Economic & international security

Let Czar Putin Overextend Himself
Despite the risk that a weak or dithering response by the West to Putin’s new advance into Syria will only encourage the hardliners around him, it may well be that Washington and NATO’s best response is to let Putin fight. Russia’s leader has imperial ambitions, but he does not have the economy to support them, especially as a decade of high oil prices recedes into the past. Aside from arms and vodka, Russia sells no competitive products internationally. The ruble now costs about three times less of what it was before the financial crisis of 2008, and it doesn’t help that politically Russia is isolated. Even China and India–the two countries that traditionally take the side of Russia’s foreign policy and whose economies are in much better shape–are unlikely to make any substantial contributions to Putin’s mission in Syria, if they were to jeopardize their relations with the US and EU.