I attended an intimate dinner last night; one of the speakers - and a very convincing one at that - was a young lady, recently arrived in the US, from Ukraine.
It got me cogitating a bit on our response to the Russian land grab. We've announced "stiff" sanctions, but are not yet considering sanctions on oil and natural gas, which make up by far the largest sector of Russian exports, and thus of Russian foreign income. To truly hurt Putin, and thus to not only discourage him, but disable him financially and therefor militarily, from further conquest, we should work with others to cut his oil and gas exports.
The Achilles heal in that strategy is Europe's growing dependence on Russian energy. We've noticed that for some time, but the current administration is not concerned enough to act. By producing more oil and gas, building more pipelines, more refining capacity and, critically, LNG facilities on our east coast (and the pipelines to feed them), we could assist Europe, particularly Germany, in weaning off Russian sources, and even benefit our balance of payments position in the process.
The virtue of prudence, as practiced in "old Whigs" like Edmund Burke and Lincoln (he was an American Whig politician until the late 1850's) involved a clear eyed assessment of the world as it exists (not as one might wish it to be) and pursuing a coherent strategy for achieving one's goals, never sacrificing short term gains for the long range goal.
At a rather lower level, we do something a little similar in delivering commercial janitorial service to a variety of clients - cross training our folks, training in response to unusual situations, having layers of back up in people, data, vehicles, equipment and security. It benefits our firm, our people and our clients. We still have lots of N-95 masks and tests and disinfectant for the next Covid variant, and even a bunch of bunny suits we stockpiled a bit after the Ebola scare.
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