Why hasn’t the Russian Federation been expelled from the United Nations yet? For further information about this question, see here and here.
Update: Hey, at least FIFA has banned the Russian national team from this year’s World Cup!
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prior probability 
If Thomas Schelling were still alive, what would he make of the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
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Good question! Among other things, Schelling would focus Putin’s decision to put his nuclear arsenal on alert. Is Putin pretending to be crazy or is he actually mad? Either way, in a game of chicken, the driver who welds his escape doors shut and disables his steering wheel will probably win!
The game of chicken truly is a game of wits.
I was thinking about the quality of the weaponry being used by the Russian forces ( eg. 60+ year old tanks with no gps system, beyond archaic).
Even in the 1980s, there was fear mongering the military sophistication of Soviet Russia. To such an extent that it became a “Schelling Point” in American foreign policy. How much of that was the distorted aggrandizement of Soviet-era propaganda from both sides of the fences? By the 1980s, tanks built in the 1940s,1950s etc. ; were an outmoded joke. Then again, I could be conflating overall military capability with their sizable nuclear arsenal. Most likely too much conjecture on my part.
However, the rhetoric behind M.A.D policies are merely pissing contests that operate as faux-Prisoner’s dilemmas. The reaction of both the US and the Soviets may seem like defections, but they are actually Nash -Equilibrium strategies. Why? It is implied that neither party really wants to be the first one to hit the “red button”; both parties employ bluster to scare the other one off from defection. A treacherous game that has a high risk-to-reward ratio, surprisingly it seemed to work.
Excellent points. One more to add to the mix: why should anyone trust our so-called foreign policy “experts” or elites given what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan?
They have perverse incentives right out-of-the-gate.
War is business. It can make-and-break careers. One of the unforeseen Bootleggers of war are up-and-coming generals. While no one wants to truly be deployed to a active war zone, but it does provide ambitious officers with an opportunity to boost their careers.
Exactly right, and this is one of the reasons our founding fathers were worried about the possibility of having a “standing army”! When you add to that the fact that a significant chunk of the armed forces’ budget is apparently wasted on bullshit, we have a double whammy: danger to domestic liberty and huge waste of scarce resources.
Speaking of war diminishing individual liberty; in Crisis and Leviathan (Robert Higgs, 1987), I was shocked to learn that in someways WWII was more damaging then the countermeasures used to “cure” The Great Depression. The US government only proceeded to expand and add programs; not to mention severely relinquish civil liberties in the name of the war effort.
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