WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27WEDNESDAY OpinionT
he forces of good have found
courage. From ordinary Ukraini-
ans preparing molotov cocktails
to Germany’s leader proclaiming
an end to his nation’s geopolitical passivi-
ty, the shifts have been extraordinary. But
the Ukraine war has brought another
development.
The West has invented a new weapon.
The weapon consists of freezing a
country’s reserves of gold and foreign
currency. This maneuver has always been
possible in theory, but few had imagined
using it. Now, its power has been laid
bare. Overnight, it can turn a financially
sound economy into a basket case.
Until the weekend, Russia’s stockpile
of $630 billion in central bank reserves
was assumed to protect it against sanc-
tions. If Western powers refused to lend
Russia euros or dollars, the state had
enough on hand to keep servicing exist-
ing debts and pay for imports. If financial
traders dumped the ruble, Russia’s cen-
tral back could support the currency’s
value by using foreign reserves to buy it.
These assumptions are now dead. With
Western institutions refusing to deal with
Russia’s central bank, roughly half of its
reserves have been paralyzed. The result
is panic. The central bank has been
stripped of its credibility as a defender of
the ruble, so the currency has fallen
sharply against the dollar. Russian au-
thorities have fought back by hiking
interest rates to 20 percent, imposing
austerity on ordinary Russians to slow
the flow of currency out. Fearing that the
financial system is on the brink of col-
lapse, citizens are lining up at ATMs.
President Vladimir Putin’s claim to stand
for economic stability has been shredded.
This shredding extends a profound
shift in geoeconomics. Until a few years
ago, creditors were assumed to have the
upper hand over debtors. U.S.-led inter-
national financial institutions — the
World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund — used creditor power to impose
policy conditions on borrowers. Japan’s
position as a huge purchaser of
U.S. Treasury securities was thought to
give it leverage during the U.S.-Japan
trade wars of the 1980s and 1990s. What
might happen, strategists wondered, if
the Japanese dumped their Treasury
holdings, causing a jump in U.S. borrow-
ing costs and a meltdown on Wall Street?
Later, as China grew to be a massive
creditor, the same fear returned with a
vengeance. As a U.S. military ally, Japan
was unlikely to have a big enough beef
with Washington to resort to a financial
attack, but China was a different story.
My former Council on Foreign Relations
colleague Brad Setser wrote brilliantly
about the circumstances under which
China might use its creditor status as an
offensive weapon.
Setser turned out to be wrong, but not
for the reasons his critics had expected.
The standard objection was that, by
starting to sell its Treasury securities,
China would destroy the value of the rest
of its holdings — damaging its own
interests. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is
the latest illustration of why this objec-
tion was naive. In wartime, nations
routinely damage themselves in the
hope of inflicting greater damage on
their adversaries.
The real reason Setser was wrong
emerged in 2008. The financial crisis
drove the Federal Reserve to improvise
quantitative easing, another maneuver
that had always been possible in theory
but untried in practice. When the Fed’s
QE experiment succeeded, geoeconomics
changed. Debtors now had a superpower,
and creditors’ leverage had been broken.
Quantitative easing was primarily a
tool to manage the economic aftershocks
from the crisis on Wall Street. But there
was a China angle, too. The Chinese state
owned oodles of Treasury and mortgage
bonds, and it was determined to get its
money back. Quantitative easing demon-
strated how the Fed could deal with these
demands: It could print money and buy
the bonds that China wanted to sell. That
buried the idea that a future Chinese
threat to dump U.S. bonds could work as
a weapon.
With its sanctions on Russia, the West
is driving creditor impotence to the next
level. Russia’s status as a large official
creditor not only fails to give it leverage
over the West, it also has little defensive
value. It turns out that being a creditor is
not a source of power after all. What
matters is having a financial system that
commands global trust, based on an
independent central bank and an inde-
pendent legal system.
Autocratic creditors, China foremost
among them, are not going to like this.
But so long as democratic nations remain
open and fair, they stand to have the
upper hand in geoeconomic competition.
They will issue the world’s most popular
and stable currencies, so savers every-
where will want to hold them. They will
host the most efficient and least politi-
cized financial markets, attracting lend-
ers and borrowers. This will give the West
the ability to freeze enemy assets and
block enemy payments, just as it is doing
now — provided, of course, that it has the
courage to do so.SEBASTIAN MALLABYThe Westdeploys anew financialweaponOne doesn’t often think of Germans as
Churchillian — for obvious reasons.
Yet the term applies to Chancellor
Olaf Scholz’s extraordinary address
to the Bundestag in Berlin on Sunday.
Declaring that “Russian President Putin
has started a war of aggression in cold blood,”
Scholz said Germany must limit economic
interdependence with Russia and must bol-
ster its badly neglected military defenses.
What Germans are already calling a “revo-
lution” in their security policy represents a
strategic defeat for Vladimir Putin — and a
strategic victory for the United States and its
European allies. Putin might yet conquer
Ukraine, but he has clearly repelled and
galvanized the European Union’s richest,
most populous country, failing in his long-
term effort to co-opt Germany via energy
and commercial ties, such as the Nord
Stream 2 gas pipeline.
No longer the bland politician who plod-
ded up the ranks of German politics for
decades, Scholz did not quite promise Ger-
mans “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” He did,
however, abandon quasi-pacifist post-World
War II and post-Cold War German shibbo-
leths that had prevailed especially strongly in
his own Social Democratic Party — and had
still constrained his center-left coalition gov-
ernment’s response to Putin only days earlier.
Embracing “hard power” as few, if any, of
his predecessors in Germany’s post-1949
democracy have done, Scholz framed the
issue as “whether we have it in us to keep
warmongers like Putin in check. That re-
quires strength of our own.”
Accordingly, the chancellor said, Ger-
many would change long-standing policy
and ship arms to one side of an active war —
Ukraine. Germany will create a $113 billion
fund for defense in 2022 and then spend
more than 2 percent of gross domestic prod-
uct annually, even if it requires a constitu-
tional amendment to allow budget deficits.
Germany will pursue aircraft and tank de-
velopment with France and provide a more
modern version of outdated German planes
assigned to carry U.S. tactical nuclear weap-
ons. Germany will pipe less gas from Russia
and build terminals to receive liquefied nat-
ural gas from other sources.
The sudden turn of this previously vague-
ly Russophilic center-leftist, and the 78 per-
cent support that his decisions received in a
new poll, reflect the anguish Scholz and
many other Germans feel for having been
naive and complacent toward Russia.
“I am so angry at ourselves for our historic
failure,” tweeted Annegret Kramp-
K arrenbauer, who had served as defense
minister under Scholz’s conservative pred-
ecessor, Chancellor Angela Merkel. Even
after previous Russian aggression in Geor-
gia, Crimea and Donbas, she added, Ger-
many underfunded its army, forgetting that
“we have to be militarily strong enough to
make non-negotiation not an option for the
other side.”
Scholz, who alluded in his speech to
“hours of direct talks” that convinced him
Putin seeks a Russian empire, is said to be
personally enraged at the Russian president.
Over champagne with Scholz at the Kremlin
last month, Putin sounded interested in
peace, inducing the chancellor to suggest a
diplomatic solution that fudged Ukraine’s
request for NATO membership. Then Putin
invaded and made Scholz look like a dupe.
Scholz’s proposals are “the plan of a gov-
ernment that fears, if Ukraine falls, to be
partly guilty for it,” Michael Link, a member of
the Bundestag from Scholz’s coalition part-
ners, the Free Democratic Party, told me.
The unspoken corollary: This is also a
government that — rightly — does not fear
accusations of repeating past German mili-
tarism, and the crimes that entailed.
Scholz credibly portrayed his proposals as
part of the European Union’s collective de-
terrence on behalf of democratic values. The
modernized German military he envisions
would work with NATO allies — former
German enemies — France and Poland. It
would face only eastward.
Though “NATO” came up repeatedly in
Scholz’s speech, “United States” did not. The
omission seemingly finessed Germans’ awk-
ward dependence on U.S. protection at a
time when the Biden administration has
Europe’s back but doubts linger about the
long-term direction and dependability of
post-Trump America.
No problem: The United States should
welcome a more united, more militarily
capable European Union, ready to share the
transatlantic defense burden with us and
Britain.
Higher German defense spending re-
moves a big irritant in U.S.-German rela-
tions. It could even help stabilize our domes-
tic politics by eliminating Donald Trump’s
populist grievance against NATO f ree-riding.
U.S. liquefied natural gas exports to Germany
will diminish the bilateral trade deficit and
create jobs in the United States.
Another iconic 20th-century English-
man, George Orwell, wrote of the human
tendency to persist in “believing things
which we know to be untrue, and then, when
we are finally proved wrong, impudently
twisting the facts so as to show that we were
right.”
“The only check on it,” he wrote, “is that
sooner or later a false belief bumps up
against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
This has just happened to Germany’s illu-
sions about itself, about Russia and about
the world, on a battlefield called Ukraine.CHARLES LANERussia has lostGermanyno matterthe outcomeAhmaud Arbery’s three killers
were convicted last week of
federal hate crimes. But I can
already hear some people
trying to turn them into some sort of
anomaly. As if they are “dinosaurs”
from a bygone era. I hear people
blaming the racism of these men on
the fact that they are from the South,
where some people think all racism
comes from. I hear people dismissing
them as “rednecks” and “bubbas” and
“bumpkins.”
But I’m here to tell you that these
killers aren’t exceptions to any rule.
They stand in for millions of Ameri-
cans in their belief that the color of my
skin makes me less of a human being.
Less intelligent. Less trustworthy. Less
worthy in general. These Americans
exist from sea to shining sea, and they
are not always White, or male. They
are everywhere. In every occupation.
They are so common — and their
actions so unavoidable — that I
learned a long time ago not to share
my encounters with them with other
White people. The minute I would
start to tell White folks about a slight,
a snub or an outright ugly racist thing
that I experienced, I could see their
minds working. I could see them pro-
cessing the things that I was saying in
order to dismiss them. Most told me I
was being too sensitive or that I was
overreacting — anything to minimize
my experience.
For instance, many years ago, I was
in a car with a White friend late at
night, and we had both been out to a
bar. I was in the passenger seat. We
were young, and my friend probably
shouldn’t have been driving. So, wegot pulled over by two police cars. My
training as a Black American has
taught me to never say anything when
police officers are around, so I re-
mained silent as one officer ap-
proached the driver’s side of the vehi-
cle and the other officer approached
my side. Mine shined his flashlight
into my face and all over my body. He
asked me a question, and I gave him a
monosyllabic answer. He told me that
he didn’t like my attitude.
It was then that he told me to get
out of the car. He asked for my ID. He
continued to pepper me with ques-
tions, and I continued to give him
monosyllabic answers. He took this as
a sign of disrespect and frisked me for
weapons. Hands on the car. Legs
spread. This, while my friend sat be-
hind the wheel. He didn’t get frisked.
Or a ticket. The officer on the driver’s
side apologized to my friend for the
inconvenience.
And, after teaching me a lesson, the
cops just released us.
On another occasion, while driving
through a wealthy White neighbor-
hood, police pulled over another car
in which I was a passenger. We
weren’t speeding or driving reckless-
ly. The officers just made something
up and pulled us over. When they had
us on the side of the road, they asked if
they could let their dog “play around”
in our car because it “needed some
exercise.”
These officers were exceedingly
friendly, asking how our day was
going and what we did for a living.
After their drug dog found nothing
in our car, they sent us on our way,
fully traumatized, carrying an angerthat we just stow away with all the
other collected anger we harbor
about such incidents. I have many
stories like these, not all of them
involving police.
But when I tell White people these
stories, they immediately start to look
for the flaws in my narrative. “Are you
sure you weren’t drunk? You can get
pretty mouthy when you’re drunk.” Or
“I don’t think you were singled out
just because you’re Black.” They cre-
ate a version of the story that mini-
mizes what happened. They do this
not to make me feel better but to make
themselves feel better, to ensure that
their idea of America as a non-racist
meritocracy stays unassailable in
their minds.
James Baldwin once wrote, “Every
white person in this country — and I
do not care what he or she says —
knows one thing.... They know they
would not like to be black here. If they
know that, then they know every-
thing they need to know, and whatev-
er else they say is a lie.” I believe this to
be absolutely true.
So, I stopped talking with White
people about the racist things that
happen to me. Instead, I commiserate
with my Black friends.
I don’t want to risk the frustration
of being told that I’m paranoid or
overreacting by people who sit across
the dinner table every Christmas
from people who say the kind of
things that Ahmaud Arbery’s mur-
derers said.
Instead, like most Black Ameri-
cans, I endure. And I tuck my anger
away so that I don’t go completely
insane.BRIAN BROOMEWhy I don’t complainabout racism to White peopleERIK S LESSER/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
Wanda Cooper Jones speaks about her murdered son Ahmaud Arbery on the second anniversary of his death
during an event at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta on Feb. 23.For millions of Americans,
Ukraine is the first war of the
modern-day Web.
Let’s say the Civil War was the
first photography war; World War II the
first war of radio. That Vietnam was the
first TV war is practically axiomatic:
Dispatches of the massacre in My Lai
streamed into living rooms in Montana.
The weapon of narrative control was
wrested out of the state’s hands, and
viewers started to associate combat less
with glory than with gore.
Some say the first Internet war was in
Kosovo. If you had one of the hulking
machines that passed for computers in
those days, you could plug in, dial up
and reach the front lines without any
intermediary. You could receive an
email from an Albanian businessman,
or hop into a chat room with a besieged
college kid in Belgrade. Others contend
that the War on Terror was the real
original Internet war. After all, it was the
first where our own newspapers were
widely online, too — b loody dispatches
at the ready with only a click and a bit of
buffering.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine, though, is a war of
the epoch of platforms — the truly
digital age, when social media has be-
come essential to social life, and when
we don’t use the Web only to take in
information but also to spit it out.
The Arab Spring, of course, spawned
the new reality in which the citizenry
turns conflict into content. But as essen-
tial as Twitter, Facebook and the rest
were to those uprisings, most of the
speech still came from people physically
on the scene, with the rest of us reading
and watching. Ukraine feels different to
many of us, especially younger people in
the West.
There’s an unsavory racial element to
our attachment to this crisis: A CBS
reporter recently gaffed that Ukraine is
more “civilized” than other Internet-erawar zones — such as Syria or Iraq or
Afghanistan or Yemen — which is a
reason the clash there has captivated
some in the West.
But also responsible for the way we’re
treating today’s events is an evolution in
how we use the Internet. Always in-
clined now toward interactivity, we’re
participating rather than merely ob-
serving what’s happening thousands of
miles away. We’re spreading memes
made in Kyiv or Kharkiv throughout the
timelines of Brooklynites, with the aid of
algorithms crafted in Silicon Valley.
Sometimes, we’re forging rallying cries
of our own.
Consider the obsession with Padding-
ton Bear, whom Ukrainian President
(and former comic actor) Volodymyr
Zelensky voiced in the Ukrainian dub of
the movie. The cuddly creature and
unlikely hero is known in the epony-
mous films for delivering a “hard stare”
to bullies. Now, an image with this
trademark expression earns the caption
culled from a recent speech by Zelensky:
“As you attack, it will be our faces you
see, not our backs.”
That’s not the only line lookers-on
have adopted as an expression of their
own distant defiance. “Russian warship,
go f--- yourself,” soldiers defending a
coastal island declared as they refused
to surrender, just before bombardment.
Now, the retort has become ubiquitous
as an ornament on the Instagram stories
of Westerners.Oh, and don’t forget the babushkas.
The women who chased away armed
separatists in Kramatorsk, or donned
the colors of the Ukrainian flag on the
Moscow subway, or offered seeds to
Russian soldiers so that “sunflowers
grow when they die,” have all been
celebrated by the foreign masses — a
fandom forming around them abroad as
we create out of their individual tales a
single grandmotherly avatar of bravery.
Zelensky’s almost caricatural charis-
ma, obviously, encourages us to cheer
for the good guys. His speeches seem as
if they could have been written by a
21st-century Shakespeare — emotional
and electrifying, but now eminently
clippable and shareable, too. His gov-
ernment’s facility with the lingua franca
of the Internet doesn’t hurt either. See,
for example, the official Ukraine Twitter
account.
“This is not a ‘meme,’ but our and your
reality right now,” it posted alongside a
cartoon of Adolf Hitler patting Putin on
the cheek as Russia invaded on Thurs-
day. On Saturday, the same page took the
time to explain to a random user why the
official Twitter account of New Jersey is
among the 24 it follows: “Cauz they’re
cool,” Ukraine replied, just days after it
was invaded. This combination of sin-
cerity and oddity is just what it takes for
a nation under serious threat to navi-
gate the often silly space of social media.
But what happens if the tale turns
toward tragedy? We in North America
and Western Europe have never actually
been the combatants here. We’re gleeful-
ly hitting “send” on tweets while the true
soldiers gravely launch javelins. Our
pseudo-participation, whether or not
our hearts are in the right place, has
been a sick sort of fun. But when the fun
stops, we can log off, just as we do any
time we’re tired of staring at our screens.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the war will go
on. There’s no closing the laptop on real
life.MOLLY ROBERTSUkraine is a war of the modern-day WebW e’re gleefullyhitting ‘send’ on tweets whilethe true soldiers gravelylaunch javelins.