Несколько тезисов из моего текста для The Russia File -- Can T | Events and texts

Несколько тезисов из моего текста для The Russia File -- Can Trade Be Moral?

Democratic countries have long traded with authoritarian ones, ignoring what is going on in them. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine could put a stop to this free trade approach. The United States and the UK want countries playing leading roles in the global economy to behave well in politics or stop trading. If such a change is possible, in the long run, it could ensure that respect for human rights and freedoms becomes a global norm. But is that approach realistic in light of the interconnectedness of the global economy?

For years, developed countries have sourced energy from authoritarian kleptocracies and allowed authoritarian elites to buy real estate, yachts, and soccer clubs and to stash their loot in Western jurisdictions. The West has contributed to the flourishing of regimes that violate human rights. Now Truss is saying that free markets should serve human progress, not rule-breakers who commit crimes at home and in other countries. The club of developed countries no longer wants to fund wars and to help bloody autocrats, even unintentionally. This, Truss warns, applies not only to Russia but also to China.

Asking markets to serve human progress represents an attempt to institute a new doctrine of international relations, trade, and finances. If accepted, it would fundamentally change the world economy and politics. Liberal intellectuals are debating whether Immanuel Kant's hope that trade would usher in "perpetual peace" has perished in the suburbs outside Kyiv. After all, in this case the objects of trade are raw materials controlled by state-dependent monopolies. In other words, that trade is not free.  

However, there are questions. Should Western countries refuse to trade with ones that have already violated the global rules and done something completely out of the ordinary? Or can the "Truss doctrine" work preemptively? Would it be feasible to deprive the violators of access to the global economy when they show the first signs of violating human rights, eliminating political competition, or dangerous saber-rattling?

So far, free societies have been buying raw materials from autocratic regimes and selling to those unfree regimes the latest technological products, including dual-purpose ones. Free societies have profited a lot from this exchange.
This subject has been developed more by philosophers than by economists. Leif Wenar, a Stanford professor and author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World,writes that we must do away with resource privilege. As he explains, “any group sufficiently powerful to maintain coercive control over a territory’s population holds the legal right to sell off that territory’s natural resources.”

By making free and fair agreements with tyrants, free societies get property rights to commodities. But those commodities have been stolen by the autocrats from the local population, Wenar holds. According to Wenar, trading natural resources with autocrats is not unlike buying stolen goods and giving back to autocrats the money to buy weapons, surveillance technology, and whatever else they need to stay in power.

As the Russian example shows, an attempt to make an authoritarian regime less prone to war by means of trade has been unsuccessful. The “trade fosters peace” principle did not work in the Russian case. On the contrary, democracies became dependent on Russia’s supply of energy. Trade, as Paul Krugman has written, can be “a force for coercion, not peace.”

With the World Trade Organization as an arbiter, most countries have managed to agree on the rules by which they trade with each other. Now it is time to start negotiating the global rules for world politics and universal human rights. As the world has learned to trade by the rules, it will eventually agree on political rules of conduct and respect for human rights.