Watching recent events (and inspired by this tweet about Latvia's PM's take on this), I am reminded of a famous misquotation from the American war in Vietnam: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it." Seems like Putin's Russia is killing the kin in order to...
In For Kin or Country, the basic idea is to explain a set of policies that is always expensive. When one tries to take the territory of another country, there tends to be a response. While folks...
Lots of words have been spilled on this Crimea thing, and so it is reasonable to ask whether our opposition to Crimean self-determination might be more about our feelings about Russia than about...
Everything is awesome! But I do wonder if the song from the Lego movie (see below) is not just a secret appeal to irredentism: "Everything is cool when we are part of a team!" So, everything is...
Keith Darden points out that if Crimea secedes from Ukraine, electoral outcomes in Ukraine would shift with fewer pro-Russia voters in the political system, and that would be bad for Russia. This is not unique to this case. In any successful secession or irredentist effort (the latter refers to annexing a "lost" territory inhabited by ethnic kin), the boundary moves, changing who votes in the rump state (Ukraine in this case) and who votes in the new state (Crimea if independent, Russia if this is irredentist and Crimea gets annexed). In this case, new voters in Russia would be largely...