What if the Europe of 1914 had figured out a way to avoid the Great War?\u00a0 What would European civilization look like today?\u00a0 Would the colonial empires have maintained their existence and by now have coalesced into a world completely dominated and controlled by Europe and its descendants?\u00a0 Would the scientific and commercial progress of this civilization have produced the first truly global state?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an interesting question.\u00a0 But I think very mistaken.\u00a0 World War I (and World War II) happened because they had to happen.\u00a0 Humans (and Europeans specifically) have been struggling for the last five hundred years with the results of the Enlightenment.\u00a0 Enormous technological and sociological change have engulfed the world and we are nowhere near figuring out how to harness these changes safely.<\/p>\n
And just in time to finish off what\u2019s left of western civilization, we have Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland playing nuclear chicken with Vladimir Putin.\u00a0 For eighty years the existential nature of the nuclear threat has kept both the Americans and the Russians on their best behavior when it came to serious escalation.\u00a0 But all that has changed over the last decade or so.\u00a0 The CIA and the State Department have been embarked on a progressively more provocative series of \u201ccolor\u201d revolutions.\u00a0 And now they\u2019ve culminated in the Ukraine War as the capstone.\u00a0 At least a hundred and fifty billion dollars of American aid and billions more euros have been transferred to Ukraine and something like a half-million Ukrainian lives have been sacrificed in this endeavor and now the neo-cons have pulled out all the stops and will allow the Ukrainians to use F-16s and long-range missiles into Russia proper.\u00a0 And Putin has responded with statements to the effect that tactical nuclear weapons will now be on the table if western offensive weapons are used in Russia.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t appear that we have many more tosses left before something pretty bad is going to happen.\u00a0 If I were to guess what will precipitate the escalation, I\u2019d say that it will be a major missile strike on Moscow.\u00a0 The Russians will respond with a major attack on the western cities in Ukraine and I assume they\u2019ll attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian military along with killing Zelinsky.\u00a0 The question is whether they think they have to use a tactical nuke to achieve this.<\/p>\n
But either way, the escalation will be extreme and the number of civilian deaths will be measured in the thousands.\u00a0 Now, it\u2019s somewhere in this part of the escalation that I think we could see this whole thing spin completely out of control.\u00a0 Direct attacks on Moscow will eventually radicalize Putin\u2019s reactions to this strategy.\u00a0 And especially if the civilian casualties are high, we run the risk that the attacks on Western Ukraine could spill over into Eastern Europe and trigger a retaliatory strike from Poland on Russian territory.\u00a0 And from there we have a direct path to a nuclear exchange.<\/p>\n
Biden and Blinken seem to be the caliber of idiot that we could expect to bring on a nuclear war for absolutely no good reason at all.\u00a0 When people look back on this, they\u2019ll probably try to identify the ideological reasons why war broke out at this time.\u00a0 What they should look for are Joe Biden\u2019s college transcripts and Antony Blinken\u2019s psych evaluation.\u00a0 For once the villain won\u2019t be artificial intelligence.\u00a0 It will be lack of intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What if the Europe of 1914 had figured out a way to avoid the Great War?\u00a0 What would European civilization look like today?\u00a0 Would the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3806,581],"class_list":["post-28874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-nuclear-armageddon","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\n