> Pretty straightforward really. You combine Brazil's history of monetary stability, with Russia's respect for property rights, India's domestic tranquility, China's financial transparency, and South Africa's investment opportunities - and hey presto, you've got a new global money
Perhaps the people who said those things thought Putin was bluffing, or that the response was going to be weak… kind of like it was in 2014.
> And yet by all accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been shrugging off threats of new sanctions if he attacks Ukraine. Maybe Putin is bluffing. But if so, he has taken his bluff very far, keeping more than 100,000 Russian troops in battle-ready positions through mid-winter.
> Maybe, however, Putin has assessed that Western democracies’ threat to issue sanctions “like none he’s ever seen” is a bluff? He has some good basis to doubt European resolve.
* https://archive.ph/eizpt / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/europe-rus...
Of course if one understood Putin and his world view, it is hardly surprising:
> Putin’s attachment to the old U.S.S.R. matters in another way as well. Although he is sometimes incorrectly described as a Russian nationalist, he is in fact an imperial nostalgist. The Soviet Union was a Russian-speaking empire, and he seems, at times, to dream of re-creating a smaller Russian-speaking empire within the old Soviet Union’s borders.
* https://archive.ph/qqcKH / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-ukra...
But after Russia attacked there were several Neocon interviews where they acted surprised and did frame it as "We did not think it would happen" in a very casual way.
What they think or intend in private is another issue.