Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
Hexapodia Is the Key Insight! By Noah Smith & Brad DeLong
PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXV: Putin's Surprise Attack on Ukraine, wiþ Special Guest Kamil Galeev
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PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XXXV: Putin's Surprise Attack on Ukraine, wiþ Special Guest Kamil Galeev

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Pseudo-Weekly; Aspirationally Less than 60 Minutes.
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We Truly Did Not Have History Rhyming to the Spanish Civil War on Our 2022 Bingo Card!…

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Key Insights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  8. 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.

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

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

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

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