PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXV: Putin's Surprise Attack on Ukraine, wiþ Special Guest Kamil Galeev

"Hexapodia" Is the Key Insight: by Noah Smith & Brad DeLong

We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!…

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Key Insights:

* Putin’s decision to invade came as a great surprise to everyone.

* The information flow to Putin is very bad, very low quality.

* Muscovy, St. Petersburg, Novgorod, Minsk, Kyiv are all ‘Rus.

* But the cultural, political, and linguistic differences between Kyivan and Muscovite ‘Rus are surprisingly deep, historically speaking.

* Economic sanctions can do a lot to degrade Russia’s war-fighting machine, and should be used to do so.

* Bounties and rewards for defectors and for the neutralization of equipment might be very effective, and should be promoted.

* Countries and régimes run on myth, and military defeat is the most effective way that a pernicious myth gets destroyed.

* Be afraid, be very afraid: Putin’s survival—his personal political, the causes he has invested his life in, and perhaps his mortal—depend on his “winning” in some sense.

* If appeasement of Putin could be made to work, it might well be worth trying.

* But it is highly unlikely that appeasement of Putin could be made to work.

* Really-existing Putinite petro-kleptocracy looks worse than really-existing Brezhnevite socialism.

References:

* ChinaTalk: Russia's Pivot to Asia From Czars to Putin

* Kamil Galeev: Why Russia Will Lose

* Kamil Galeev: Twitter <https://twitter.com/kamilkazani>

* Wilson Center: Kamil Galeev <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/person/kamil-galeev>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>

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