— “Q: Curt: How do you see the recent negotiations between Russia and USA playing out?” — john smith
Well NATO’s decided that it can’t determine whether or not this is a bluff to obtain negotiations or it’s a coordinated action in order to seize an opportunity that might place the USA and NATO in a multi-front war that we are unprepared for, and will lose.
So it looks like intel has determined (no secret here) that they have intercepted something going on in Ukraine, where there have been, for years, and still are, many Russian agents doing things like blowing up facilities as they have in the past. I have no exposure to current intel capacity inside of Russia, but generally, the inner circle is notoriously opaque. So I suspect we don’t really know what’s going on in their heads.
It appears to me that, Russia is actually creating a pretext for invasion. And they are (as I said they would) baiting the USA and NATO into hazard, of defending against Russian invasion, so that Russian can construct an event which they claim is a threat to their sovereignty. And that will give them first strike justification at least with conventional weapons.
I have said for some time now that I think whether implied or direct, Russia, Iran, And China smell the weakness of biden, and the likelihood of a Republican win this year, as creating a window of opportunity to displace the USA permanently as a world power, causing the USA to lose on multiple fronts, thereby satisfying the public demand to exit the USA from international affairs.
As I’ve said before this is what I would do because American power in a multifront conflict given that we really only have 200k soldiers available to field, and that our supplies of weapons are exhausted, and our hardware is at end of life, that it’s a great time to push the USA over the edge. Myself I might welcome the chaos as an opportunity for radical reforms, since radical reforms generally happen only after a major war. So, as I’ve said elsewhere and often, cycles are playing out as expected on expected lines that even Huntington suggested back in the 90’s.