Ships Are Sailing with Fake Insurance From the Norwegian Ro Marine

> Ideally, any accusations like this should first go through a careful examination by a jury of one’s peers rather than just being posted willy nilly.

Does Norway even have juries? At least in Sweden we don't have any juries in court (and the two countries tend to be more similar than not), so while the overall comment sounds fitting (and I agree), some details seem to miss the detail of what country this is about :)

Due process needs to be a lot faster and it could be. Things which warrant immediate action are delayed by months, years, or decades by wildly inefficient and slow processes that have nothing to do with someone's right to fair judgement.

Which Ro Marine didn't have- but they submitted forged documents to Panama and other countries claiming they did. When you have the resources of a nation-state, forging documents from other countries is straight-forward: you can all buy roughly the same stamps, etc. from the same sources, for your own documents. So changing a stamp or two to look like Norway's stamps isn't too difficult.

Getting ports around the world to check back with the originating agency on every document they look at... would be a lot of extra work.

Punishment often doesn't matter. Until someone notices, it's finished already for a long time. People are disposable, and some just take the risk to go to prison for a lot of money. It's often possible to disappear into another country, before the authorities start to figure out what's happening.

>The state fell short on that, and hence created an arbitrage opportunity

The state fell short on that because everyone hates violence so there isn't the political will to deploy it at the drop of a hat multiplied by everyone's pet issues.

The state "technically could" do a lot of stuff but it doesn't because doing even a small subset of those things more than it does would destabilize it.

Why not tariffs? Basically the continuous version of discrete sanctions, that wouldn't encourage as much routing around. Tax Russian oil/gas at the max point in the Laffer (-esque) curve, with all the revenue flowing as direct aid to Ukraine.

(I know 'tariff' has become a dirty word these days to due the obvious abuse, but I swear I'm making this comment in good faith)

Russia is the third largest oil producing country, this plan was never going to work because oil is a fungible resource. Sure you can stop buying from Russia and buy from someone else, but that just kicks off a game of musical chairs where everyone is backfilling from someone else and eventually _someone_ is buying from Russia to make everything whole. If Russia was some insignificant player the world could have frozen them out entirely but they simply produce too much oil for the world to absorb the loss of all of it.

De-sanction Iran and Venezuela too, before sanctioning Russian oil.

The thing is, sanctions damage both the sanctioned nation and the sanctioner.

I'm not really optimistic about western Europe's willingness to absorb damage in it economy in order to damage Russia. France's government expenditures are 55% of GDP, much of it financed by borrowing. That's the level maintained by major powers in the world wars. Can the French state demand more from a private sector that's funding the equivalent of a total war?

Worse yet, western European politics gives you the strong impression all these expenditures are necessary to prevent the election of a pro-Russian government or a bloody revolution.

Hence why sanctions seem to be something of a joke.

The same Dan Dexter that pushed for the Iraq war? Should we treat his opinions as such?

> 25 years ago, IR scholar Dan Drezner wrote the book _The Sanctions Paradox_ which tried to explain, in an IR theory sort of way, why sanctions are used so often and achieve so little- they don't overthrow governments, they rarely even manage to make governments stop doing the things we don't like.

Sanctions are a negative-rate compounding system. Sarah Paine from the US Naval War College:

> People look at sanctions and go, “Oh, they don't work because you don't make whoever's annoying you change whatever they're doing.” What they do is they suppress growth so that whoever's annoying you over time, you're stronger and they're weaker. And the example of the impact of sanctions is compare North and South Korea. It's powerful over several generations.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8&t=29m03s

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_C._M._Paine

> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce

The previous Russian imperial project, the Soviet Union, ended 35 years ago, not 80. It's easy to overlook that they forcibly redrew borders and kept them redrawn for decades (and still to this day do keep some territories they conquered in imperialist wars when they were still allied with Nazi Germany).

It's not like ww2 where you have increasingly fewer people who were old enough to consciously experience it. It's very likely that most people on this forum were around for the fall of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Russian imperialism.

>> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders

What are the current borders of Yugoslavia?

Did anybody in the west argue that redrawing the borders of Yugoslavia was against global norms?

Did you?

Yeah, it seems hard to say military intervention is preferable to increased accounting and recordkeeping requirements. Or maybe sheltered is a better way to put. Which is a good thing! For most people alive on Earth right now haven't had to deal with wars of territorial expansion. Yes wars exist, and yes territorial expansion by military might conitnues, and military occupations from the US certainly don't help. But overall we're in a point of relative stability.

There is no 80-year norm against redrawing borders. 80 years ago, Crimea was a part of the Russian SSR - now it's part of a free and independent Ukraine.

Eastern Europe looks a heck of a lot different, as did British India.

In all fairness, 80 years ago, the world was on the cusp of a massive border redraw, but the Phillipine Islands were still a US territory.

> and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce

The “global community” you’re referring to consists of America and its client states—only around 1/8th of the world’s population.

> We've managed to go 80-odd years with a reasonable global norm against redrawing borders, and it is worth a lot to demonstrate that we- the global community- do not acquiesce.

Cool story bro. Almost like Kosovo never happened.

Russia did not make Europe dependent on them for gas. Europe freely made that choice, even going so far as to do away with existing alternatives like nuclear in Germany. Trump even warned them. They had a wonderful time laughing at him while proclaiming the ignorant orange buffoon didn't understand Europe. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. Everyone then pretended Europe didn't make itself vulnerable while also ridiculing anyone who dared sound an alarm about the potential danger.

Europe wasn't forced. Europe chose and chose freely. Europe chose poorly.

They also could not anger donor EU countries sucking on the far end of the pipe. So time was provided for them to switch to LNG from the US and Qatar.