Gut the world is so intertwined: if they really want it, Europe and America can quickly change how other countries fare. When the Russian regime has only limited access to its foreign exchange reserves, the value of the ruble falls rapidly, Moscow people queue up in front of ATMs, rich Russians suddenly fear for villas, luxury yachts and foreign accounts, foreign companies cancel investments or divest business and on platforms like Facebook or Twitter Telling those affected directly what is happening to them in this war – then all of this is possible because delicate connections have been established around the world that link your own well-being with the well-being of many others. That is why sanctions such as those the West has now launched are possible.
Taken on their own, the mechanisms behind them have fundamentally provided and continue to provide more stability. This core of globalization hopes, once packaged in maxims such as “change through trade” or put forward much earlier by Immanuel Kant, still applies. At the very least, it cannot be concluded, as is sometimes done in the face of the current horror, that the world would automatically be a more peaceful place today if post-Cold War Western Europeans and Americans slowed trade with Russia or did not let China into the WTO had. Unfortunately it’s not that easy.
