Later this year (probably in May), Australia will be holding elections for its parliament.  Similary, France will be holding its presidential elections in May and June.  Meanwhile, West Virginia has a case that the Supreme Court heard this week challenging the EPA over potential power plant regulations.   What do these two events have to do with the war in the Ukraine — everything.

The Russian-sympathizing Party of Treason want to blame the current Administration for the Russian attack on the Ukraine because we did not have a clear set of sanctions outlined prior to the invasion to deter the invasion.  Aside from the fact that it is unclear that anything would have deterred the brutal dictator who currently governs Russia, this framing of the situation relies on the fact that a large number of Americans have no real sense of how politics or international relations work which brings us back to our starting point.

Even in the U.S. where we are supposedly one country with one national interest, there are still local interests.  And so, state and local officials who face an entirely different set of voters than the national leaders find that the interests of their state and city are in opposition to what may be best for the nation as a whole.  If that is true for different regions in the same nation, it is even more true for different nations.  Potential sanctions that are relatively painless for the U.S. might be extremely painful for other countries and vice versa.  And the governments in our allies have to face their voters too.   If they want to be in office next year, they have to consider what the voters in their countries want.  Agreing to a set of sanctions that merely protects the U.S. economy and not their own is not a viable option. Continue Reading...