Quick take: Reconsidering Cheney's 1% doctrine

  Dick, not Liz.  The bad guy.  Remember him?  Remember the 1% doctrine?  This was the idea that if there was even a 1% chance of some unimaginably bad outcome, treat it as a certainty.  In utilitarian terms, this is not as wacko as it sounds.  In microeconomics, we calculate expected utility by multiplying your utility for an outcome by the probability that it occurs.  If your utility for X is unboundedly negative, then even if pr(X) is quite small, then Xpr(X) may be unboundedly low.  That means you'll do some extreme things to take X off the table.  In the case of the 1% doctrine, it meant stuff like worrying about terrorists getting... nukes.

You know what we'd do if Putin tried this without nukes?  We'd flatten Russia.  We would bomb the shit out of it, and send it back to its pre-Bolshevik days of agrarian barbarism, as opposed to its current state of nuclear-armed barbarism.  I'd like to be able to do that right now.  But, we can't.  Because Putin has nukes.  This is what nukes do.  They don't nuke people.  They let a psychopath like Putin do... this.  And yeah, we can impose crushing economic sanctions, but it would be better if we could just drop a fuckload of daisy-cutters and MOABs on Moscow and clear up their traffic problems, showing everyone else what happens, Larry, when you bomb a fucking maternity ward.  Yeah, I'm a bit angry right now.

But we can't.  Because Putin would nuke us.  Nukes = immunity, and priority #1 is avoiding WWIII.  Anger cannot override rationality.  So Putin has immunity.  Nobody should have that kind of immunity.  But it's too late.  He has it, so he can invade any non-NATO country he wants.

Now considering that, what would you do, in other cases, to prevent future Putins?  Not naming any countries, just thinking through the hypotheticals.