RE: U.S. War Plane Shoots Down A Syrian Jet: Russia Warns Of Consequences
June 20, 2017 at 5:54 am
(This post was last modified: June 20, 2017 at 7:33 am by Anomalocaris.)
(June 20, 2017 at 1:07 am)Moros Synackaon Wrote: Why are the Russians "warning" us? They're a lot more diplomatic with the US than everyone else. What's Putin's angle?
Russia is likely to not come out best in any real airpower contest. In fact if it were anyone else in the White House, the downing of a US jet in Syria by a Russian missile or aircraft would likely lead to deployment of US resources to the region that would collapse the entire Russian position in Syria. So Putin is giving trump the opportunity to forfeit the air battle first.
People still credit Russia with the weight and punch of something like a superpower. In fact Russia is extremely weak in military, economic and geopolitical power. Russia's nuclear arsenal is of no significance since it can't be used and the bluff of its use would be readily called. Russia has a thin crust of second rate albeit effective conventional forces, but lack the reserves, logistics and support to use it on a sustained basis against any equally second rate force abroad. Russia has no economic leverage other than cutting the natural gas supply to turkey. Russia has no geopolitical future to sustain any credible long term geopolitical blackmail.
Putin is in effect trying to seize a win by bluffing at a time of total disfunction in the trump White House, that the Russian military does not the capability of actually attaining in any real showdown, nor does Russia as a country has any leverage to achieve through classical geopolitical blackmail.
(June 19, 2017 at 9:39 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: an absurdist solution is the only viable possibility for peace in the middle east
The unpalatability of the options entitles the player to throw the game, as if the game is a discretionary yuppie luxury, not a weighty matter of life and death for millions. That is the same mentality that brought us trump.
