On March 7, Emma Ashford was quoted in The Week on the dangers of banning imports of Russian oil.
“This is what happens in wartime: You make a deal with the devil in order to avert some greater evil. The United States allied with the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany, then opened the doors to China — on the cusp of its most violently repressive era — to contain the Soviets. Conflict always means such brutal choices. There’s no way to do this cleanly.
“‘Let me put it this way,’ Emma Ashford, a senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote Monday on Twitter. ‘You can either have your democracy vs. autocracy frame, or you can have oil sanctions on Russia. Impossible without working with some authoritarian states, just as we did in the Cold War.'”
