Declare an economic war on Putin

As the West debates countermoves to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the single most powerful and yet least risky reaction does not seem to be on the table for Biden administration: Unleash the oil industry so it can send oil prices out of nosebleed territory and down into the strategy of bleeding Putin dry. That’s an economic war against Putin, which will not cost one penny or one American life. In fact, it will put money in our pockets and improve the standard of living for people in regions of the United States that are mired in social breakdown and despair.

In the past 14 years, we’ve seen three crises arising from Russia and its revived imperial ambitions. What did all three instances have in common? Answer: high oil prices as part of a general wave of high inflation. Oil prices hit an all-time high ($180 per barrel) in June 2008, and two months later, Russia invaded Georgia. Oil was at sustained levels at more than $100 a barrel before Russian annexed Crimea in 2014. And, of course, the wave of energy inflation we’ve seen in the past two years is a recent and painful memory. The pattern is overwhelming and undeniable. Russia is a petrostate. It is highly dependent on oil revenues. If the price of its oil goes down, that’s a hit to its income—where it hurts most.

Wars are costly. Jesus told us that. Remember this text from Luke: “Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough …?” (Luke 14:31). Jesus knew exactly what He was saying. Within easy commuting distance of Nazareth was the city of Sepphoris, which did not count the cost before going to battle against Rome and did not “while the other is still far away” send a delegation and ask terms of peace (Luke 14:32). That city was destroyed during Jesus’ infant life and rebuilt during his adolescence when He worked as a carpenter. The tragic story of that city would have been a daily conversation during his upbringing. We should try to avoid the habit of ignoring the earthly level of Jesus' parables and rushing right to the theological point. Jesus as a rabbi argued “from heavy to light,” meaning He used an accepted truth at an earthly level to support a truth at a heavenly level. He doesn’t skip right to the cost of discipleship, and neither should we. As God in human flesh, Jesus was incapable of speaking falsehoods, either about discipleship or about geopolitics.

We would be wise to learn from all His words, which include His observations about when rulers should ask for terms of peace. The West clearly blundered in the cost calculation with Putin in at least two ways: We acted in a way that caused him to undercount the cost, and we pursued energy policies that gave him the revenues he needed to field the number of troops he thought he needed to win. The latter blunder is the more important one, as we see from the data, because of the high correlation between oil prices and Russian border incursions. Putin’s tyrannical predilections are a constant. The fecklessness of Western foreign relations has also been a constant. The key variable is oil prices. And thank God that they are variable because that means we can take action to push them down. All we need to do is stop choking our own energy sector. That changes the Putin calculus dramatically.

The West should use some of the more conventional and symbolic tactics being discussed now. It’s hard to morally justify buying Russian oil, for example. But let’s not have illusions about the economic impact of that tactic. U.S. consumption of Russian oil amounts to about one day per month. And, since oil is fungible, it’s nearly impossible to stop some other country from buying the day’s worth of oil that we abstain from. But symbolism matters, so by all means, boycott Russian oil, but let’s keep our eye on the most potent weapon we have in our arsenal: our ability to produce energy for the world from our vast reserves of crude oil in the ground and our vast reserves of refined knowledge in our minds. The last time we beat the Russians, it was using Ronald Reagan’s playbook. We didn’t so much defeat them directly as we simply transcended and weakened them. We grow, they don’t. We get richer, they get impoverished. That should be our policy.