Avenging Navalny is not our government’s job

Plus: the face computer again, Puritan baby names, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

---

1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Avenging Navalny is not our government’s job

(via)

“You warned Vladimir Putin when you were in Geneva of ‘devastating’ consequences if Navalny died in Russian custody,” President Biden was reminded last week, after news broke of the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. “What consequences should he and Russia face?”

Biden didn’t exactly respond. He mostly talked about bad things that had already happened to the Kremlin before Navalny died—which can hardly be consequences for his death—then said he’s “looking at a whole number of options.”

At The New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens is bursting with ideas for what those options might be, explicitly framing them as means of vengeance: Seize frozen bank reserves and give the money to Ukraine. Give Ukraine more missiles. Up American exports of liquid natural gas so friendly nations can take their business away from Russia. Make other jailed dissidents candidates for U.S.-negotiated prisoner exchanges. Or refuse to recognize the Russian government as legitimate, declining to acknowledge Putin as the country’s president after his next election in March and categorically rejecting him as a negotiating partner.

Biden “needs to act,” Stephens said, to make good on his threat.

Let me propose something different: Biden should not make good on his threat, because it is not a threat he should have made in the first place, because it is not the job of the United States government to avenge even the most heroic and admirable foreign dissidents in authoritarian countries—and because to shoulder the task, in this case, would mean shouldering a significant and unjustified risk to U.S. security.

The unfortunate truth is this: There are many authoritarian countries in the world, and there are many dissidents in those countries. As oppressive states are wont to do, these governments imprison, torture, and kill people—including courageous, virtuous, principled people working to bring to their compatriots some measure of freedom, prosperity, and safety.

This is evil. It is also happening all the time, all around the world. Few dissidents are as prominent as Navalny, and few imprisonments and deaths generate so much sympathy and outrage, yet there are many, many more of them. I say this not to minimize Navalny’s death one whit, but to point out that no one is saying the U.S. government should avenge every such death. Why not? Because we all realize it would be impossible, dangerous, and outside our government’s proper scope of action.

The United States is the most militarily powerful country on earth, but we can’t intervene every time an oppressive government abuses and murders its people. Even the most ardent military interventionist must admit we can’t constantly go “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Our resources are great but still limited. We have to prioritize, to be “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” but “champion and vindicator only of [our] own.”

To those who want to say this is a special case, I agree. But it’s not primarily special because of Navalny but because of the regime that killed him, a regime that, though declining in power, still has the one nuclear arsenal to rival our own. (Maybe including space nukes??)

It’s one thing to throw our weight around with markedly smaller, weaker countries. I’m not saying it’s good to do this—I have written tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of words arguing against the interventionist debacles of the post-9/11 era and U.S. foreign policy efforts to forcefully remake the world in our image. But it is different, for while coercing the government of a country like Afghanistan or Syria can lead to many terrible things, it cannot directly lead to global nuclear war.

With Russia, that is perhaps an unlikely outcome, especially for some of the things on Stephens’ list. But it is not an impossible outcome.

I’ll end by noting that one item on the list strikes me as particularly reckless: pretending Putin won’t be the “real” president of Russia after next month.

Will Putin’s election be free and fair by our standards? No, of course not. Should he rule Russia? Again, no, of course not. (He’s arguably a dictator, albeit of a semi-new breed.) But does he rule Russia? Yes, he does, and pretending he doesn’t is silly and dangerous political theater.

Refusing to negotiate with him—and Stephens doesn’t bother to say whether this would extend to routine and working-level talks like inter-military communications to avoid accidental mishaps—will not somehow force him out of office. It would simply cut us off from important conversations with a near-peer rival that is actively waging a war of aggression in which we are involved on the other side.

And remember, that’s a near-peer rival with nukes.

---

2. What I'm reading this week

Sigh. Yes, I read the divorce article. No comment.

---

3. A recommendation

I’ve mentioned here before my frustrations with the children’s Bible market. My personal solution (for now, anyway) has been to just make the leap to the regular NIV with our twins. We still read the Tales that Tell the Truth series and some other illustrated stuff, but I figured if they can handle all the Little House and Ramona books, they can handle a chapter from Luke.

That said, I was delighted to commission and edit this piece at CT on choosing a good children’s Bible, and if you’re not quite ready to make that leap, let me recommend it to you. The writer, Rebekah Henderson, reread no less than eight children’s Bibles for her research, and she offers both broad guidelines and a few specific picks and pans.

---

4. Recent work

• The fault in our norms | Christianity Today (unlocked link)

• Apple’s Vision Pro doesn’t augment reality—it sacrifices it | The Dispatch

• An overdue NATO shift | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

---

5. Miscellaneous

---