What If We Are Bluffing But Putin Isn’t?

Sarcastic version of Kipling quote: If you can remain calm when others are panicking, maybe you just don’t understand the situation.

Report: For the first time, Biden-Harris allow Ukraine to shoot American-made missiles not just at Russian troops in Ukraine, but also at targets in Russia itself. Putin has threatened to use nukes if this happens.

What, exactly, is the end point here? That World War III results, preventing Trump from pursuing his Washington house cleaning? That we call Putin’s bluff? But who says he is bluffing? That the Pentagon crowd proves they are really tough, when they couldn’t exit Afghanistan without casualties? That we prove we have a military capable of facing nuclear weapons, when we couldn’t subdue tribesmen after 20 years of trying?

The current Washington big shots are so full of baloney and so used to living in a self-serving bubble that they have difficulty understanding a serious man who means every word of his threats. All they know are meaningless “red lines” that the world has learned to ignore. They can’t comprehend a man whose red lines are actual red lines.