Observation 1: Nothing over the past twenty years has shown the Russian military to be capable of handling much more than a very limited military action against a far smaller military force. At best, they pick and choose situations where they know they can come out with a better-than-average military conclusion.
Observation 2: To be any threat across Europe....you’d have to maneuver a tank-force over a 500 km-plus of trip-wire (Poland, Belarus, Bulgaria, etc). If you figure up all the TOW’s available (US, NATO, etc)...at least 2,000 of the Russian tanks won’t be on the scoreboard after the fifth day of this operation.
Observation 3: If you line up the top 1000 Russian Oligarchs....who exactly thinks this is a wise idea and would let Putin do this? Rome, Paris and Berlin is their playground where they spend weekends with their ‘honey’ and spend tens of millions on fake fashion.
Observation 4: If you took out these idiot rich Europeans and replaced them with Russian underlords and doomed their economy....what idiot would pay the obscene prices for natural gas and oil that Russian currently sells European dimwits?
Maybe this is a decent “what-if” discussion one night....with a decent bottle of Czech-made Becherovka...but there are five hundred better what-if discussions in my humble opinion.
Jan Becher ping...
To your Obs #2, I will say that I want to agree, but as we saw with what happened in the Crimea, the world powers do little more than wag their finger at aggressors anymore. Putin marched across that stretch of land with little resistance, and the world powers watched as the Ukraine basically ceded its land back to Russia. I understand that this area historically is a hotbed of activity, and that its been an area of contention for centuries; but if the world powers, and NATO, wanted to do anything, they missed their chance by a long shot.
One additional observation I’d like to add: European youth have degraded to the same point of sloth as American youth. They want their TV, Internet, their phones, their booze and drugs, and they want everything subsidized. They don’t want to work. If Russia barrelled through eastern Europe, aside from a likely very heated front through Poland, most fighting-age Europeans would be in shock and curled up in a ball under their beds. Nationalism is all but dead across most of Europe, and a sense of self-worth and pride in one’s country has been replaced with the idea that diplomatic pollyannas are going to make everything better.
Meanwhile, most of Europe is under attack by Muslim invaders, and you hear nary a peep from the media about it. You can read social media such as Twitter and Reddit lament the rapes happening across Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium at the hands of Muslim “refugees,” but many just make excuses for the behavior and dismiss it.
We have a serious problem across the world, and it has to do with the emasculation of society. The left is right to worry about fascists coming to power. One saber rattler in Moscow is one thing, but putting several of them in a room together, measuring their military penises, could lead to war. In light of all that’s happening and the abject failure that has been multiculturalism, I believe that war may be the only thing left to right society and put it back to the point where we can be relatively peaceful.
Amen
Of course, one must never mention the fact that the reason there hasn't been another wide-scale European war is because of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the author must exclude that critical factor to allow his fantasy scenario of the Russian hordes (a modest sized country of 150m with the economy of Italy) pouring through the Fulda gap.
What is this, NATO justification circa 1950? I can only imagine the author's counterpart in Russia constructing the same kinds of fantasy scenarios for an equally bemused audience.
Lest anyone be confused, there will never be another confrontation between any global powers without nukes. Once you understand that important fact, then you can put to rest nonsense scenarios of conventional forces facing off like a reprise of 1945.