cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59867996
German media outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR, and NDR also cite the report, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears intent on testing NATO’s Article 5 guarantees. The alliance’s mutual defence clause obliges member states to come to one another’s aid if attacked. The assessment suggests Putin may seek to challenge how seriously that commitment would be honoured.
Considering that Putin got his ass absolutely beat by a small country using second hand and surplus military hardware he’d have to be an absolute moron to pick a fight with NATO. Literally the only card he has to play is nukes and that’s kind of an all or nothing sort of move. If nukes are off the table any concerted push by NATO is going to be mopping up in moscow within a few months.
That’s also assuming the US doesn’t get serious about it, but considering Putin’s puppet in the Whitehouse there’s a pretty good chance the US would quit NATO and so wouldn’t factor in. Even without the US though Russia has demonstrated the rest of NATO is far more than sufficient to handle Russia.
Poland + Ukraine is enough to practically destroy Russia.
Honestly I really hope putin just croaks over and dies at this point, the old fuck has practically killed endless amounts of his own people just for land. He can’t use the excuse of “Hur dur NATO is encroaching on my borders via Ukraine” because Finland is in NATO now thanks to his stupidity.
He’s gambling with WW3 with a high chance of losing it.
And he can’t keep America under his grasp forever, by the end of the decade trump could lose the election or get couped by anyone.
Then again he’s going on with cable cutting and other idiocies. I’m not sure some kind of stupid “test run” could be ordered by him, like attacking one of the Baltic countries or Finland.
If the war stops BTW then his days are probably numbered so maybe he’ll need some stupid war just to stay in power/alive.
Redo the calculations with the USA fighting on Russia’s side, and things start to look different.
Trump seems to be consolidating to focus on Iran (and it’s allies) and China. He’s not going to fight Europe. If anything, he’ll try to get them to help by threatening NATO membership or something.
Trump doesn’t have enough pull yet to make that happen, and it’s unlikely he will anytime soon. He could manage to get the US to sit out the fight, but actively committing US forces to help Russia isn’t going to happen.
What about Putin and Trump working together the rhetoric of nuclear deterrence?
IIRC, Russia+USA = 90% of all nuclear weapons in the world.
A big whammy hammer if they (hypothetically) fight together.
Possible but it would be an incredibly risky move on Trump’s part as nukes are a very touchy subject and frankly Trump doesn’t have either the brains nor the charisma to pull it off. He’s as likely to make things worse and unite the rest of the world against Russia (including China who won’t want to see nukes deployed in essentially their backyard) as he is to help in a meaningful fashion. Putin knows how limited a tool Trump is and wouldn’t want to risk that. Trump is essentially useless for international purposes and limited to only domestic affairs.
Despite his claims he is not and never has been a negotiator, he only ever “wins” when his opponents are at an overwhelming disadvantage. It’s why he prefers working with companies on the verge of bankruptcy because they’re desperate and easier to push around.
As for deploying nuclear weapons, not only would that unit the entire world against the US, it would ignite the biggest shit storm within the US in its entire history, assuming the military even went along with it in the first place. If anything was going to convince the US military to stage a coup against Trump, giving the order to nuke a recent ally in a war the US is only tangentially connected to would.