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Yep. Though I think expecting a NATO second strike is a deluded expectation of charismatic Cold War epic conflict, which shows how far gone Putin is. I suspect the US response plan is non-nuclear special forces decapitation etc.
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I think Kremlin may view nuclear strike on Ukraine (with an American retaliatory strike) as a rational move. It may not make much sense in the context of foreign policy, but it does in the context of domestic policy. Meanwhile foreign policy is just domestic policy by other means
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I suspect the most effective response to tactical nuke use would be big air campaign and inserting a big multinational special forces op with highly visible Ukrainian members doing the “liberation” photo-ops in Moscow.
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For all its big junky conventional military, the mix of terrible morale, fleeing potential draftees, crumbling backend, and third-world-autocrat power structure makes Russia an adversary more like Afghanistan or Iran than what it looks like on paper. Not a symmetric nuclear power
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There’s a weird sense of mismatch I’m getting comparing this to say Cuban missile crisis or Dr. Strangelove era nuclear scenarios. Russia lacks sufficient gravitas as an adversary, which makes it more dangerous. Far less to lose than 1960s Soviet Union. So acts crazier.
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Wonder who is on the NATO Karzai list? Navalny? And how deep is the bench of loyalist palace troops that wouldn’t abandon posts. Russian expectations of Ukrainians abandoning defense in February now seem like pure projection.
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This whole thing is the least necessary crisis in decades. Literally nobody in the world wants it except Putin plus perhaps a few hundred ultranationalist retvrnistas. I suspect the third or so of Russians supporting him have just memed themselves into a loss-of-face bind
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When you run out of main-character energy but don't notice and misread the world ignoring you as a deep conspiracy to attack and end you 🤔
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Putin's biggest blindspot may have been not realizing how little attention the world was paying to Russia for the last 15-20y. Even N. Korea made for a better movie villain.
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It's a darker version of what started to happen to the UK between the wars and just after, especially around when the dollar displaced the pound as the world reserve currency. Suddenly reality check and movement from empire to sideshow.
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Another narrative is that Russia had to attack first not to let NATO attack (I'm not joking, these are the exact words I hear from my relatives)
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I suspect they'd be shocked by how little Russia has been on anyone's mind in recent decades. Outside of legacy arms supply and stop-gap space launches, I barely heard of Russia at all for a long time.
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