Garry Kasparov - Winter Is Coming

United military intervention to protect human lives and the greater good must also be kept on the table. The value of human life and the value of human freedom in a new Magna Carta must be defended as if they were borders, for that is what they are. They are borders of time and space, separating those who want to live in the modern world and those for whom modernity is a mortal threat.

I advocate for a return to many of the principles and policies that were dominant in the West during the Cold War. But that does not mean I want to turn back the clock. As the Bible says, “No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined.” We cannot pour the modern wine of globalization and the multipolar world into the old wineskin of obsolete Cold War institutions and regulations. Times change. Circumstances change. Institutions must change. But our values must not.

What is to be done? Each situation, each crisis, has its own requirements, of course. The shift of a single pawn changes the entire position. This is why I like to say that I advocate principles, not policies. When you have solid principles and the entire world knows what they are, the policies tend to be much easier to develop and enforce.

It is for leaders, for those who are responsible to their people, to form policies. It is for leaders to consult with experts, to evaluate their options, to consider the consequences, to weigh the short term versus the long term. Making recommendations without the authority to enact them or the responsibility to be held accountable for them is an extravagance. It lends itself to the worst kind of posturing and folly. But I realize that this response, however honest and accurate it may be, is also a form of evasion. No one would be pleased with a doctor who diagnoses you with a deadly illness and then declines to suggest a remedy.

There are many steps that can be taken that require only courage and will. A global Magna Carta is one of them, a document that leads to the creation of a united Democratic nations that upholds and enforces the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Democracies can take steps now to protect and support those under attack from the dictators, the oppressors, and the time travelers. The free world possesses wealth and power beyond imagining and it must be used to help the unfree to join us or it is power wasted.

Another reason specific policy recommendations are unsatisfactory is that they are inevitably outdated or entirely obsolete. Over the years I have made a long list of things that should be done to respond to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, for example. Even now, after he has proven my worst fears correct and everyone is telling me how right I was, few of those recommendations have been enacted. Others have been carried, such as sanctions and ejecting Russia from the G7, but too feebly or too slowly to have the deterrent impact I had in mind.

Most of the specific proposals I made nearly a year ago regarding dictatorships, Putin, and Ukraine still stand and I have referenced them throughout the book. Isolate dictatorships that exploit engagement to support oppression. Keep human rights and the value of human life as the backbone of policy, including foreign policy. This does not preclude negotiation or trade within certain parameters, but it must never be doubted that relations will always have strict limits as long as repression exists.

Ukraine should be defended as if it shares a border with every free nation in the world. This means providing arms with which it can defend its borders and financial aid to stabilize the economy Putin is trying so hard to destroy. Take a close look at what America and Europe get from Russia—oil, gas, supply lines—and develop substitutes for them. This is why Putin fears fracking and other technologies that make the West less dependent on his energy exports. And yet this very week, at the end of April 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon has asked Congress for permission to use Russian-made rocket engines. When the leading nations of the free world put their militaries at the mercy of the bad guys, what hope can the victims of the bad guys have?

If appeals to morality and values do not move you, America does indeed have vital interests in Ukraine. As the world’s largest economy, military power, and energy consumer, the United States reaps great benefits from global stability. (While big fossil fuel exporters like Russia benefit from instability, which tends to raise the price of oil.) Even if you are a cynical realist or a libertarian isolationist, it is cheaper and more practical to take a stand now over Ukraine than to let it go and then have to worry constantly about even stronger American commitments to the Baltics and Poland, who are NATO members. It is also much safer for Americans, Europeans, and everyone else to maintain a robust global American security umbrella than to encourage rampant military proliferation by closing that umbrella.

It’s important to remember that appeasement reflects the overall climate, not just the personal weakness of our elected leaders. From Chamberlain in 1938 to Obama in 2015, the people get what they demand—for a while. Main Street and Wall Street reward politicians who produce attractive short-term results no matter how bad the long-term consequences are. There are few rewards and many penalties for the rare politician who tries to talk about the big picture and the long-term consequences of inaction. Hypothetical questions are dismissed as if it’s an unfair “gotcha” to inquire about the future. With no guiding strategy to stick to, democracies lose out to opportunistic dictatorships that can act much more quickly with no checks and balances or people to be accountable to. We cannot wait to act until after the catastrophe is under way. This “wake me up when they take Poland” attitude was foolish in 1938 and it’s even more foolish in 2015 because we have the lesson of September 1939—when Poland was invaded—and the six horrific years that followed, to inform us. At least Chamberlain didn’t have a history book to tell him what was coming.

I will not say that we are reaching a crisis point or a fork in the road because the tragedy is already unfolding. The decisions made by the leaders of the free world—and by the voters who select them—will decide how tragic it will be. The aggression of Putin and ISIS caught the complacent free world off guard, but that excuse cannot be used any longer and we still have no plan of action. Any politician running for national office should be asked what they will do to make the world safer. Candidates and leaders cannot be allowed to hide behind the flimsy mask of “domestic priorities” in a world of globalized economies and globalized violence.

Whether it is in Ukraine, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, or Nigeria, the free world should be ready to act to support those who want to live in freedom and to live free from fear. Not just act militarily, after the crisis has already exploded, but act to educate, to build, to help construct societies that appreciate modern values. Even the cynics and isolationists should admit that it is far more moral, economical, and effective to invest in preventing the poverty, fear, and ignorance that often lead to radicalization than punishing that radicalization after it becomes violent. Each billion dollars spent building schools, training teachers, and connecting the isolated to the rest of the world saves $10 billion of war later, after another generation of hungry, angry young men have become vulnerable to the propaganda of anti-modernity because modernity has done nothing for them.