Gradually, Then Suddenly: How the World Stood Up to Putin

Volodymyr Zelensky’s stirring appeals have been crucial, but there’s more going on.

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In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway famously answered the question “How did you go bankrupt?”

“Two ways. … Gradually, then suddenly.” The last week suggests that getting out of bankruptcy works the same way.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the suddenness and significance of the change in attitudes—and policies—wrought by Russia’s unprovoked and indefensible invasion of Ukraine. Imposing banking sanctions via the SWIFT system was considered too heavy a lift on the eve of the invasion. Now it has started in the U.S., Canada, Japan, the European Union and even “neutral” Switzerland. The U.K., long addicted to Russian oligarch money, has announced an asset freeze. BP and Shell Oil have announced they will divest from Russia, as will Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.

Russian planes—including the private jets of oligarchs desperate to rescue their money—cannot fly over the EU. Russian vodka is being pulled from shelves worldwide, and FIFA has suspended Russia from all competitions, including the World Cup.

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  1. Avatar photo
    BrandonAlleman

    The supposed unique hit to America's credibility by the withdrawal seems like projection to me. I thought we'd already taken a big hit by our invasion of Iraq and diverted mission over 16 years in Afghanistan. To pick a single point as motivating Putin is just speculation and usually just self serving towards one's wordview.

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    Narwhal

    The way we withdrew from Afghanistan was awful and a mess, inexcusably so and two US administrations and our military leaders bear the blame. But, our, the US and NATO, withdrawal after twenty years was less of a choice than some either understand or want to admit.

    I’ve written about this before at some length here, including sources. When we began our presence in Afghanistan we had multiple routes to re-supply and re-enforce our troops. By 2020 we didn’t and our remaining route was not as secure as it once was, and even that wasn’t entirely secure earlier in the war, or guaranteed to exist going forward. Many things had changed for the worse over twenty years. Supply lines matter.

    Putin knows better than most why we needed to withdraw from Afghanistan, he is one of the people responsible for cutting off our supply routes. He knows our withdrawal was not due to a loss of a will to fight after twenty years.

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    Jesse.Wick

    A sign of how serious this crisis has become: three of boxing’s major sanctioning bodies (the IBF, WBO and WBC) have decided not to sanction bouts involving Russian or Belarusian fighters. This is something— normally NOTHING stands between those folks and the Almighty Dollar.

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    Will Bates

    I'm not so convinced about Afghanistan having anything to do with Putin's decision, here.

    40 years ago, Russia had the same experience in Afghanistan. I don't think Putin would look back on that time and think to himself that Russia was 'weak' because of that experience. I can certainly be persuaded that Putin saw it as further evidence that the U.S. had little appetite for more war, but frankly I don't think Putin needed any 'evidence' of that - all he had to do was read the Pew Research polls at the time. Our pull-out of Afghanistan was caused by that lack of appetite - it was completely foreseeable. It going so terribly wrong doesn't seem to factor in here.

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    1. Pohl

      Yes, in other words, we failed in Afghanistan gradually, then suddenly. Jonah and David think the obviously shambolic end is more deterministic for our rivals’ calculations than the long unravelling that went before. Reasonable people disagree. I’m glad we’re out. Ukraine illustrates precisely why we need to choose our interventions wisely.

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      1. GregS

        I'd really like someone (like Klon Kitchen) who knows this area well, and spends time thinking about it, to write a piece about how our response to Ukraine would have been affected if we had about 10k soldiers in Afghanistan right now fighting a resurgent Taliban.
        What would the effects have been on our ability to protect our forces and our logistics/supply chain?
        What types of mischief could Russia have threatened against us if we imposed the types of sanctions we are now imposing?
        What would the criticisms of Biden have been?
        Would the GOP have said - look at this moron, Trump was going to get us out of Afghanistan but he left us in there and now we don't have the attention to pay to Russia?
        There's a lot to think about here - I'd appreciate a non partisan expert weighing in.

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  5. David Mancke

    I imagine when Jonah orders a steak he gets the baked potato and the mashed.

    "Donald Trump’s exaggerated claims that his administration was tougher on Russia than either his successor or predecessor have some merit."

    Pre-Helsinki or not..? Dude, you've been on a good track lately. Why disgrace yourself with this kind of slop.

    Suffice it to say, those claims have no merit. They are in fact totally contrary to reality.

    Edmund Burke was right Jonah, so you might want to take a look around. -100 from Gryffindor.

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    Nathan Anderson

    Good take, Jonah. I think Biden's mismanagement of Afghanistan could also be the source of so much of Putin's miscalculations about the intervention in Ukraine so far - almost as if it were a blessing in disguise. There are many things that we should be harsh on Biden for, but his handling of the Ukrainian crisis has been excellent to far.

    In the words of General Mark Hertling, "
    -RU is unifying NATO
    -RU has helped Biden slowly unite a divided US"

    These are all good things.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Show Jay Janney the 🚪!

    Putin is going to find it very costly to occupy Ukraine. He would have been far better off to keep nibbling away at the edges gradually, then suddenly.

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  8. Avatar photo
    C C Writer

    By the way: A good source for news updates from Europe, if you care to go to the trouble, is this:

    1) Go to the website for the newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung [sorry to omit the accent marks], which is a Zurich newspaper in the German language. A couple years ago they ran an interview with Jonah, and I decided I like their general editorial stance. https://www.nzz.ch/
    (yes, the top-level domain name for Switzerland is .ch which stands for “Confederatio Helvetica” and they don't mean a font, but the Latin name for their country.)

    2) Highlight and copy the headline of your choice.

    3) Go to Google Translate, specify German as the from language, and paste the headline. The English (assuming that that's what you want) will appear.

    Interesting: NZZ spells the name "Wolodimir Selenski "

    Example (notice you get three compound German words all in the same headline!):

    Krieg in der Ukraine: Uno-Vollversammlung fordert Truppenabzug +++ Kiew fordert Hilfe für die Sicherheit der Nuklearanlagen des Landes

    War in Ukraine: UN General Assembly calls for troop withdrawal +++ Kyiv calls for help for the security of the country's nuclear plants

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    C C Writer

    Counter-entropic achievements must be appreciated, maintained, and built on, not taken for granted. Otherwise they will be lost. This theme (frequently alluded to by Jonah) could be the meta-lesson from the past several decades. The current ill wind may be blowing a bit of good. Lots is happening on the level of intangibles, though the effects may take some time to work out. But whatever thought and effort we put into it will not have been wasted.

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    BrettH

    Enjoyed the read, thanks Jonah. These are some truly wild times to be alive (e.g. climate change, covid, $30 trillion in national debt, feckless and juvenile "elites", and the makings of another bloodbath in Europe).

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