wikileaks

If you want to send a message, use Western Ukraine by Dan Davies

What was needed was for someone (probably Baroness Ashton) to go and deliver the message "Don't worry Vlad, not while the Ukrainian people have holes in their arses will they be members of the EU and as far as NATO membership is concerned they are somewhere behind North Korea. We fully appreciate that Ukraine is your back yard, not ours and we have no interest in doing anything that makes you feel threatened". At which point it could all have been stood down in a cloud of bad temper, but kept relations on the same broadly productive track they were before.

Thing is, this is now the post-Wikileaks era. And the trouble with the little speech I indicated in the last paragraph is that a) it's a total lie and obviously so, and b) it involves selling out the Ukrainian opposition in a really unedifying way - we keep financing these people and providing the expectation of help that we're never going to deliver, in order to use them as pawns in our game of chip-bits, and I suspect they might kind of know that, but we can't rub their faces in it and expect to keep their support. There is no way that any official is going to be prepared to have that speech attached to their name, and so no way anyone's going to do it if there is a risk of it being plastered all over the internet (and there is; EU diplomats have screwed up their comms at least once already and seen embarrassing conversations appear in the papers). There's a symmetry too here - there are all sorts of threats and deals that Putin might want to communicate but can't.

So the normal channels of diplomatic communication aren't working, and people are working blind, while trying to communicate strategies and alternatives to each other by the traditional Cold War means of costly signalling theory. My answer to the question of "why did Putin invade Crimea?" is that it is quite likely that he did it "in order to transmit a single bit of information". We're trying to use various forms of sanctions as a communication tool, but we haven't got an agreed code to match them up with - we need to develop a set of bidding conventions, like bridge players have. My guess is that because it has now become someone's job to develop a new substitute diplomatic communication channel, and fast, it will get done, and things will get a lot more normal. But it's also possible that they won't, and that we will be seeing a lot more use of the tactic of annexation of territory as a means of self-expression.\

Reminds me of the increased partisanship in Congress where old-style, bipartisan deals can no longer be made.