entering its borders. As I wrote last week, it looks like our
cold war against China is in full swing, and while that may improve American competitiveness, it will make for a sadder, more stressful, and less-connected world.
Russia has been trying to build its own Great Firewall for at least three years now. Putin knows that Putinism is incompatible with the free markets and free people implied by the freedom of information on the internet.
But Russian society—and the Russian elite—are different from Chinese society, and the Chinese elite. Russia's wealthy and powerful, unlike in China, want to feel like they're part of the rest of the world. They want to shop in the SoHo neighborhoods of New York and London, ski in Zermatt, and sun on the Turkish coast. They have more contacts, both business and personal, outside Russia and on non-Russian platforms. And unlike China, Russia is economically weak and highly economically interconnected with Europe.
Cutting Russia off from our world—from SWIFT bank transfers, credit-card processing, WhatsApp logins, Google Play, Apple's App Store sales and mobile services, Nokia and Ericsson tech support for their mobile infrastructure, heck, even from Tinder—would hurt the people who have Putin's ear. (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba agrees on the need for a Russian SWIFT ban.)
Yes, Russian oligarchs could still deal with China, but it's never seemed to me that the Russian elite would truly stomach being a Chinese client state. And while the Russian opposition uses WhatsApp and banking systems to plan and fund protests, I think we have to acknowledge that they're ineffective—smothered by Putin's absolute control, as he wants Ukraine to be. The only true way to help the Russian opposition would be to force Putin's wealthy cronies to turn on him.
We've had wars in the past 30 years, many in my mind stupid and ill-advised. But they haven't generally been conflicts between two major internet-dependent states. The closest I can think of is the war against ISIS, which used internet and financial sanctions as part of an overall successful strategy.
The internet is ultimately based on the idea of free people, transacting freely. It's worth breaking it, for a little while, to save the principles it needs to survive.
