Peace through Commerce

There’s an old joke that goes around the Kremlin. It’s that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has only three trusted advisers: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great. Perhaps not funny, but also perhaps truer than you’d think. U.S/Russian negotiators are making diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine war by establishing the basis for a lasting and mutually beneficial economic relationship between the former Cold War rivals.

The gist of the offer the Russian government apparently pitched to President Trump was that making money and making war have never been mutually exclusive activities.

Russia, the Land of Opportunity

Gerard Baker in the WSJ documents how Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and a close Putin aide, and Steve Witkoff, the president’s ambassador plenipotentiary to everywhere, “have drawn up a list of commercial opportunities for the U.S. and Russia if only Washington would sign off on Mr. Putin’s unlawful occupation of a neighboring country.”

The prospects on offer seem enticing: rare-earth mining and energy projects for U.S. investors in Russia’s Arctic; joint missions to Mars between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Russian space industry; appropriation of the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen by European central banks after the 2022 invasion, to be used for collaborative investment in Russia and Ukraine.

The offer is so appealing you wonder whether the American envoy and his colleagues were given the same sort of Potemkin village spectacle to which Tucker Carlson was treated on his visit to Moscow last year, the one where he expressed wonderment, for example, at the coin deposit-and-return system in Russian supermarket carts.

That technology, writes Mr. Baker, has been in almost every European supermarket since about 1990.

From Swords to Plowshares

Mr. Witkoff seems to believe that offering the peace dividend can benefit Ukraine as well. Converting military training to peaceful uses is a modern invocation of the swords-to-plowshares principle. Witkoff has evidently told Ukrainian officials that its de-mobbed soldiers could soon be earning Silicon Valley-level salaries operating American data centers in the country. It’s unclear whether Russia has been offered any investment opportunities in the U.S. as part of the deal. But we can at least hope, offers Baker, that Mr. Witkoff told Mr. Dmitriev about an amazing bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan that he would be happy to sell.

Mr. Baker wonders if his own cynicism is unfair about Mr. Witkoff’s curious mix of ingenuousness and rapacity. Does Witkoff believe in the old idea that a deeper economic relationship between the countries acts as its own guarantee of peace?

From Mr. Witkoff:

“If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that is going to be naturally a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”

Gerard Baker calls Witkoff’s idea “beguiling,” adding, “peace through commerce.” Could Witkoff, asks Baker, have been reading Norman Angell’s famous “The Great Illusion” (1909), whose central argument was that profitable economic engagement between industrialized countries made war virtually unimaginable because it was the “real guarantor of the good behavior of one state to another.”

Five years after Angell’s book was published, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was murdered in a Sarajevo street, and for the next four years the richest and most economically integrated countries in history staged the bloodiest warfare humans had ever produced.

Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, etc.

Even if you aren’t mindful of history, you might be skeptical about big claims of peaceful and prosperous coexistence with Mr. Putin’s Russia.

Over his quarter-century in power, the Russian president has demonstrated that for him and his favored courtiers, enrichment through cross-border economic activity is perfectly consistent with—indeed, a helpful facilitator of—violent campaigns to extend Russia’s borders.

Russia has long been adept at exploiting the cupidity of eager Westerners to advance its political aims, as Baker notes. As he points out, the Soviet Union played the capitalist game better than we did during the Cold War, showering riches on men like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssenin in exchange for secrets the Russians hoped would bring about the destruction of our political system.

In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs, many of whom now surround Mr. Putin, welcomed well-meaning Western academics, businessmen and others to help them plunder their resources and pave the way for the kleptocracy that now holds up his global ambitions.

In the end, kleptocrats are going to do what kleptocrats always do, concludes Baker.

For Americans, making money with Russia in the hope of making peace would be a time-tested mistake. But helping to make money for Russia while it pursues its aims of undermining Western freedom and American leadership would be a crime.