The first part is obvious: Switzerland is famous for its neutral stance in European conflicts, so the fact it is freezing Russian assets is a big shift. It was the second part, though, that jumped out me in the context of Stratechery and my analysis about the impact of technnology: “Full neutrality has become untenable given popular revulsion at the invasion.” This strikes me as a social media story in two respects: the first is the way in which social media makes it possible to broadcast searing imagery and pleas for support to the entire world; Ukraine has leveraged this capability extensively (while Russia doesn’t even seem to be trying). The second is the way in which the audience for those messages can rapidly coalesce around a particular point of view and exert pressure on their own leaders to act.
The idea of popular pressure around foreign affairs is hardly a new one: as an American one’s mind immediately goes to the World War I sinking of the Lusitania with American citizens on board, Pearl Harbor in World War II, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in Vietnam, and 9/11 as events that shifted public opinion in a significant way. All of those incidents, though, entailed American deaths; what is so striking about the sentiment around Ukraine is that a similar level of outrage and demands for action are being mounted without the previously needed component of there being a specific national connection. This strikes me as a new phenomenon that is very much a downstream impact of social media making everyone a publisher; one suspects it has had an impact that Russia didn’t consider, but which future would-be aggressors surely will.