Dear William Spaniel, No Shit Sherlock!
- john raymond
- Aug 12
- 2 min read
William, your latest “lesson in coercive bargaining” offers a perfectly serviceable undergraduate recap of how secondary sanctions are supposed to work. You outline a clean, two-player model: set tariffs high enough to make India’s Russian oil purchases unprofitable, and eventually they switch to non-Russian sources. Too low, and the policy fails.
“Go big or go home.” Clear, crisp, logically sound — and utterly useless in understanding the moment.
Because here’s the problem: you’ve built a neat diagram for a world that doesn’t exist. You take for granted that Trump’s goal is to end India’s Russian oil purchases in order to weaken the Kremlin and shorten the war in Ukraine.
You treat the 25 percent tariff as an earnest but undersized opening bid, a half-measure that just needs to be scaled up to a “critical threshold” you call t-star for success. Your conclusion, stripped to its bones, is that if you want big effects, you need big moves.
No shit, Sherlock.
That is not analysis; it’s stating the obvious. Worse, it misses the far more important truth: by not reaching t-star — the level that would actually compel Indian realignment away from Russia — this policy actively pushes India further into Putin’s arms. That is not an unfortunate side effect; it is the intended outcome, one easily teased out by even a simple reading using the first three pillars of the Raymond Method:
Pillar One (Regime Security): Trump must protect Putin’s capacity to wage war.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare): The move is framed as coercion but functions as camouflage.
Pillar Three (Byzantine Traitor-General): The policy is betrayal dressed as statecraft.
In your payoff charts, the U.S. is a coherent actor seeking an optimal outcome. In reality, it is a Russian-aligned actor seeking the following disguised results:
Keep India buying Russian oil.
Spin the tariff as “tough” for domestic consumption.
Reassure Moscow that nothing fundamental will change.
In that real-world incentive structure, t-star is never reached on purpose. The move is calibrated precisely to be a non-move — low enough to avoid real pressure, high enough to feed headlines. This isn’t a failed attempt at coercion; it’s a successful exercise in deepening India’s integration into Putin’s economic war network.
You see a policy failing for want of courage. Smart people see a policy succeeding at betrayal. And until you replace your hypothetical payoff matrix with the actual one in play, you’ll keep explaining technical mechanics to a public that needs to hear about the motive force driving the machine.
So yes, William, high tariffs are more coercive than low ones. But in this case, that insight is about as useful as pointing out that water is wet. The real question — the one you aren’t asking — is why the man at the helm has no intention of turning up the heat.
That’s the analysis your audience needs. And until you give it, I’ll keep having to write pieces like this.
Because: no shit, Sherlock!
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