Because it only makes sense. Ditto assassinations of specific civilians: technocrats, CEOs, our nomenklatura and their families. Ditto physical attacks on the grid and cyberwarfare. Opening a front with Mexicans north and south of the border would be another option, given what American drug money has done to them, Fast and Furious etc. that could be whipped up without too much effort.
Obamacon bloodeaters keep telling themselves that today’s NATO will cut the “Soviets” down like wheat in a contained European Theater. I rather doubt it would be so easy.
We destroyed Serbia with ease, Libya with difficulty, and failed in Syria. Russia is going to leave some marks.
The upside I suppose, at least for the domestic tyrants large and small who oppress us, it will give them the cover to impose martial law which they have been working towards for about a generation now.
I THINK Putin isn’t a Soviet, as much as an old style Russian warlord with ambitions to make himself czar. It would not surprise me that he has a hankering for a throne and if he hypes himself enough, the Russian people will determinedly clamor for him to become their leader and surrender any CHANCE of a free constitutional republic.