Funny thing about deterrence conversations in the west is that it’s so often characterized as a one way street. That the west can be deterred limitlessly and that others like Russia are impervious to deterrence. As if Putin were some fearless automaton with complete confidence. Because if anything spells confidence it’s having 4 out of 5 of your latest in service ICBM tests fail, including the most recent. Just how confident is Putin, having personally fostered such an endemically corrupt society, in his recently manufactured pits? Russia’s pursuit of a nuclear powered drone that would attempt to be a weapon of mass destruction by virtue of creating an irradiated tsunami reveals an intense fear of the credibility of their current deterrence.

The french are actually trying to drag the rest of EU into war because they lost their colonies to russia.