of West Africa. Against this history, Russian saber rattling on its western border, and Chinese posturing in the East and South China Seas, absolutely pale in comparison.
While hypocrisy is expected in international politics, and typically the stronger the power the stronger the hypocrisy, it is never a good look.
Russia’s main threat to the world (as I see it) is its active interference in the domestic politics of the US and Europe (something the US and former European colonial powers are plenty guilty of, too, interfering in other nations’ domestic politics), supporting ultra right wing populists and fanning conspiracy theories, just to create chaos. Chaos is good for no one, not even Russia (in the long term).
RaflW
@BruceFromOhio: Far more is necessary, but as a quick and easy early move, I think it’s helpful (sorry, Boeing, but your own problems are far bigger than two copies of your formerly trash airplanes).
The EU really needs to move smartly and fast on this, and a move like canceling export licenses is merely a way to say “we’re taking action, too.”
The sorts of sanctions Adam talks about will take longer to organize.
varmintito
It’s hard knowing how to balance the efficacy of a response, the direct retaliation, and the indirect blowback. That said, I think it is long past time that the word go forth that there will be no more freebies. I assume there is a comprehensive and hierarchical list of non-lethal responses, up to and including interruption of infrastructure (electricity, water pumping, internet, satellite communications).
This pisses me off, and I am at the point where I feel like it’s our turn to be saying “do something about it” after we rest our sweaty unwashed asses on their faces for a while.
Thor Heyerdahl
Yes Prime Minister – Salami Tactics and Nuclear Deterrent (YouTube)
Chris Johnson
Seems to me like the most effective way to hurt Putin and his aims is to convincingly communicate the narrative of ‘he’s a mugger, sucks to be that journalist’ perhaps with some policing work to back it up.
This sort of thing is meant to convey the sense of ‘OMG, the dastardly acts of the dreaded burgeoning world power that is Russia and its catspaws!’ and you want to be able to depend on civilization being out there, you want to have a set of rules governing how people (and countries) behave. On the whole, reasonable people (and countries) work together to come up with agreements where they can act civilized with each other: that’s part of being human, as much as the savagery.
And then you have Putin, and Donald Trump, and that sort of person. You have muggers and creeps, people who can’t behave.
It’s a police problem, just on a more complicated level. It’s uncultured, uncivilized (an accusation Russians just love to be tarred with). The whole point is that you will be able to leverage the force of general societal/human expectation, that you’ll plausibly be able to say ‘no way’ to that behavior and have a really commanding majority back you.
The down side is that, humans being humans, you’re going to continue to have the occasional mugger, as damaged and inadequate people fail to be civilized and act out. We don’t get to define civilization so hard that everyone will meet the bar. There will always be lapses, and it’s important to not see it as ‘WELP, I guess everybody just opens fire and beats the shit out of each other now, because one guy got beastly! I guess we are all just like that, let’s show ’em we’re more beastly than the next guy!’
polyorchnid octopunch
@BruceFromOhio: Sometimes, investment risks pay zero. It happens.
Joel
I’m not a defense or foreign policy expert like you guys, but how about using the criminal law? Lukashenko committed an act of terror. He hijacked an airplane. That’s a criminal offense. Charge him. If it can be shown Putin/Russia was involved (likely), charge them too. Is it so much to ask that we hold foreign leaders accountable to the same criminal laws you and I are subject to? Maybe when we stop following this outdated notion of sovereign immunity and start treating these thugs like, well, thugs, they’ll realize they can’t get away with murder, and they’ll stop doing it. Maybe. Worth a shot anyway. And while we’re at it, we can convene a few war crimes tribunals (remember those?) for Syria and Ukraine and charge Putin, Assad, and all the generals for crimes against humanity.
And yes, severing all air, ground, and financial links between Belarus and the West sends a powerful message too, and even more importantly, cripples their economy. And by making an example of Belarus, it makes it clear to Putin he CAN go too far, and we can send that message without starting WWIII.
RedDirtGirl
You know sometimes (often) I really wish our government had a council of Balloon Juice jackals they would consult with on important matters of state.
Villago Delenda Est
@RedDirtGirl:
OHJB might take that up. OTOH, TFG knows everything, and would not be interested.
Another Scott
Hmm…
He makes a good point, but I’m not sure the lesson learned is the correct one…
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
Hmm…
Cheers,
Scott.
burnspbesq
@bbleh:
So what are you proposing as an alternative? Throwing Dinamo Minsk out of the Champions League?