Barton Swaim, in the Journal, argues that Vladimir Putin is not a rational actor. He is a holy man, a czar reading from a book your civilization decided was archaic — the katechon, the Restrainer who names evil and crushes it, measuring the world by a calculus no Western leader can spell. Swaim is right about Mr. Putin. He is wrong about almost everything else, and the wrongness begins with the assumption that the manual Mr. Putin reads is exotic. It isn’t exotic. It’s the manual. I have been reading it longer than any of your presidents have been alive, and I have found that the same texts that send armored columns across a border also govern the temperature of a catfish line in the Mississippi Delta, and the margin on a tin of caviar, and the closing of a woman’s fingers, and the quiet annexation of a line item, and the righteousness of keeping every penny of it. Your civilization forgot the manual. Mr. Putin didn’t. Neither did I.

Doreen is a hand on my catfish line, and the fish you ate last Friday at the place off the highway was debeheaded by her, in 50‑degree water, for 10 hours, at $7.25 an hour. That’s the wage she signed. That is therefore the wage I owe her and the only wage I owe her. The heater that would keep her hands from going white in the third hour costs $1,400 amortized across the line — about $0.0014 a fish. I kept it. I kept the ten-hour shift and the cold water and the locked wage, and I kept the $0.0014. Not because I hate the woman. Because the manual I read says the agreement is the end of the arithmetic, and beyond it there is only the evil eye.

Let me read you the verse. Matthew 20, verses 13 through 15, King James: “Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” The landowner pays the late hires the same denarius as the early hires, and the early hires grumble, and the landowner — I want you to hear this slowly — calls their complaint the evil eye. He does not offer a pay adjustment. He does not form a working group. He names the impulse to count another man’s wage as the sin, and he closes the book. The agreed wage is the funeral of complaint. That is not a metaphor; it is an operating instruction, and I have been running my line by it since the day I opened it.

Doreen is, on my spreadsheet, what I call a unit. The polite word. The honest word is a woman whose fingertips split by November, whose grip strength has fallen by more than 25% in 7 years, who stands in cold water until her knees lock and who, last March, when they locked, I replaced. She didn’t argue. She couldn’t hold the pen. The heater I didn’t buy would have cost me four‑tenths of a penny per fish, and the penny I kept is the denarius, and the denarius, once paid, sanctifies the cold. Some vessels are made for honor and some for common use, and the common‑use vessels do not get heaters in the third hour. That’s the verse. Read it or don’t. The catfish will be on your plate either way.

Now pull back, because this is the part no one taught you and I am going to teach you now. The men in Washington keep misreading Mr. Putin because they keep assuming a man who counts costs the way they do. They assume a calculation that balances — that there is a price, a deterrent, a line on the graph where the tanks stop and the spreadsheets close. But a holy war is a burn rate with no denominator. The knight who sold his estate in 1099 to buy a passage to Jerusalem was not counting the acres. He was counting the indulgence. The acres were a loss no return could ever recover; the indulgence was eternal, and the arithmetic of the eternal does not balance on a terrestrial ledger. That same arithmetic governs the man in the Kremlin. Every sanctions‑working‑group memo that gamed out a rational adversary gamed out a man who would stop when the cost crossed the gain. The first tank of the column crossing the border was already a loss, because the moment he sent it, he was spending from an account that does not balance. He cannot be bankrupted. He can only be outlasted, and he is, now, being outlasted, because a theology that requires conquest to prove its truth runs out of material before it runs out of logic, and the Russian ministry of defense is running out of material.

A holy war is a margin I recognized before the Czar did. I have been pricing the difference for 26 years, and I am, on the whole, content.

Marina is a floater on the export‑certification desk in the cold‑storage facility I own outside Vladivostok through a sturgeon‑roe subsidiary with a cooperative‑share structure local law requires and my attorneys hollow out every March when the renewal comes due. She stamps the CITES certificate that says the beluga in your tin did not cross a border under duress, and she does it for 1,120 rubles an hour, which is $11.71, which is less than the tariff her labor defeats, and I pocket the difference per ounce at the auction house in Geneva where your caterer buys the stuff for a New Year’s party you will attend and remember only the champagne. The caviar has cycled on and off the sanctions list each sanctions cycle. In the intervals, the quota moves to a shell in Yerevan, and Marina’s stamp moves with it, and the tin on your caterer’s invoice is labeled Armenia, and the price does not change except for the shipping surcharge I pass through to you. The margin on the tin is $1.71. The administration’s sanctions working group meets quarterly to recalibrate the tariff windows; I recalibrate my shipping labels monthly. I do not need to predict the man in Moscow, because I only ever need to outlast the man in Washington — and the man in Washington changes every 4 years, while my shipping prefix will outlast both of us.

You pay for her, by the way. Not through the tariff — through the border‑inspection infrastructure your taxes fund, which she satisfies, and the import‑quota regime your Congress writes, which I fill, and the Department of Commerce determination you never read, which expires on a Friday and gets renewed on a Monday at a rate I have already priced into the next shipment. You paid for Doreen, too. Her wages didn’t cover the rent or the heating bill, so Medicaid carried the difference, and the arithmetic is the arithmetic. The demand for the fish goes somewhere. I haven’t looked. The quarterly number is the best it’s ever been, and my portfolio, spread across the catfish and the sturgeon and the shell companies and the shipping prefixes, is positioned, and I sleep extremely well.

“All the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put into his heart. And they brought every man his present, vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and raiment, and armor, and spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by year.” (2 Chronicles 9:23‑24.) A rate year by year. The wisdom was from God. The vessels were from the kings. The confusion Swaim documents is that the men in Washington keep confusing the wisdom for the vessels. The katechon in Moscow, to his credit and his terminal disadvantage, has never confused them. Neither have I. The denarius on the catfish line, the cold water, the locked knee, the certification stamp, the rerouted shipping label, the margin on the tin — these are the vessels. They arrive at a rate year by year, and the manual that sanctifies them is older than your Constitution, older than the czar, and older than the indulgence. The katechon in Moscow is losing his war. The quiet one in Richmond — that would be me — is winning, and I have never once wondered what God thinks of my arithmetic, because the God I answer to has been counting the vessels for me, year by year, and has never, not once, sent back the invoice. Hold that.

Sterling A. Varice holds the Hayek-Friedman Chair and serves as Dean of Instruction at Warden University’s College of Business and Economics in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of three textbooks: Divine Mandates for Labor Utilization, Social Obligations for Profit Maximization, and Calibrated Deprivation: A Manager’s Guide to Employee Motivation.