A Thousand Balls of Flame (Russia's threat on possible US vs Russia conflict)

A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!

...........Russia will not resort to military measures against the US unless sorely provoked. Time and patience are on Russia’s side. With each passing year, the US grows weaker and loses friends and allies, while Russia grows stronger and gains friends and allies. The US, with its political dysfunction, runaway debt, decaying infrastructure and spreading civil unrest, is a dead nation walking. It will take time for each of the United States to neatly demolish themselves into their own footprints, like those three New York skyscrapers did on 9/11 (WTC #1, #2 and #7) but Russia is very patient. Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear. But if you still think that there is going to be a war with Russia, don’t think “Armageddon”; think “a thousand balls of flame,” and then—crickets!

I don’t foresee a time when Russia and the NATO countries will be at war. The current situation is not as co-operative as it should be, but perhaps with more intelligent leadership on our side, that can be overcome.

I am not one to look at Russia as being the one perfect civilized country, but in the grand scheme of things they are not much worse than we are on balance and we face many similar problems. We have many shared interests.

If there is to be a big war in the future, it will be either Eurasia vs China or western civ broadly defined vs Islam in some future more unified state.

Those wars are already being fought at a lower level than full engagement. Our disputes with Russia are relatively trivial (aside from the computer hacking issue which I am not in a good position to assess but that should be a top priority for Trump and Putin to resolve). What’s going on in Ukraine is relatively small potatoes, it is simply Russia trying to rationalize its post-Soviet boundaries. As long as we don’t encourage them to think they can do this past a certain limited point (meaning Crimea) then I don’t see much of a future problem.

As to all of Orlov’s theorizing, I doubt that any of it would actually happen. At some point a future Russian leader or future U.S. president would redefine the hostilities as all-out war and a nuclear exchange would be inevitable. This is why I don’t think it will ever come close to this. Who gains anything from that? China and the Islamic world, mainly. And they would have more than a decade of nasty side-effects on a large scale — it would be no picnic for anyone.

“The next large-scale war, if there ever is one, will be fought on enemy territory. Thus, if the US attacks Russia, Russia will counterattack the US mainland. Keeping in mind that the US hasn’t fought a war on its own territory in over 150 years, this would come as quite a shock.”

Yes, it would of course be a “shock” to have ANY foreign army attack CONUS, but that army would be in for even more of a shock when it discovered how well armed our citizenry is and how motivated we are to defend our nation!

There is exactly one nation in the world that nukes other countries, and that would be the United States. It gratuitously nuked Japan, which was ready to surrender anyway, just because it could. It prepared to nuke Russia at the start of the Cold War, but was prevented from doing so by a lack of a sufficiently large number of nuclear bombs at the time. And it attempted to render Russia defenseless against nuclear attack, abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, but has been prevented from doing so by Russia’s new weapons.

It shouldn't be necessary to take the trouble to remark that the allegations in this paragraph are not only false but they are the opposite of the truth. For example, Japan was not ready to surrender (it took two atomic bombs), the decision was clearly not gratuitous in view of the certainty of the immense casualty estimates on both sides. The United States refrained from using the bomb or even the threat of the bomb against Soviet Russia during the period 1945-1949 when we had a monopoly of the weapon. It can hardly be contented, therefore, that the United States "nukes other countries."

The entire article is filled with deceits such as these compounded by bizarre extrapolations and generalizations. In fact the article is so distorted that it should simply be rejected out of hand by rational people. But what prompts me to even note the article is the fact that so many people here in Germany accept virtually every crazy proposition of this article and actively circulate similar screeds in German throughout their subculture.

I have been warning for a long time now that there is a cosmic shift in alliances and balances of power that pose enormous risks for United States security. Orlov is uniquely coming close to the truth when he knows that Russia and China are in a virtual military alliance and he is also describing Russia's alliances in the Middle East which run from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. The great existential risk for America is not just the breakup of NATO but the alliance of Germany in a kind of a replay of the Ribbentrop/Molotov pact which triggered World War II.

So far the subculture here in Germany is so small and is such a discreditable fringe element that it is unable to exert significant political weight but the potential is always there.

The idea that Russia is growing stronger is ridiculous. It is a ticking economic and demographic time bomb, with a growing share of Muslims in a long run declining population. And it’s even worse than that. Many of the best and brightest in the 25-34 year old generation have already left for Europe and the U.S. and they aren’t going back to a Putin-led dictatorship.

I agree that the U.S. and Russia have shared geopolitical interests, but the opportunity to exploit them has been squandered by the Obama-Clinton administration.

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