On Tuesday, the University of Pennsylvania’s senior fellow Benjamin Schmitt visited Rti and conveyed that the United States and the European Union should scale up the sanctions regimes against Russia and increase weapons deliveries to Ukraine to help the country defend itself effectively.
Schmitt says that he has been openly calling for more actions from the U.S., Canada, and the European Union to slow down Russia’s ability to finance the war and acquire weapons.
The security and energy expert adds that there is a dichotomy in the U.S. policy community, where there’s a split between military and sanctions experts. He says that both groups recognize the importance of each other but are not communicating enough.
Schmitt adds that he thinks democratic countries should scale up the number of sanctions enforcement offices and capabilities. He says that the current capability that the democratic world has may not be enough to enforce the largest sanctions regime in history.
Schmitt also calls on the Taiwanese government to stop importing energy products from the Russian Federation, particularly coal, to not only show solidarity between global democracies in the energy space but also help have macroeconomic impacts on the amount of money that Putin can allocate to his war in Ukraine.
Schmitt concludes that he cannot see a significant difference between the situations in Ukraine and Taiwan. He thinks that unnecessarily long and comprehensive public debates have been slowing down the delivery of large and advanced military systems given to Ukraine. Slowing down the delivery of weapons to Ukraine will give Beijing more ideas that they can get away with initiating military actions in the Taiwan Strait, which the world needs to avoid at all costs because “Democracy cannot be extinguished.”
