What should the president do? Back the immediate exile of every Russian bank from the SWIFT messaging system that knits together international finance. Ban travel to and from Russia, including by cruise ship. Call for NATO nations to expel every wealthy Putin crony. Expropriate Russian assets for the settlement of Ukrainian claims. Go on the cyber offensive; don’t wait to be hit.
The West’s countermeasures so far may have struck Putin as merely half-measures. He may well interpret the dispatching of a few thousand troops, some planes and a few tanks to Eastern Europe as evidence of an unwillingness to stand up to him. Germany’s cessation of the permitting process for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing gas from Russia probably looks more like a gesture than a permanent ban.
Government officials who proclaim that “everything is on the table” when it comes to fighting back against Putin are sending a message so cliched nowadays that there might as well be nothing on the table. Putin sees a United States that won’t fund its military adequately even as it spent trillions of dollars in a one-time pandemic stimulus. He knows the Democrats controlling every lever of power are the party of the “peace dividend.”
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