I've been thinking that the most appropriate response to this situation is to send an extraction team to rescue him.
It's a bit like being a spy: get caught and you're disavowed.
Now, what I for one would love to see is an extraction of Julian Assange. He's a far more important journalist, who's been held in captivity far longer, and whose mental and physical deterioration as a result of the abuse he's endured has been far greater. He's the Griffith of the journalistic world.
Who wouldn't love hearing that a crack Russian special forces unit dropped into London, hit the Belmarsh hard, incapacitated the prison guards, and sprang Assange? Then vanished from London under cover of night, nursed Assange back to health in Russia, and Assange eventually returns to journalism after a decade of suppression, assuming his mind can be pieced back together, while living as a free refugee, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the former USSR?
I think we're all owed a happy ending at this point. It's been an ugly decade.
Who are you going to pay for that? Your neighbor Joey, he will go and perform an intelligence operation in a foreign country? Or maybe some professional CIA-as-a-service corporation?
It's appealing to try to help this person, though. Maybe other people feel the same.
There's also the question of logistics. It would be hard to transport weapons across country borders. The most likely way to do it might be to start the op in a neighboring country. But if you want to drive, you'll probably be stopped at a checkpoint. Walking isn't very appealing. I suppose you could parachute in, Fortnite-style, but that's pushing the boundaries of believability. Plus that Mig they sent to intercept the civilian plane might have a few things to say about that.
That poor guy. I wish there was something to do for him.
Actually I'm pretty sure there are PCMs who could handle it.
Crowdfunding mercenaries to go against nation states would be very cyberpunk.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Ghosn#Flight_from_Japan
Money (ie, power) creates and solves such problems; it just doesn't do that under the sun.
(It is of course illegal to crowdfund coup attempts and jailbreaks in foreign countries, although whether a prosecution takes place is entirely political)
Call me irresponsible, but I am weirdly optimistic about the potential for our floundering to have unexpected upsides
The Russians are the world's undisputed masters of this, so it's time we paramilitarize back.
Also, time to fuck Russia, hard. Putin's parkinsons won't come soon enough, and what comes after might even be worse. We should offer a visa for every Russian woman under 18. Starve the country of mothers, and their birthrate is already abysmal.
1 - https://polymarket.com/market/will-joe-biden-be-president-of...
Geopolitics is much more a game of Go than Call of Duty.
It'll also blow right up in our face in terms of the desired effect. In many cases, I figure doing that would actually boost support for the regime. Many dictators are ruling right now on nationalist sentiment -- "I may be a thug but I am strong and I keep our nation safe from the Americans [or whoever]". Bumping them off will not exactly dispel that myth. If they survive, or if power transfers stably to their second-hand-man or woman, they can now portray themselves and their nation as besieged by hostile foreign powers which will stoop as low as assassination to manipulate the nation's destiny for their ulterior objectives. (The best propaganda, after all, is the truth.)
Anybody can assassinate just anybody. Even heads of G7 can only afford security barely enough to defend against lone attacker with a battalion sized force constantly following them.
It's just they don't want to because they are afraid.
Assassinations aren't quite that, but perhaps the world would be better if that, rather than warfare was how countries that couldn't resolve their differences escalated. Leaders would have a more personal stake in resolving conflict diplomatically, and fewer people would die when they failed.
I should note this is only half-serious before somebody writes up a reply about a scenario where more extreme leaders take their place and there's a worse war as a result, or some such.
It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
What a heck is that "power vacuum?" I never managed to comprehend the mechanics of Western thought process arriving to that philosophical concept.
> It also sends a very strong message to Putin that the US may not want to send
You want to send this message. You want Putin to be intimidated, and scared, and not laughing at you in the face.
Very massive intimidation. Gaddafi's intimate encounter with a bayonet type of one.
It will be also a message of unity, for the world to see that the West can still Desert Storm any Hitler wannabe like was in time when the West was big, and menacing, and not the other way around.
It's called a "vacuum" by analogy with physics, because unscrupulous folks will rush in to fill it. This kind of chaos is not something you actually want, since it lets the worst guys around win easily. You want to give Mr. Dictator the best opportunity to establish well-founded transition/succession mechanisms (including respect for fundamental rights, which is even more important than democratic voting norms!) and then step down willingly and orderly, with a golden parachute to sweeten the deal.
The West has gotten this stuff horribly wrong as of late, even as recently as the latest wars in the Middle East, but that's no reason to do even worse.
Here’s an example from the end of Habsburg Spain: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spanish_Successio...
This guy rose to power after Tsar Nicolas II and his family were machine-gunned: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin Then, Stalin rose to power from the chaos after Lenin’s death, and then when Stalin died, Malankov was ‘in charge’ until Khrushchev took power from him, and so on.
There are counter examples of course, Nicolae Ceausescu being executed in Romania, for instance.
Well, Lenin (with peers like Trotsky and to some extent Stalin) was the architect of the Russian revolution that got rid of the Tsars. Rather than being a lucky opportunist he was dedicated to that project for a long period, motivated significantly by the execution of his brother. I don't think it's a great example of a power vacuum so much as the payoff for a singular focus on a specific goal.
On the other hand, Lenin's debilitation and death following being shot in an assassination attempt and then suffering a series of strokes did create a power vacuum, and Stalin had cleverly positioned himself to fully exploit it and push aside his rival Trotsky - arguably a more capable military and political leader, but one so dedicated to his cause that he failed to defend his own position.
After the Tsar was forced to abdicate as a result of the spontaneous, popular and bottom-up February 1917 Revolution, his government was replaced by a provisional government led by Kerensky which tried to incorporate all political classes and factions in Russian society. However, the provisional government was both weak and unstable – vulnerable to a coup by monarchists in the army while being effectively dependent on the co-operation of the Soviets (workers’ councils / citizen assemblies) of the more industrialised cities, particularly St. Petersburg. Just as important, they had been unable to extricate Russia from the disastrous and unpopular war with Germany (Eastern front of the First World War) and had been unable to resolve much of the material conditions (food shortages) that precipitated the February Revolution.
The Bolshevik party had been organising as a revolutionary party (previously a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) since the turn of the century. Unlike orthodox Marxists, they weren’t content to wait for the capitalist class to become powerful enough to institute modern, industrialised capitalism in Russian society and they believed it was their role to revolutionise Russian society, by-passing the capitalist stage of development.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks had become a well-disciplined and effective political force. They successfully worked towards gaining the support of the majority of the working class in St. Petersburg and Moscow (but not the peasants). After they gained control of the Soviets, they were strong enough to carry out their own coup d’état (known as the October Revolution) and become both the “de facto” and “de jure” ruling party.
The Tsar and his family were executed (horribly, by both bayonet and gunshot) only after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their power in order to prevent monarchist/counter-revolutionary forces (known as the “Whites”) from rescuing them.
One of the things I found so bizarre as a liberal... I was against the Iraq war on the basis that it would create a power vacuum, which it did. When six years later, liberals lined up to applaud the Arab Spring, I was against American support for it for the same reason. Both of those things were sold to the American public as a form of liberation from dictatorship. In the former, we would supply democracy after overthrowing Hussein. In the latter, we would expect countries with no history of democracy and almost no independent civic institutions to do it for themselves. The goal is great, but it never seems to be reached. People here haven't mentioned the Iranian revolution which was the most vivid example in modern history of a sudden vacuum in a dictator's absence, with the presence of a drifting democracy movement, being filled by a bloodthirsty lunatic.
tl;dr Better the devil you know, in most cases.
But at least Europe got much needed civil reform in the process, I guess?
A more effective solution is to sponsor a resistance movement (whether militant or peaceful) and this has been done so often that it's been systematized in both military and civil terms by various imperial powers, but with (imho) increasingly mediocre outcomes and increasing risk of blowback.