A world without bugs is a world we don’t want to live in.
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A world without bugs is a world we don’t want to live in.
When European colonists first brought cattle and horses to Australia in the late 1700s, they learned a foul-smelling lesson about how useful certain species of beetles could be. As the hoofed animals ate and defecated, manure began piling up across the continent. Without any European dung beetles to break it down, the cow dung in Australia had nowhere to go.
Perhaps you don’t think much about the value of dung beetles. But without them crawling around farms, stables, and wild savannas today, the world would be pretty, er, shitty. What about the importance of small, mosquito-like flies called midges? Without them, there’d be no chocolate and likely no ice cream because they pollinate both cacao and the plants that feed dairy cows.
“There are lots of tiny little things in this world that hold aloft everything that we value,” said Oliver Milman, an environmental journalist at the Guardian and author of a new book called The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run the World.
<img alt="The cover of the book “The Insect Crisis” by Oliver Milman." src="https://cdn.vox-
A world without insects is a world we don’t want to live in, Milman told Vox. Yet we don’t seem to pay these critters much attention — even as many of them slip toward extinction. Science is increasingly showing that insects, on the whole, are declining quickly, he said. Some populations have fallen by more than 70 percent in just a few decades.
Averting an insect apocalypse starts with understanding why these famously uncharismatic critters matter — that’s one lesson he hopes his book can convey. Then there’s the question of how to help them. Fortunately, he writes, it’s pretty simple: We don’t need an action plan, we need an inaction plan. Insects love overgrown lawns, empty lots, and other untended spaces.
“Perhaps it’s time to sit back and see what could blossom in front of us if we just give it the chance,” Milman writes.
Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
People tend to equate insects with so-called pests like cockroaches and mosquitoes. How small of a sliver of the insect world do pests represent?
“Pest” is such a subjective term. Certainly, you can find a lot of people who consider every insect to be either irrelevant or a pest — other than bees, because they’re nice, buzzy things that make honey and provide us with food, and butterflies, because they’re pretty. That’s part of the problem: We’re not starting from a baseline of fondness for these animals.
Three-quarters of all the known animals in the world are insects. There’s roughly 1 million named species — but there might be 5 million or maybe 10 million, or even up to 30 million species. In peoples’ day-to-day interactions, they might see an ant or a bee if they’re lucky and that’s not really representative of the insects that are out there.
As one scientist put it, you’ve got one researcher studying 50,000 insects and 50,000 researchers studying one monkey. That’s the kind of imbalance you have in the scientific world when it comes to insects.
How universal is the decline? Does it include the ones that we encounter in our homes, like cockroaches and mosquitoes?
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Sanka Vidanagama/NurPhoto via Getty Images
We don’t know the full picture of the declines. In some places, insects are actually increasing. The range of mosquitoes, for example, is expanding — an extra billion people could be exposed to disease-carrying mosquitoes, which like warm and damp conditions.
But there are so many studies showing these startling declines [in many species] — these eye-watering numbers that you just wouldn’t normally see in scientific studies. We should also be thinking about the composition of what’s out there. We are stripping away a world of bees, butterflies, and beetles, which we rely on for many things including food, medicines, and so on. And we’re replacing them with insects that can adapt to the changes we’ve set in motion. We are creating a world of mosquitoes and cockroaches, just like we’re creating a world of rats and crows and raccoons.
The natural world doesn’t care if the world is populated with lions and butterflies. If the conditions are ripe for cockroaches and mosquitoes, that’s what we’re gonna get.
How severe is the decline of insects compared to other animal groups?
There was a big study in Germany in 2017, which found that the annual average weight of flying insects caught in traps was down 76 percent since 1989 in protected nature reserves. There was also an incredible study by the scientist Anders Pape Møller who’s been driving up and down the same stretch of road in Denmark each summer since 1997 and counting the bugs that get smushed on his windshield. They had declined by as much as 97 percent. You don’t see those kinds of figures normally in conservation biology.
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Lyndal Stewart
Over a long time, we’ve wiped out a good chunk of tigers, for example, but in just a short period of time — we’re talking just a few decades — we’ve wiped out an enormous range of insects from seemingly stable, well-protected, well-regulated parts of the world. One meta study from 2019 found that 40 percent of insect species are declining around the world. They compared that to other creatures and found that the extinction rate for insects is eight times faster than it is for mammals or birds.
Are there ways to sample insects without killing them?
All the methods that I learned about involve killing them — trapping them in sticky traps or these funnel-like tents that push them into alcohol. The traditional way was to go up to the bottom of a tree and fog it with insecticide. The insects would fall down and you would catch them on the forest floor.
Benji
What is the single largest reason for these declines?
Oliver
Habitat loss is an enormous one. We’ve removed about a third of all the world’s forested areas in the industrialized era. We’ve changed much of the planet into monocultural farmland. We’ve expanded highways, urban areas, and so on, creating a landscape that’s very hostile to insects.
We’ve dominated the world in a very boring way. Insects like diversity and color and a range of different plants and we tend to like uniformity and tidiness. Culturally, we like very neatly trimmed lawns. We like fields of crops that are not diversified and have tidy edges. We dislike weeds in general. We’ve created a monotonous world that isn’t favorable to insects.
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Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images
What does an abandoned plot of land that might not look very nice to us mean for these critters?
If you start to let things go a little bit — stop tending your backyard, leave a building abandoned — it may look terrible to us but it’s a joyful place for insects. They can feed upon the weeds and use them for shelter.
During pandemic lockdowns in various countries, insects actually came back because of the lack of traffic, the lack of people. A lot of local authorities stopped cutting grass and insects really benefited from that. Plants sprung up that we hadn’t seen in years. Then the insects came back. And once the insects come back, the birds come back. So you start having these mini-ecosystems springing up.
That’s one of the more hopeful things I think about — you just need to give insects a bit of a chance and they can bounce back. One scientist compared what’s happening to insects to a log in water that we’re pushing down with our foot. If we just take our foot off it, the log will rise up. That’s what insects can do if we give them a chance.
People know that pesticides are a problem for insects — by design. What did you learn about pesticides through your reporting that surprised you?
I had a general understanding of pesticide use and believed the trend was getting better — new chemicals and techniques were coming that were a little less harmful to wildlife and a little bit more effective. But what you find is an absolute mess.
Think about the days of Silent Spring by Rachael Carson. It was a seminal book on the dangers of the pesticide DDT, which was pushing bald eagles toward extinction in the US. It helped rally support to ban DDT. But neonicotinoids, a widespread insecticide used now by US farmers, is 7,000 times more toxic to bees than DDT. So we’ve actually substituted this infamous chemical for one that’s far worse for bees. A single teaspoon of the stuff is enough to kill as many honeybees as there are people in India. It’s just deadly.
That really shows how little value we have for insects compared to charismatic animals like eagles.
That’s right. Insects have been allowed to slip into this silent catastrophe that we’re only just waking up to now.
Climate change affects the environment in very complicated ways. How is it impacting insects?
Climate change is generally pretty good for mosquitoes. Cockroaches don’t really care that much either. But for lots of other types of insects, it’s pretty disastrous.
There was an assumption a few years ago that insects would fare better than other kinds of animals because they have these huge populations that can rebound quickly. They’ve managed to get through five mass extinctions relatively unscathed. But there is research showing that the range of insects is going to shrink quite dramatically. Insects are more restricted in terms of their movement. They exist in fairly stable bands of temperature, and once that’s pushed beyond their limits, they are in big trouble.
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Paul Souders/Getty Images
Climate change is also scrambling the seasons. Spring is arriving much earlier now. In the UK, moths and butterflies are emerging from their cocoons about six days earlier, per decade, on average. In the US, spring is arriving 20 days earlier in some places compared to 50 or 60 years ago. You have plants not aligned with insects, which are then not aligned with birds. So you have this whole cascade of problems going through the ecosystem.
It’s hard to win people over with insects. What is your best argument for why we need them?
Selfishly, to save ourselves it would be a good idea to save insects. As much as it would be a terrible shame if we lost rhinos or elephants or orangutans — these big charismatic creatures — it wouldn’t trigger a food security crisis. It wouldn’t cause the loss of potential medicines that could save us from antibiotic resistance. It wouldn’t cause whole ecosystems to collapse. That is what would happen if we lost insects.
We are heading toward a world where there are far more mouths to feed at a time when insect pollination is under severe strain. Some parts of the world are either going to have far more expensive food or no nutritious food at all.
Insects also have intrinsic value. Butterflies are beautiful, for example. A garden filled with insects is alive, and it’s a place you want to be.
Is there one particular insect that you found especially fascinating?
I love this water beetle [called Regimbartia attenuata] that’s a superhero. It can survive being eaten by a frog because it can … jump out of its ass.
Bees’ abilities amaze me. You can teach a bee how to play soccer. They can add and subtract. They can recognize each other by their faces. They almost have a sense of consciousness.
Cockroaches are incredible. Anything that can survive two weeks after being beheaded is a pretty formidable creature. As much we hate them, we’ve got to at least tip our hats to them.
It doesn’t give me a ton of hope that we struggle to save even some of the most charismatic species. Tell me there’s a relatively easy way to avert catastrophe for insects.
Unlike solving a pandemic, where you need a new vaccine, or climate change, where you might need new technologies, we don’t really need to invent anything new or do anything radically innovative to save insects. One scientist told me that we need more of an inaction plan rather than an action plan. It’s about just letting things slide a little bit. Maybe don’t rake the leaves in your yard, or don’t apply as much or as many insecticides. Maybe let the grass grow a little bit — because insects love that.
Fixing the larger agricultural machine [expansive monocultures, pesticides, and so on] requires more systemic change. But there are signs of optimism. Farmers are looking at establishing corridors of wildflowers at the edge of their fields, for example, because they realize the importance of insects in helping their crops grow. There is a model we can follow to bring them back, but we need to start doing it quickly because the pressures on insects are only growing.
Mass bombardments and cluster munitions are reminiscent of the wars in Syria and Chechnya.
The Russian assault on Ukraine is ongoing, with Russian forces moving on major population centers including Mariupol in the southeast and the capitol, Kyiv. As the war moves into major cities, Russia has started to deploy brutal siege tactics — like using cluster munitions and bombing civilian infrastructure — which its military previously utilized in conflicts in Syria and Chechnya.
Such tactics could be a prelude to costly street-to-street fighting as Russia attempts to take Ukraine’s major cities, though tactical blunders on the ground, particularly outside of Kyiv, have in some cases stalled Russian ground advances.
Ukrainian armed forces, combined with the Territorial Defense Forces protecting individual cities and a civilian population armed with rifles and determined to resist occupation, have thus far had unexpected success in fending off Russian assaults. Western efforts to arm, train, and fund the Ukrainian military, too, have given it the capacity to punch far above its weight — something the Russian government, in an effort to downplay the seriousness and scale of the invasion, didn’t deploy forces to counter, Mason Clark, the lead Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Vox last week.
But that’s changed in recent days: Russian ground troops are still stalled outside Kyiv, but they have managed to make significant headway in Kharkiv and Mariupol, in addition to capturing the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, the Zaporizhzhia facility, on Friday. Russian forces are also attempting to move on Odessa, another port city in the southwest.
According to Rita Konaev, the associate director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Russia’s evolving military tactics underscore a new direction for the conflict.
“The Russian approach to urban warfare very much emphasizes priming and prepping the ground for any sort of ground operation with this destruction from the air. It’s to break morale, it’s to cause significant damage to the infrastructure of cities, it’s to cause high levels of displacement from the cities,” Konaev told Vox. “That air campaign is an integrated and important part of the way that Russia sees warfare.”
Analysts say Russia is currently preparing the ground in Ukraine’s cities by trying to raze as much infrastructure as possible by air in order to make the ground assault easier.
“The key thing that we’ve been watching in the last 72 hours is, they’ve been starting to directly shell major cities, primarily Kharkiv, but we’re now seeing it in Mariupol as well, that they refrained from doing in the early days of the war,” Clark told Vox in an interview Thursday.
Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second-largest city and has already seen heavy fighting, including rocket attacks resulting in civilian casualties.
Now, according to Clark, those attacks are likely to be stepped up from the early days of the conflict, when Russia “likely did not use these higher-scale artillery fires and airstrikes and those sorts of assets because they expected a quick victory” — which hasn’t occurred — “and didn’t want the portrayal in international and domestic Russian media of destroying Ukrainian cities.”
In a small village near Kharkiv, which is close to Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, civilians have been caught up in intense shelling, Al Jazeera reported Friday. The most recent attacks reportedly killed three civilians. Although the city of Kharkiv is still under Ukrainian control, it’s been under heavy and indiscriminate shelling since the beginning of the war, with significant escalation starting February 28, according to a report by the Digital Forensic Research Labs’s Michael Sheldon, published by Atlantic Council. That report found that Russia had used BM-30 300mm multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), which can launch cluster munitions — essentially bombs containing smaller munitions, which can cause extreme devastation when used in civilian areas.
“Cluster munitions have a relatively high failure rate, meaning that a bunch of them don’t explode, they don’t detonate [after] impact. So in addition to that initial impact, all of that unexploded ordnance remains, on massive areas where people used to live, and want to continue living, and then they’re basically like landmines,” Konaev said.
In addition to ongoing shelling, Russia is also attempting to cut off resources to key cities. In Mariupol, a city of more than 400,000, water, heat, and electricity have been shut off for days throughout a ferocious Russian bombardment campaign. According to Konaev, urban areas are dependent on a “pretty fragile grid system of life-saving and life- necessity utilities. If you damage one pipe, it can damage water access or heating for thousands of people.” The kind of destruction Russia is unleashing, therefore, could affect millions as the war continues.
“It will be devastating,” Konaev said, “because it’s going to depend on whether they’re going to still allow that humanitarian corridor where people are allowed to leave, and how are they going to be treating those movements?”
Thus far, humanitarian ceasefires to allow evacuations haven’t been successful, despite an ostensible agreement between Russia and Ukraine; Mariupol and the city of Volnovakha halted evacuations on Saturday as Russian attacks on civilian targets resumed, the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov reported.
“These will be real sieges,” a US official told the Washington Post’s Paul Sonne and Ellen Nakashima Friday. “They will be almost medieval in their approach. They will cordon cities. They will bombard them until the ground bounces. And then they will go in, and they’ll go street to street.”
Past conflicts paint an alarming picture of where Russia’s siege tactics could be headed, experts told Vox. Though it’s unclear how far Russia might go in Ukraine, the most extreme version of such tactics can result in mass civilian casualties.
“In Syria, Russia’s predominant role was as part of the air campaign, so an air bombardment that just targeted cities, that’s where you saw the [extensive use of] cluster munitions,” Konaev told Vox. “Most of the heavy lifting that the Russians did was concentrated on aerial bombardment,” which decimated parts of Aleppo and other Syrian cities.
“They used everything they could in Aleppo, and as much as I don’t want to see this, I wouldn’t be surprised if they started using the same planes, bombs and missiles to target civilians in Ukraine,” Mustafa al-Qaseem, a Syrian refugee from Aleppo who settled in Germany, told Al Jazeera.
Syria isn’t the only parallel; in the first Chechen War, in 1994 and 1995, Russian forces attacked the Chechen capitol, Grozny, flattening it with aerial bombardments before withdrawing in
In both Syria and Chechnya, the Russian military was able to hone the devastating — and possibly illegal — tactics it is now beginning to deploy in Ukraine.
“Health workers were targeted, medical facilities were bombed, there have been confirmed reports where doctors and humanitarian convoys did not want to have their location be shared during the deconfliction process [in Syria],” Sahr Muhammedally, the director for the MENA region and South Asia at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told Vox. ”Russia bombed these facilities, even knowing that these were hospitals.”
Hospitals and ambulances have reportedly been hit in Ukraine, too; US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned Russia for the attacks on Tuesday, while advocating for the Russian Federation to be removed from the UN Security Council. US officials have so far declined to say that Russia is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, but the lack of discernment by Russia in the war so far is having brutal effects.
“It is really horrific to see this, this intentional targeting of civilians to submit them, to get them to give up,” Muhammedally told Vox. “We saw this in Homs, we saw this in Aleppo, and even neighborhoods were bombed, markets were hit.”
Now, Ukrainian cities could be facing the same kind of destruction.
Ukrainians aren’t fighting like they intend to give up any time soon — which will almost inevitably lead to further destruction as the fight shifts to ground warfare.
“We tend to think about urban warfare as this door-to-door, building by building, street by street fight, which is a predominantly ground battle, reliant on infantry and artillery, which is correct,” Konaev said. “But it’s also a multi-domain battle that involves this air bombardment element, especially for Russia.”
Some analysts, Konaev included, have pointed to the battle for Mosul in 2017 as an indicator of the brutal morass that such urban ground assaults can become.
While there are obvious differences — among other things, Ukraine is a sovereign country fighting against an unprovoked invasion, rather than a brutal terrorist group — there are also some parallels with the nine-month-long battle for Mosul.
“It took nine months because ISIS was well-trained, well supplied, and very dedicated to its cause,” Konaev said — a situation reflected by the Ukrainian armed forces and civilian resistance. What’s more, she said, defenders have an unquestioned advantage in urban fighting, and it will be more challenging for the invading force to hold a city, in part because they lack intimate knowledge of the area.
“You have the power but you have to fight smart,” John Spencer, the chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, tweeted last month in a thread explaining his advice to the Ukrainian resistance. “The urban defense is hell for any soldier. It usually take 5 attackers to 1 defender. Russians do not have the numbers.”
As Russia’s siege tactics indicate, though, Putin is intent on taking Ukraine’s cities — and whether or not he succeeds, history suggests the next phase of the war could cause even more civilian casualties.
A political scientist on why the fate of the global political order hangs in the balance.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a world-historical event and the effects of it will likely ripple out for years to come.
Since 1945, the world has done a remarkably good job of preventing wars between great powers and making the costs of unprovoked aggression extremely high. In a matter of days, Russia has upended this system. A major war, if not probable, is at least plausible — and that’s a significant shift.
Countries across the globe — especially in Europe — are already rethinking their entire foreign policy, and that’s just the beginning. Every government will be watching closely to see what unfolds in Ukraine and whether the global response to Russia is able to deter even greater escalation.
It’s worth remembering that we’re only a week into this war and things are changing by the day. And that is perhaps the scariest thing about this conflict: No one really knows how it will play out.
Is this the end of the global order? Are we entering a new era of great power conflict? Are we already looking at World War III?
To get some answers, I reached out to William Wohlforth, a professor of international politics at Dartmouth. Wohlforth studies the post-Cold War world and he’s a close observer of Russian foreign policy. I wanted to know what he thinks is truly at stake in this conflict, and if one of humanity’s greatest achievements — a rules-based system that nearly abolished the idea that nations can use brute force to take whatever they want — has come to an end.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
When people say that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is the end of the global order, what does that mean?
When the Soviet Union fell, we saw a revived and expanded order based on pretty liberal principles in most respects. And that was grounded on America’s unprecedented position of power in the international system. Vladimir Putin has never liked this order and the best way of interpreting what’s happening in Ukraine and Europe today is a struggle over that order.
I hate to say it, but the fate of the global order hangs in the balance. That is what is being contested in Ukraine, because the post-Cold War order has been built on an architecture of security in Europe, based on NATO. And it was grounded on the principle that any state neighboring NATO could join it, except Russia.
Russia never liked this, and it especially didn’t like the idea of extending this order to Ukraine. To be clear, I’m not justifying Russia’s behavior, I’m just explaining it. If they can succeed in at least forcing this order to stop, that will be, to some degree, a change from what existed after the end of the Cold War.
Can they succeed?
It’s not clear. We’re seeing a fateful confrontation of different kinds of power with different actors, all concentrated on this struggle. There’s obviously the Ukrainians fighting way better than we thought, and the Russians are fighting worse than we thought. But there’s also this gigantic clash of economic statecraft happening between the United States and a huge array of allies.
How that all pans out is still up in the air. What the terms of the settlement of this war will ultimately be are still up in the air. But underlying all of this is this question of whether Russia has the power to end the European order that it has faced essentially since 1991.
Does Russia have that kind of power?
I don’t think they do. I don’t think they can achieve the grandiose aims they’ve laid out prior to this invasion. Their maximal aims are not just “No Ukraine in NATO,” but “No NATO in Ukraine,” meaning no military cooperation with Ukraine. And that NATO would essentially withdraw its military position back to what existed in 1997 before the first round of its session.
Essentially, what they were asking for is a completely revised European security order. They’re not going to get that. Did they ever think they were going to get that? I doubt it, but I think this has always been about more than Ukraine.
What would you say is truly at stake in this conflict? I’m asking for the average person watching it from a distance who doesn’t think much about the “global order,” who’s probably horrified by what they’re seeing, but just not sure how significant it is or why it matters beyond Ukraine.
Obviously the fate of Ukraine is at stake. The right of the Ukrainian people to determine their own cultural and geopolitical orientation is at stake — that’s the fundamental thing that’s being fought over in the streets and in the skies of Ukraine.
But for the rest of the world, what’s at stake is a confrontation between two countries, the US and Russia, which together possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Even though Russia seems insignificant economically, a festering contest between these two countries that continues to intensify would create the risk of serious escalation and that would be a threat to people everywhere.
This is a very different kind of conflict than we’re used to. There will be major economic consequences, like inflation and rising energy prices and that sort of thing. But there is also potential insecurity if this develops into major cyber competition between the two sides. The freedom to travel, the sense of openness in the world, our sense of our collective economic prospects — that would all change.
The world has lived for 30 years in a historically peaceful period and that’s absolutely at stake here. We’ve had devastating wars. We had them in the Global South. We had them even in the Balkans in the early 1990s. But we have not had a serious conflict between superpowers with vast arsenals of nuclear weapons looming in the background. Not even Al-Qaeda’s horrific attacks in the United States could produce the level of existential crisis we’re talking about here.
We’re talking about the shadow of an extremely dangerous and unpredictable great power war hovering over the world, unless this thing finds some settlement that doesn’t leave the two sides completely and totally alienated and holding swords over each other’s heads.
One of the great achievements of the modern age — maybe the greatest — is an international order that nearly abolished the idea that “might makes right,” that a strong country can take whatever it wants from a weaker country just because it has the power to do so. Is that over now?
Again, I hate to answer this way, but the best I can say is that it hangs in the balance. If Russia succeeds in Ukraine, if they accomplish their maximal objectives, then that’s a major dent in that order.
For a long time, if a state was going to do something like this to a country, it had to come up with reasons that resonate with the rest of international society. There’s really good research on this by political scientists and historians showing how, even in the previous political age, most countries, when they went to war, they tried to find a reason that would somehow legitimate it in the eyes of other interlocutors. Sometimes they even put off military operations and waited for a time when it would look like they were really defending themselves.
Russia has just blown this away completely. They’re trying to get the world to believe that Ukraine, having sat there for eight years, witnessing these breakaway republics, suddenly chose to invade them and commit genocide against ethnic Russians, and that they waited to do this until there were 170,000 Russian troops around their country. You have to be a complete idiot to believe that.
So if they succeed here, if this use of force without any justification is allowed to stand, then yes, the global order we’ve lived under for 30 years will have taken a massive hit.
Are you surprised by the unanimity of the response from the rest of the world?
I am not surprised given the failure of Russia’s original vision of the operation. If the operation had gone the way they thought, if Ukraine fell quickly, you would have seen a different reality. People would have said, “Well, what are we going to do? We still have to deal with Russia, it’s very important.” But the Ukrainians, to their everlasting historical credit, ruined that Russian plan, and the result is you’ve seen this huge coalition develop.
I’ll add that several countries are still hedging their bets big time, and they include major players like China and India. They’re still trying to preserve their relationships with Russia and somehow trying to thread the needle between their valid commitment to the principle of sovereignty on the one hand, and their strategic relationship with Russia on the other.
What do you make of Germany’s decision to bolster its military spending in response to Russia?
It’s a historic increase. There was always a debate, in Germany and elsewhere, over just how antagonistic Russia’s preferences really were, over how deep its resentment against the European order really was, over how willing it was to take major risks. Well, those questions have been answered. So Germany is making this great turnaround because they just learned a lot about Russia and they’re updating their foreign policy and their whole approach to defense and security.
Before the war, Germany and France were discounting the American intelligence saying that this invasion was imminent. And I think it was a widely held belief in German circles that Russia could be managed. The war in Ukraine has upended that argument.
And now countries like Finland and Sweden are talking openly about joining NATO, and Sweden is even sending military aid to Ukraine — that seems like a big deal.
It’s a big deal. This debate has been going on in Sweden and Finland forever, but it really picked up back in 2014. The authorities in those countries always thought this was a card they could play if they had to. The question was always, why deploy it? And the thinking was, “Let’s wait until things are serious.” Now things are serious.
So yeah, these are very significant events. Sweden is shipping military hardware and this is a country that maintained a neutral stand all throughout the Cold War, although they were always pretty pro-America. Despite that affiliation with the West, they always stayed away from things like this.
And then there’s Switzerland’s decision to freeze Russian assets. This really is unprecedented, and it surprised the heck out of people who closely follow financial matters. It shatters the image of Switzerland as the ultimate neutral actor. So this is all a huge deal and speaks to what a bad strategic move this was by Putin.
How worried are you about what international relations scholars often call a “security dilemma,” where you have these European powers increasing their defensive capabilities in order to protect themselves, but instead of making everyone safer, it produces a chain of reactions that ultimately makes conflict more likely?
I’m very worried about a spiral. Again, every statement I make, in the back of my mind, I’m seeing these images from Ukraine and I’m remembering that this is what’s happening on the ground and anyone who doesn’t feel for what that country’s going through has got no heart. But I’m also remembering that we have to continually think about how to avoid a dramatic intensification of the Russia-West spiral.
We have a tremendous national interest in trying to keep this thing from spiraling out of control. We need to have enough of a relationship with Russia that we can begin to establish red lines and guardrails to this competition, to mirror some of those that developed during the course of the Cold War. A lot of those don’t exist and they’re hard to create because there’s a new strategic reality created by such things as cyber [warfare].
If we don’t maintain some kind of relationship with Russia, we can’t keep the rivalry within bounds that don’t escalate. I think this is within our capacity, but passions and emotions are hard to control. All of these things conspire against our effort to impose firewalls.
If the international community continues to hold the line and punish Russia, is it possible that this war might actually affirm the rules-based system and in that sense strengthen it?
Some analysts are arguing that if the outcome is like what you described, an unambiguous reaffirmation of how bad it was to do this, then that might be the case. But if Russia emerges a winner — actually, I don’t even want to go down that route because it’s a disaster.
To stay with your question, if all that happens as a result of this strong unanimity, it could result in the strengthening of the very order Russia is challenging. The problem with that is the timing. There have never been sanctions like this against a country as important to the global economy as Russia, which means we have no idea what’s going to happen. But most experts will tell you that it’s going to take a while for the sanctions to really take effect.
The military side of this is moving at a different speed than the economic statecraft. Russia is hoping to get some kind of resolution on the ground in Ukraine before these sanctions have a chance to completely crater the Russian economy if that is indeed what these sanctions are capable of doing. So we really don’t know the outcome of this thing yet.
Are we closer to World War III than we’ve been in 80 years?
I don’t think so, but that’s such a hard thing to measure. I think we were very close during the Cold War. I still think nuclear escalation in this particular crisis is unlikely, despite Putin’s decision to raise the alert level of his nuclear forces. We’re still parsing exactly what’s happening operationally on the ground. I think he just wants to remind people that his country’s a nuclear power, and for all practical purposes, basically equal to the US in terms of the number of weapons. But we should be very careful when it comes to crossing certain red lines.
What are the red lines?
That’s the crucial question. I still think they’re mainly about direct use of force in the Ukrainian theater against Russia. I don’t regard a nuclear threat in response to economic sanctions as a credible one, even if those sanctions hit pretty deep. So, right now, I don’t think that threat of the World War III is as high as it was back in the Cold War at crucial junctions like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
One of my biggest worries is the lack of off-ramps for Putin. He can’t be seen as outright losing this war and he has the capacity to burn everything down if he wants to, so where does that leave us?
I’m extremely worried. There’s a debate among Russia watchers over whether this is the same Putin we’ve been dealing with all these years or whether the isolation or something else has changed him. Does he really think he personifies and exemplifies the Russian state to such a degree that he’s willing to destroy Ukraine rather than allow it to fold into the West? Or will he realize that maybe plan A didn’t work and then fall back to plan B and accept more modest concessions?
Frankly, I think the neutrality pledge is probably the easiest concession of the ones that Russia’s currently demanding. They’re going to want autonomy for these republics. Of all the demands put forward by Russia, this may be the easier for the Ukrainians to swallow. But if Putin isn’t updating his expectations about what he’s going to get out of this crisis, then we’re potentially facing a really awful situation.
I can’t help but think of that Sun Tzu line about “building your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across” and given the stakes and the asymmetries here, that seems like an important piece of wisdom.
Yeah, and nobody’s seeing that bridge right now, partly because we’re all reacting in real time. Sanctions have been put on without any statement about what would it take to end them. Personally, if I were running a foreign policy, I would be very clear about the conditions. I’d signal to Putin, “If you withdraw your forces in Ukraine, all of this comes to an end immediately.” I’ve not heard that statement yet.
People are right to worry about backing Russia too much into a corner. That’s why this diplomacy has to combine pain with potential reward if they take an offer. There has to be some kind of inducement to entering into negotiations. That’s the only way forward. We have to put things on the table in order to avoid a truly hopeless situation.
IPL 2022 to start from March 26; CSK to face KKR in lung-opener - All IPL games will be played across four venues – Wankhede Stadium and Cricket Club of India in Mumbai, DY Patil stadium in Navi Mumbai and Maharashtra Cricket Association stadium in Pune
Ashwin goes past Kapil Dev's 434 wickets; becomes India's second-highest wicket-taker in Tests - Ashwin got to the mark with the wicket of Charith Asalanka in the first Test against Sri Lanka at Mohali
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Water level -
Lokesh urges Governor to recall Andhra University V-C - TDP MLC seeks probe into allegations of irregularities in the university
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PM Modi’s personal ties with leaders of Ukraine's neighbours made evacuation possible: Adityanath - The UP CM interacted with 52 students evacuated from Ukraine and their parents at his official residence
War in Ukraine: Zelensky urges Ukrainians to go on the offensive - In a rallying cry, the Ukrainian president says the country has withstood the invasion “together”.
War in Ukraine: Thousands march in Kherson against occupiers - The Black Sea port is Ukraine’s only big city to have been captured by Russia in the war so far.
Putin says sanctions over Ukraine are like a declaration of war - The Russian president also warned against any attempt to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Ukraine war: Boris Johnson urges renewed world push to halt Russia’s invasion - The PM wants a renewed effort from world leaders to tackle Vladimir Putin’s “barbarous assault” on Ukraine.
Siege of Mariupol: Fresh Russian attacks throw evacuation into chaos - Mass evacuation postponed because of continued Russian shelling.
The war in Ukraine is keeping Chinese social media censors busy - Posts that glorify war and those that criticize Russia are getting quietly deleted. - link
Report: Apple mulling bid for NFL Sunday Ticket package - Cash-flush Apple has been exploring a move into live sports. - link
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Orbiting robots could help fix and fuel satellites in space - Machines will soon have a go at maintaining fleet of small spacecraft orbiting Earth. - link
I told her she can stop working from home and go back to the office
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He said, “quit shakin the ladder you little shit!”
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The priest said, ’What do you mean, almost? The man said, ’Well, we got undressed and rubbed together, but then I stopped! The priest said, Rubbing together is the same as putting it in. You’re not to see that woman again. For your penance, say five Hail Mary’s and put $50 in the poor box!
The man left the confessional, said his prayers, and then walked over to the poor box. He paused for a moment and then started to leave.
The priest, who was watching, quickly ran over to him saying, ’I saw that. You didn’t put any money in the poor box!
The man replied, Yeah, but I rubbed the $50 on the box, and according to you, that’s the same as putting it in!
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David promptly jumped in and saved him, swimming to the bottom of the pool and pulling John out.
The medical director came to know of David’s heroic act. He immediately ordered that David be discharged from the hospital as he now considered him to be OK. The doctor said, “David, we have good news and bad news for you! The good news is that we are going to discharge you because you have regained your sanity. Since you were able to jump in and save another patient, you must be mentally stable. The bad news is that the patient that you saved hung himself in the bathroom and died after all.”
David replied, “Doctor, John didn’t hang himself. I hung him there to dry.”
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… and the nurse asks, “what types are you?”
The rabbit says, “I’m probably a Type O.”
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