Russian oligarchs are safe in Maldives at the moment living the good life on their yachts, until America grows some balls and says fuck it and just seizes those yachts anyway, the oligarchs won't change their ways. I mean what's the Maldives gonna do, whats point of having greatest navy in world if we dont use it when we need it? Maldives might ban us from vacationing there? good riddance, plenty of other nice places to go anyway. UN might slap us on the wrist, but I doubt it, lol
America plays by the rules to often, and no other country does, and they only get slapped on the wrist when they dont. even when the dust settles from all of this, Russia will "negotiate" and things will go back to normal since he controls the energy for a lot of the west.
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I'm perplexed. When the US had its teeth kicked in, post 9/11, we did exactly this with Afghanistan. We defined what we saw as bad people, who reasonably saw terrorism as a resolution to their ideological differences. Our response was to go kick down the doors, and the rest of the world claimed that we were acting as a global police force that nobody wanted or needed.
The above proposal is to have the US do the exact same thing, but instead of kicking somebody who was tangentially linked to the event you want us to start kicking the oligarchs. Individuals who learned from Japan in WWII, and have rightly left the sleeping dog lie with regards to the US. Our motivation for doing so is to liberate Russia, spread democracy, and doing all of this only because we want more democracy?
I'm trying to frame this so the ask is rational. So far, the theoretical spread of democracy is literally the only upside of this transaction.
Alternatively, we can push our internal benefactors to not provide resources to Russia. This takes almost no political capitol, and doesn't require any manpower. The result, in an interconnected world, is the collapse of infrastructure and markets. Market drive everything, because there is functionally no longer a self-sufficient economy on this planet. The only point of failure here would be if a third party restored the lost economic activity, which would functionally mean that there were two pariahs if those original actions bringing down a sanction were universally viewed as abhorrent.
Of course, abhorrent is rather plastic. War crimes, invasions, and genocide generally are the only thing that would be considered to be universally abhorrent...and wouldn't you look at that. Russian invasions of land seem to fit the bill.
I suppose that the US finally learned that there are more subtle ways of doing things...because military conflict is no longer possible between large powers. It's not even really a viable tactic against people whose most advanced hardware is an AK-47. What you're asking for is decisive action against people who you think are evil...to right a perceived wrong...and the cost of that moral policing should fall on the US...because? I'm just laughing, because a decade ago this suggestion would have been jingoistic talk from the extreme bits of the US. Oh, how the pendulum swings.
Back on point though, this is about Intel and AMD. Best case scenario their stuff is used in military hardware...which the sanctions will severely cripple the production of. Oligarchs living high off of money siphoned from a corrupt political system is kind of beyond the pale here. I don't think forcing them to pay 200% MSRP for a CPU can ever really address that.
