Sanctioning Neutrality
I didn’t follow Jacques Baud closely. I don’t live inside the daily churn of war commentary, expert panels, or Telegram prophets. I know there is a war. I worked with Ukrainian refugees. I know there is propaganda on all sides. I also know that in every conflict, reality is usually more tragic and more ambiguous than the slogans suggest.
So when I heard that the European Union had sanctioned a Swiss citizen, a former intelligence officer, I paused.
Sanctions are not symbolic gestures. They are not an argument. They are a financial and civic execution. No bank accounts. No normal economic life. In effect, a quiet form of exile. You don’t do that lightly. Or at least, you shouldn’t.
So my curiosity wasn’t ideological. It was almost clinical. What on earth did this man say to deserve that? Had he gone off the rails? Was he openly cheering for Russia? Spreading fantasies? Undermining something concrete? I honestly expected something extreme.
What I heard instead was Jacques Baud speaking calmly, almost dryly, in an hour-and-a-half interview with a Swiss publisher. I didn’t watch all of it. About half. Long enough to notice if something was seriously wrong. Long enough to catch tone, structure, intent.
Nothing was.
Baud didn’t glorify Russia. He didn’t demonize Ukraine. He didn’t indulge in moral theater. He analyzed military capacities, escalation dynamics, intelligence failures, incentives. He spoke like someone trained to think in terms of systems rather than slogans. You don’t have to agree with his conclusions to recognize the genre. This was analysis, not agitation.
That doesn’t mean I’ve heard everything he’s ever said. I would not vouch for him, because I don’t know him. But if what I heard is representative of his public voice, then the sanction tells us far more about the sanctioner than the sanctioned.
Because even being wrong must remain allowed in a free society. Free speech is not a reward for accuracy. It is not conditional on foresight, moral alignment, or later vindication. Its function is precisely to allow incomplete, provisional, even mistaken judgments to exist in public, where they can be tested, contradicted, refined, or discarded. The moment something is treated as an error itself becomes punishable, speech turns into performance. People stop thinking aloud and start reciting what is safest. Analysis becomes retroactive, always aligned with whatever position has already been declared correct. That is not how democratic societies learn. It is how they freeze.
A political order confident in its values does not need to preempt dissent by force. It allows arguments to fail on their merits. It tolerates uncomfortable voices because it trusts that truth does not require protection from discussion. Sanctioning someone not for causing concrete harm, but for offering an interpretation that might turn out to be wrong, is an admission of insecurity. It signals that the narrative cannot risk being challenged, not even calmly, not even analytically.
Because if a sober view on a conflict is now enough to justify economic annihilation, then we are no longer talking about security. We are talking about alignment discipline.
Switzerland’s neutrality is not a branding exercise. It is not moral laziness. It is not fence-sitting. It is a historically trained suspicion of absolutism. A refusal to collapse complex realities into good-versus-evil theater. We are raised, politically speaking, to look at conflicts phenomenologically: what is happening, who benefits, what fails, what escalates, what breaks. That doesn’t make us pro-anyone. It makes us structurally cautious.
So the question almost asks itself:
If a Swiss analyst is sanctioned for thinking like a Swiss analyst, why stop there?
Why not sanction all of Switzerland?
Why not sanction journalists, academics, diplomats, or just ordinary citizens who express similar reservations about taking sides in this war? Why not sanction neutrality itself? Austria is neutral too. So are Ireland and Malta. Why not sanction them as well? Why not simply say out loud what seems to be the new rule: there is only one acceptable moral posture, and analysis must follow it, not precede it?
This is where it becomes dangerous.
Sanctions used this way are no longer tools against concrete harm. They become instruments of narrative enforcement. They don’t punish wrongdoing. They punish insufficient enthusiasm. Refusal to chant becomes suspicion. Hesitation becomes disloyalty. Thinking becomes interference.
The sanction against Jacques Baud, viewed through this lens, ceases to be a minor diplomatic incident. It becomes a litmus test for the future of European political discourse.
And the irony is almost perfect. The EU already struggles with trust in Switzerland. Every heavy-handed move confirms the oldest Swiss instinct: this is exactly why we stay out. Sanctioning a Swiss citizen for holding a view widely shared inside Switzerland doesn’t isolate dissent. It validates it. It turns skepticism into confirmation.
Once sanctions are used as moral correctives rather than last-resort security measures, there is no natural stopping point. If the criterion is deviation from the approved framing, the list will grow endlessly. Today a former intelligence officer. Tomorrow a journalist. Then a professor. Then a publisher. Then a platform.
And all of this in the name of defending democratic values.
You don’t strengthen a political order by punishing neutrality. You don’t build legitimacy by policing thought. And you certainly don’t persuade Switzerland by demonstrating precisely the kind of overreach it has spent centuries avoiding.
If this is the new logic, then at least be honest about it: Sanction us all.