Quote (Goomshill @ 18 Nov 2024 08:48)
There's a time you hang in the air after the plunge and before the impact.
Biden has two months to get us all killed. When Obama was a lame duck president in 2016, he spent these couple months on a series of spiteful and petulant measures- executive actions, diplomatic snafus, regulations, etc all designed to trip up Trump. Declaring bear ears a monument, regulating refrigerants, ending the us veto on condemning israel, etc. All reversible, and reversed and in some cases unreversed by Biden. Obama's most dangerous move was just to authorize his intelligence spooks to spy on Trump and try to sabotage him, but all they did was leak and gossip like schoolgirls. Undermining Trump in the minor.
Biden's authorization and saber rattling doesn't mean we're guaranteed to strike a greater war. But Russia is guaranteed to respond in kind if we do. That's the worst type of brinksmanship, where you're in a losing position and know your rival will retaliate and you still seek to escalate. If American operatives are firing American missiles onto Moscow, Russia is going to reciprocally escalate and we've speculated for a couple years now how that would shake out. I've guessed that if they aren't just bombing Ukraine and its border areas like they already are, US naval assets would be the obvious choice. Particularly if they ostensibly handed these weapons to proxies like the Houthis. Drones have shown how incredibly vulnerable conventional platforms can be and our main security has come from not picking a direct fight. Until now.
It is of course, conditional. Saying you give an authorization, and actually being stupid enough to follow through, aren't the same thing. But this has its precedent in cold war actions. Warmongers and brinksman who wanted to be perceived as more dangerous than they were willing to be- and they could lead us on misadventures that risk getting us all killed anyway. Mercutio and Tybalt bandied in the street until they didn't.
How realistic is it that the Ukrainians will target Moscow, though? It's heavily fortified and defended with a dense shield of air defense systems and located 800km away from Ukraine. At the same time, you have Russian airfields sitting 100km from the front line - airfields from which the missiles, drones and glide bombs which are killing them (literally and metaphorically) are launched. Instead of musing about imminent WW3, wouldn't it be much more reasonable to assume that Ukraine will use its new-found long-range capabilities to strike the things that pose the most acute military threat to them?