Moscow Burns / Coup In Progress by THG

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Moscow Burns is a Medifor. A figure of speech.

So was Peaceful Protests a Medifor too?

This thread was BS, Moscow Burns WTF

thats THUGR, posting from an endless wellspring of bullshit and desire

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Friday, June 30, 2023 9:26 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Putin Narrowly Escapes Assassination Attempt as Russian Secret Service Thwarts Moscow Bridge Explosion

The Kremlin leader grew increasingly paranoid about being assassinated. The 70-year-old's greatest fear manifested into reality on Friday.

According to the Kremlin's security agency, Federal Protection Service (FSO) members thwarted a plan to kill Putin. The failed assassination attempt allegedly centered on an unnamed bridge that Putin and his motorcade were expected to travel over.

https://radaronline.com/p/vladimir-putin-assassination-thwarted-moscow
-bridge-explosion/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, July 1, 2023 9:39 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK (June 25th):
LOL

The coup isn't even really happening, you dumb shit.

Putin's putting on a show for dummies like you.

You've been psy-oped, bitch.

The Wagner 'Coup' Was Staged by Putin—and the West Fell for It

https://www.newsweek.com/wagner-coup-was-staged-putin-west-fell-it-opi
nion-1810035

Well... not everybody in the West.

I'm right again. Imagine that, huh?

Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK (June 28th):
Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
The one thing I can't square is his calling Prigozhin a traitor and the next day just send him into exile. He's had to explain that recently so I think he's taken some criticism for not dealing with Prigozhin harshly. I'm still trying to figure out the about-face.

Because the whole thing was a psyop.

If Prigozhin were really attempting an actual coup, he'd be dead right now.

Quote:
FROM THE ARTICLE: That Prigozhin is still alive, having supposedly betrayed the Russian motherland, is inconceivable under the rule of Putin, who famously said in 2019 that "treason is the biggest crime on earth" and who hunts down traitors anywhere on the globe, including in the United States.

I wish I could describe to Ted what it's like being right all the time.

And you should all keep in mind the source here. The article was written by this chick:

Rebekah Koffler is the president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting, a former DIA intelligence officer, and the author of "Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America." She also wrote the foreword for "Zelensky: The Unlikely Ukrainian Hero Who Defied Putin and United the World."

She's one of yours.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Saturday, July 1, 2023 10:23 AM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

meanwhile, western press is saying

Quote:
Currently, there is widespread reporting that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, the deputy commander of the Russian forces fighting in Ukraine, has been detained in relation to the Wagner uprising. The New York Times and others days ago alleged, based on anonymous US intelligence officials, that Surovikin had foreknowledge of the Wagner rebellion, and suggested he may have even helped, in a move against Putin's grip on power.

keep this in mind. they've also 'reported' that shoigu and gerasimov have been fired, or will be fired.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 6:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Putin Cannibalizes the Russian Economy to Survive Personally

Amidst such undisguised plundering of the Russian economy, stripping it down for war toys, it is perhaps no surprise that Prigozhin’s failed putsch this past weekend revealed no lost love for Putin domestically from the Russian populace and elites. After all, not only did military leaders and civilians alike passively wave columns of Wagnerites through checkpoint after checkpoint on the road from Rostov to Moscow without a shred of resistance; even Putin’s own regional governors were lethargic in their response, and even now, a whopping 21 of them have yet to express any support for Putin. Ironically, the only group of Russians who rushed to Putin’s defense with any genuine enthusiasm prior to Belarusian President Lukashenko’s diplomatic intervention were brigades of Chechens who sped to Moscow and Rostov, led by Putin’s longtime ally and newly-minted selfie-pal Ramzan Kadyrov.

Historian Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners reminds us that the evil of the Third Reich triumphed through the complicity of average Germans through their complacency. We now see Russians’ willing complacency with the murderous autocratic Putin.

https://time.com/6291642/putin-cannibalizes-russian-economy/

A free copy of Daniel Goldhagen’s books is available for download from the mirrors at http://libgen.is/search.php?req=Daniel+Goldhagen

Quote:
Introduction

Reconceiving Central Aspects Of The Holocaust

Captain Wolfgang Hoffmann was a zealous executioner of Jews. As the commander of one of the three companies of Police Battalion 101, he and his fellow officers led their men, who were not SS men but ordinary Germans, in the deportation and gruesome slaughter in Poland of tens of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children. Yet this same man, in the midst of his genocidal activities, once stridently disobeyed a superior order that he deemed morally objectionable.

The order commanded that members of his company sign a declaration that had been sent to them. Hoffmann began his written refusal by saying that upon reading it, he had thought that an error had been made, "because it appeared to me a piece of impertinence to demand of a decent German soldier to sign a declaration in which he obligates himself not to steal, not to plunder, and not to buy without paying...." He continued by describing how unnecessary such a demand was, since his men, of proper ideological conviction, were fully aware that such activities were punishable offenses. He also pronounced to his superiors his judgment of his men's character and actions, including, presumably, their slaughtering of Jews. He wrote that his men's adherence to German norms of morality and conduct "derives from their own free will and is not caused by a craving for advantages or fear of punishment." Hoffmann then declared defiantly: ''As an officer I regret, however, that I must set my view against that of the battalion commander and am not able to carry out the order, since I feel injured in my sense of honor. I must decline to sign a general declaration."1

Hoffmann's letter is astonishing and instructive for a number of reasons. Here is an officer who had already led his men in the genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews, yet who deemed it an effrontery that anyone might suppose that he and his men would steal food from Poles! The genocidal killer's honor was wounded, and wounded doubly, for he was both a soldier and a German. His conception of the obligations that Germans owed the "subhuman" Poles must have been immeasurably greater than those owed Jews. Hoffmann also understood his parent institution to be so tolerant that he was willing to refuse a direct order and even to record his brazen insubordination in writing. His judgment of his men—a judgment based, no doubt, on the compass of their activities, including their genocidal ones—was that they acted not out of fear of punishment, but with willing assent; they acted from conviction, according to their inner beliefs.

Hoffmann's written refusal sets in sharp relief important, neglected aspects of the Holocaust—such as the laxness of many of the institutions of killing, the capacity of the perpetrators to refuse orders (even orders to kill), and, not least of all, their moral autonomy—and provides insight into the unusual mind-set of the perpetrators, including their motivation for killing. It should force us to ask long-ignored questions about the sort of worldview and the institutional context that could produce such a letter which, though on a tangential subject and seemingly bizarre, reveals a host of typical features of the Germans' perpetration of the Holocaust. Understanding the actions and mind-set of the tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who, like Captain Hoffmann, became genocidal killers is the subject of this book.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 6:40 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Xi Jinping's Schadenfreude Over the Mutiny Against Putin
Craig Singleton

In war, more things often go wrong than right. If that inconvenient truth was somehow lost on Chinese leader Xi Jinping more than 16 months into Russia’s planned two-day takeover of Ukraine, then last weekend’s rebellion and march toward Moscow by the Wagner Group surely set him straight. Indeed, while Xi often champions the ostensible novelty of the Chinese system, deep down he fears that China is afflicted by the very same ideological ills that once plagued the Soviet Union—and continue to curse its Russian remnants.

Chief among these ills, according to Xi himself, are “political corruption, ideological heresy, and military disloyalty,” all of which were on full display during last weekend’s Russian rumble.

Moscow’s short-lived mutiny, led by a wealthy, well-armed former member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s innermost circle, represents the sum of Xi’s greatest fears about China’s post-Deng Xiaoping political framework. No doubt, Putin is Xi’s “best, most intimate friend.” But Xi has hardly been shy about criticizing Putin’s perverse preference for power sharing, whereby the Russian leader lets competing factions vie to keep each other in check. If nothing else, last weekend’s dramatic events re-affirmed Xi’s intense distrust of any form of pluralism—even within a country’s power elite—and will likely lead him to pursue ever more radical policies aimed at making the world less safe for democracy.

Generally speaking, Xi and Putin agree on most everything, with one major exception: the reason for the Soviet Union’s demise. In Xi’s estimation, the Soviet Communist Party’s rule did not collapse as a result of any specific external pressure, nor because of the structural fragility inherent in the Soviet Union’s state-directed economy. Instead, Xi asserts the “great Soviet socialist nation fell to pieces,” seemingly overnight, because its “ideals and beliefs [were] shaken.” Putin, meanwhile, has long argued economics, not ideology, led to a collapse in the Soviet Union’s social sphere. The elite infighting that followed, Putin posits, gave rise to long-term consequences in the political sphere and, eventually, the Soviet Union’s self-destruction.

Based on these differing diagnoses, Xi and Putin have pursued wildly divergent strongman strategies—the former relying on purges and purposeful political discipline, the latter on graft and growing his coterie of cronies, a group that until recently included Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. If the failed rebellion is any indication, Xi’s initial ideological instincts were right all along.

No doubt, the seeds of Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny were sown the moment Putin foolishly embraced paramilitaries as foreign-policy force multipliers. But the veneer of competence and control long synonymous with Putin’s 20-plus years in power truly began to crumble last month, when explosive-laden drones penetrated Russian air defenses and struck several apartment buildings in Moscow. In that moment, the Kremlin’s misadventures in Ukraine became too serious for the Russian power elite—the siloviki, such as Prigozhin—to ignore.

Now, Putin’s problems are Xi’s, too. For if the Soviet Union could implode so suddenly and unexpectedly, Xi surely realizes the same fate could befall Beijing’s junior partner.

Beijing’s near-term challenge is compounded by its limited, almost myopic, insight into Russian decision-making. That extends to accurately assessing whether long-simmering resentment and recriminations over Putin’s failed attempts to subjugate Ukraine might lead other disgruntled elites to exploit Russia’s current power vacuum. Even worse for Beijing is the begrudging realization that it is merely a bystander in Putin’s Ukraine power play—incapable of either helping Moscow win the war outright or effecting a diplomatic solution that ensures Putin, and by extension Xi, can save some much-needed face. Indeed, with prominent Chinese theorists speculating that time may no longer be on Putin’s side, Xi must now grapple with losing the very great-power clash he set in motion against the West.

If history and Xi’s previous actions are any guide, he will channel Putin’s predicament into doubling down on his preference for rigid top-down policymaking at the expense of the entrepreneurial, collaborative hallmarks that embodied the Deng era. Abroad, China will lead like-minded authoritarian partners in deepening their interference in both developing and developed countries. Their collective goal: to destabilize democracies and make the world less dangerous for dictators.

Yet however vindicated Xi may feel today about Putin’s style of governance, his schadenfreude may not see too many tomorrows. Sure, Xi’s years-long anti-corruption campaign, one that targeted both prominent “tigers” and small-time “flies,” rooted out political disloyalty within the party and sidelined potential rivals. Xi similarly enhanced his direct control over China’s armed forces, for instance by reforming China’s military reserve command structure to reduce the number of bureaucratic layers between himself and the individual soldier. Xi, too, maintains a very watchful eye on paramilitaries, which are prohibited from using force.

But Xi’s geopolitical and economic mismanagement has contributed to a genuine crisis of confidence about the party’s legitimacy, including its ability to achieve economic growth, social stability, and national unity. Xi’s myriad challenges are set to worsen on account of China’s rapidly deteriorating external environment and precipitous economic slowdown, not to mention the ongoing onslaught of Western export controls aimed at thwarting the country’s technological ambitions. Put differently, Xi appears on the cusp of confronting the very misfortunes that befell Putin. What remains unclear is whether Xi’s unique brand of party-centric nationalism and state-directed ideology, both so clearly missing from Moscow’s milieu, will be enough to salvage the China dream—or lead to its demise.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/29/xi-putin-wagner-prigozhin-russia-
china-ukraine-war/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 10:44 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

That's some interesting fan-fic.

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How you do anything is how you do everything.

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 12:12 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Xi Jinping's Schadenfreude Over the Mutiny Against Putin
Craig Singleton

In war, more things often go wrong than right.

except for the winner. right now, more things are going wrong for ukraine and NATO

Quote:
If that inconvenient truth was somehow lost on Chinese leader Xi Jinping more than 16 months into Russia’s planned two-day takeover of Ukraine, then last weekend’s rebellion and march toward Moscow by the Wagner Group surely set him straight. Indeed, while Xi often champions the ostensible novelty of the Chinese system, deep down he fears that China is afflicted by the very same ideological ills that once plagued the Soviet Union—and continue to curse its Russian remnants.

Chief among these ills, according to Xi himself, are “political corruption, ideological heresy, and military disloyalty,” all of which were on full display during last weekend’s Russian rumble.
russia's military is loyal, politicians weren't involved, and not sure where the ideological heresy comes in. prigozhin's mutiny was all about money ... and getting cut off from government contracts. no 'larger' story there, except the west keeps trying to invent one.

Quote:
Moscow’s short-lived mutiny, led by a wealthy, well-armed former member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s innermost circle,
putin has met progozhin once. not bff/ 'inner circle' stuff

Quote:
represents the sum of Xi’s greatest fears about China’s post-Deng Xiaoping political framework. No doubt, Putin is Xi’s “best, most intimate friend.” But Xi has hardly been shy about criticizing Putin’s perverse preference for power sharing, whereby the Russian leader lets competing factions vie to keep each other in check.
actually, his criticism revolves around economic policy, and how much 'capitalism' can be tolerated

Quote:
If nothing else, last weekend’s dramatic events re-affirmed Xi’s intense distrust of any form of pluralism—even within a country’s power elite
hey! i thought putin was some sort of iron-gripped tyrant with total control over every person in russia. you're saying he's not??

Quote:
—and will likely lead him to pursue ever more radical policies aimed at making the world less safe for democracy.
so be afraid! be very afraid!

according to some american expats, USA is already trying to 'regime change' on china's border (Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar specifically) this is just the rationalization for those actions /snicker

Quote:
Generally speaking, Xi and Putin agree on most everything, with one major exception: the reason for the Soviet Union’s demise. In Xi’s estimation, the Soviet Communist Party’s rule did not collapse as a result of any specific external pressure, nor because of the structural fragility inherent in the Soviet Union’s state-directed economy. Instead, Xi asserts the “great Soviet socialist nation fell to pieces,” seemingly overnight, because its “ideals and beliefs [were] shaken.” Putin, meanwhile, has long argued economics, not ideology, led to a collapse in the Soviet Union’s social sphere. The elite infighting that followed, Putin posits, gave rise to long-term consequences in the political sphere and, eventually, the Soviet Union’s self-destruction.
economics

Quote:
Based on these differing diagnoses, Xi and Putin have pursued wildly divergent strongman strategies—the former relying on purges and purposeful political discipline, the latter on graft and growing his coterie of cronies,
both xi and putin have dealt with oligarchs trying to control politics. putin's situation was a bit more dire bc -for a decade- kleptocracy was russia's official policy, thanks to jeffery sachs' advice

Quote:
... a group that until recently included Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. If the failed rebellion is any indication, Xi’s initial ideological instincts were right all along.

No doubt, the seeds of Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny were sown the moment Putin foolishly embraced paramilitaries as foreign-policy force multipliers.
by definition, conscripted russian soldiers can't be deployed abroad. i understand why russia chose to employ mercs, but it was a bad choice

Quote:
But the veneer of competence and control long synonymous with Putin’s 20-plus years in power truly began to crumble last month, when explosive-laden drones penetrated Russian air defenses and struck several apartment buildings in Moscow. In that moment, the Kremlin’s misadventures in Ukraine became too serious for the Russian power elite—the siloviki, such as Prigozhin—to ignore.
one has nothing to do with the other

Quote:
Now, Putin’s problems are Xi’s, too. For if the Soviet Union could implode so suddenly and unexpectedly, Xi surely realizes the same fate could befall Beijing’s junior partner.
the soviet union implosion happened 30 years ago, for crissake! implosion has nothing to do with putin, and the example is always there for xi, putin or no putin. china's nightmare was tienanmen square

Quote:
Beijing’s near-term challenge is compounded by its limited, almost myopic, insight into Russian decision-making. That extends to accurately assessing whether long-simmering resentment and recriminations over Putin’s failed
?????

Quote:
attempts to subjugate Ukraine
NATO. this is about NATO, not
ukraine

Quote:
might lead other disgruntled elites to exploit Russia’s current power vacuum.

there is no power vacuum

Quote:
Even worse for Beijing is the begrudging realization that it is merely a bystander in Putin’s Ukraine power play—incapable of either helping Moscow win the war outright
of course it can

Quote:
or effecting a diplomatic solution that ensures Putin, and by extension Xi, can save some much-needed face. Indeed, with prominent Chinese theorists speculating that time may no longer be on Putin’s side, Xi must now grapple with losing the very great-power clash he set in motion against the West.
xi did not set a poer grab in motion. xi is, first and foremost, keeping young people employed

Quote:
If history and Xi’s previous actions are any guide, he will channel Putin’s predicament into doubling down on his preference for rigid top-down policymaking at the expense of the entrepreneurial, collaborative hallmarks that embodied the Deng era.

the deng era bred oligarchs in china, just like oligarchs fluorished under yeltsin. china has been increasing its share of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for the past DECADE. nothing new there!

Quote:
Abroad, China will lead like-minded authoritarian partners in deepening their interference in both developing and developed countries. Their collective goal: to destabilize democracies and make the world less dangerous for dictators.

in other words, USA policymakers are going to pre-emptively regime-change around china now, in support of 'democracy'

Quote:
Yet however vindicated Xi may feel today about Putin’s style of governance, his schadenfreude may not see too many tomorrows. Sure, Xi’s years-long anti-corruption campaign, one that targeted both prominent “tigers” and small-time “flies,” rooted out political disloyalty within the party and sidelined potential rivals. Xi similarly enhanced his direct control over China’s armed forces, for instance by reforming China’s military reserve command structure to reduce the number of bureaucratic layers between himself and the individual soldier. Xi, too, maintains a very watchful eye on paramilitaries, which are prohibited from using force.

But Xi’s geopolitical and economic mismanagement
???? IMHO the only things xi has 'msimanaged' were covid and money supply. too many 'shadow banks' in china.

Quote:
has contributed to a genuine crisis of confidence about the party’s legitimacy, including its ability to achieve economic growth, social stability, and national unity. Xi’s myriad challenges are set to worsen on account of China’s rapidly deteriorating external environment and precipitous economic slowdown, not to mention the ongoing onslaught of Western export controls aimed at thwarting the country’s technological ambitions. Put differently, Xi appears on the cusp of confronting the very misfortunes that befell Putin. What remains unclear is whether Xi’s unique brand of party-centric nationalism and state-directed ideology, both so clearly missing from Moscow’s milieu, will be enough to salvage the China dream—or lead to its demise.

so what they're saying is: damned if they do and damned if they don't?

i see a whole lotta projection going on!

Putin's and Xi's popularity are based on two factors: improving the economy and instilling a sense of national pride. China has lifted nearly a billion people out of poverty. Its current challenge is that roughly 25pct of Chinese males age 16-24 are jobless, and - as the USA knows full well, idle hands are the devil's workshop. It depends on being an exporting economy for growth... never a sure bet bc when your markets dry up, you're in trouble.
Russia OTOH is almost a fully self-sufficient economy. Its self-sufficiency is a problem for nations that want to buy Russian oil... what do they sell to Russia in return to balance their trade? I guess with China it could be "electronics" and with India it could be pharmaceuticals?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Sunday, July 2, 2023 5:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Moscow Burns is a Medifor. A figure of speech.

So was Peaceful Protests a Medifor too?

This thread was BS, Moscow Burns WTF
thats THUGR, posting from an endless wellspring of bullshit and desire

WHY RUSSIANS ARE NOT ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR WITH UKRAINE?

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023 7:26 PM

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Wednesday, July 5, 2023 9:04 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

THUGR'S wishful thinking.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Tuesday, July 11, 2023 8:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/10/russia-putin-prigozhin-wagner-ukr
aine-nuclear-weapons/

Russia-Ukraine War: Prigozhin's Failed Coup Was a Blessing in Disguise

By Christopher Clary, an assistant professor of political science at SUNY Albany, and Joshua Shifrinson, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

July 10, 2023, 2:52 PM

When the Wagner Group’s rebellion against the Kremlin unraveled, many commentators welcomed the prospect of Russian unrest and potential regime change as a way of complicating Russia’s war in Ukraine. In reality, however, the United States likely dodged a bullet when this uprising failed to topple Russian President Vladimir Putin. Though a weakened Russia might struggle to sustain its operations in Ukraine, political turmoil in a nuclear-armed state has historically given Washington good cause for hand-wringing, sparking fears about the stability and security of foreign nuclear arsenals. And even though Russia takes considerable steps to secure that arsenal in peacetime, the sheer size of its nuclear weapon and fissile material stockpile leaves it open to major risks. The Wagner Group crisis may be in the rear-view mirror for now, but as Washington contemplates future challenges to Putin’s authority, it ought to tread carefully. Russian political turmoil might be good for Ukraine today but awful for other U.S. priorities in the near and distant future.

Political instability in nuclear-armed states is more common than one might think. Of the 10 states that have developed a nuclear weapon, seven—France, China, the Soviet Union, South Africa, North Korea, Pakistan, and India—have experienced serious political turmoil in the form of coups or coup attempts, regime changes, civil wars, or other forms of widespread domestic instability. Lest anyone in Washington be too quick to judge others, the recent record of political stability in the United States is far from exemplary.

Domestic instability in nuclear states tends to scare foreign governments—and for good reason. In the nuclear age, no one wants ambiguity over who has authority over decisions to use or deploy nuclear weapons. Most states have announced publicly who has this authority in peacetime and crisis conditions, but domestic instability can render these procedures irrelevant, leading insiders and outsiders to fear the worst.

The canonical example is the Soviet Union. As Soviet political authority imploded in the early 1990s, punctuated by the August 1991 coup attempt against President Mikhail Gorbachev, there were pervasive fears that Soviet nuclear command and control procedures would unravel in chaotic fashion and undermine the U.S. ability to assess Soviet nuclear behavior. Following the collapse of the Soviet state in December 1991, Soviet nuclear weapons and material were scattered across four newly independent states—Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine—leaving U.S. policymakers scrambling to make sense of nuclear decision-making in a fluid security environment and to develop diplomatic, military, and economic tools to minimize the risk of crises.

Even when events threaten to topple an adversary, foreign-policy makers tend to worry that a replacement might be even worse than the leader or regime they know. For example, despite having started the Korean War in 1950 and fighting against the United States, when North Korean leader Kim Il Sung died in 1994, many U.S. officials feared his successor, Kim Jong Il, would be worse. William Perry, then the U.S. deputy defense secretary, went so far as to argue that before the elder Kim’s death, a primary goal of U.S. policy was to prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear arsenal in case a power transition turned violent. “This is a government which has clearly failed and in my opinion is going to collapse sometime in the next few years,” Perry said in 1993. “Our concern is, if it goes out with a cataclysm, we don’t want it to be a cataclysm with nuclear weapons.”

Equally disconcerting is the risk that political instability could lead to civil war and what former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once called “Yugoslavia with nukes.” The problem here is both ambiguity over who controls a nuclear arsenal and the possibility that rival factions might deploy nuclear weapons against competitors. During a coup attempt in France in 1961, the coup plotters attempted to delay a scheduled French nuclear weapons test in Algeria. One of the plotting generals instructed the general responsible for the nuclear explosive device: “Refrain from detonating your little bomb. Keep it for us—it will always be useful.” After the plot fizzled, several members of the nuclear test team commented that they believed the plotters sought the device as a bargaining chip to blackmail Paris.

Meanwhile, because domestic instability by definition undermines law and order, it raises the risk that nuclear technologies will be lost, stolen, or diverted and imperil counterproliferation efforts. When South Africa’s apartheid government faced growing domestic unrest in the late 1980s, a major impetus behind U.S. engagement with the noxious white-minority government was the desire—driven to some extent by overblown fears of what Black-majority rule might mean—to prevent South African nuclear assets from spreading beyond its borders. The available evidence indicates that U.S. policymakers were “extremely concerned about the possibility of Pretoria’s nuclear capability falling into the hands of an irresponsible government with links to communist and extremist Islamic countries,” scholar Anna-Mart van Wyk writes.

Such worst-case scenarios have not come to pass, but the potential is real. Because these risks are so stark, foreign governments have tried to find ways of mitigating the dangers. But the options for confronting the collapse of a nuclear state are limited.

For the United States, the most widely discussed option involves using U.S. military action to secure if possible, seize as needed, or destroy if necessary nuclear assets in an imploding country. Military intervention, however, is a dicey prospect.

For one thing, intelligence of looming instability may not be available or sufficiently certain to act in a timely manner. Even if warning is available, states’ nuclear enterprises are opaque by design and frequently distributed across many sites—sometimes hundreds of locations for large, mature arsenals. As a result, it is difficult for a foreign-policy maker to know with confidence that all relevant nuclear assets have been identified ahead of time and seized or destroyed afterward. As the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon put it when assessing a possible intervention in Pakistan or North Korea, “A surgical strike might, with excellent intelligence, destroy the weapons” but “such intelligence is usually lacking.” In the case of Pakistan, anonymous former U.S. officials have complained that they do not know even the total number of Pakistani nuclear warheads, let alone where each of those warheads is located. Former military planners say an attempt to secure the Pakistani arsenal with special operations forces “would be the most taxing and most dangerous of any special mission” that Joint Special Operations Command could be assigned.

The task at hand elsewhere would likely be no easier. An estimated tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops would be needed to secure North Korean nuclear assets, and the number would be orders of magnitude higher in a country such as Russia. Time and distance compound this dilemma. Not only would it take time for the requisite military forces to arrive in theater, but also, if the goal is to prevent the loss or diversion of nuclear assets, any delays increase the risk of mission failure. Depending on the scenario, an imperfectly timed military operation may make the problem appreciably worse by alerting local leaders to U.S. efforts and giving them time to hide or disperse nuclear assets under their control.

Given this reality, foreign governments facing instability in a nuclear state have instead tried to avoid the problem and help incumbent regimes survive when at all possible. Lingering U.S. concerns about the nuclear arsenal of a collapsed Pakistani government falling into the hands of terrorists has helped override pronounced U.S. differences with Islamabad—including Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network as those groups targeted U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Even more dramatically, President George H.W. Bush’s administration held off on encouraging the breakup of the Soviet Union out of fear that successor republics would be unable to control Soviet nuclear weapons. No matter how noxious the existing regime, political instability in nuclear states has often pushed foreign governments to bank on the devil they know rather than risking catastrophe from the devil they don’t.

Despite foreign efforts to ensure stability in nuclear states, domestic implosions can still happen. When the government of a nuclear state collapses, however, foreign governments have generally tried to broker political deals to ensure continuity in the nuclear enterprise. The Soviet example is again illustrative. When Soviet authority began unraveling in the fall of 1991, the Bush administration made clear publicly and privately to the Soviet Union’s restive republics that the price for U.S. recognition of their independence would be their commitment to centralized control of any nuclear forces on their territory—meaning that Russia, as the designated successor state to the former Soviet Union, alone would operate ex-Soviet nuclear forces—and adherence to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Until these pledges were received, the United States would hold off on backing their push for independence. Once the Soviet Union broke apart, the United States subsequently pressured Ukraine into returning the weapons to Russia as the surest route to maintain stable control of the arsenal. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the wisdom of the Ukrainian relinquishment has been questioned—indeed, John Mearsheimer made the case for a Ukrainian nuclear arsenal prior to Kyiv’s accession to the NPT. Yet for the United States in the 1990s, the dangers of a new nuclear state in a troubled region outweighed the hypothetical deterrent benefit.

As the United States and its allies ponder the future of Putin’s regime, policymakers would be wise to consider these experiences. A Russian domestic implosion might be good for Ukraine’s battlefield success but deeply injurious to other U.S. interests. Ironically, and for all that Washington has done thus far to support Ukraine, the closer Russia comes to a political collapse, the more likely Washington might be to step back from its efforts to punish Putin’s regime. Otherwise, it risks having to deal with instability and a new, potentially more reckless Russian leader with his finger on the nuclear button—or, even worse, more than one Russian leader. When Baker considered such dangers in 1991, he feared “an extraordinarily dangerous situation for Europe and for the rest of the world—indeed, for the United States.” For all the promise that domestic Russian instability may hold for battlefield progress in Ukraine, it risks opening the door to such extraordinary dangers again.

The research in this piece was supported by a grant from the Stanton Foundation.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, July 11, 2023 9:06 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

THUGR'S wishful thinking.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

True, I do like the idea of the Russian military rotting. That said, I would point out that if it’s true you live here, and if by some chance your love for Russia and hate for the United States, allowed for America to become more like the authoritarian state, Russia, then your children’s children will have to live there. I wonder if they will remember you fondly for wanting that and preaching that should be Americas' future? It's my guess they would not.

T

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Monday, July 17, 2023 9:51 PM

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Tuesday, July 25, 2023 11:09 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
It's not an uprising or a civil war or even a coup, since Prigozhin was going after shoigu, not the whole Russian government. it's being called a mutiny.

I've suspected for a while that Prigozhin was off his rocker. the one thing that Russia is being very cagey about is ... how many Wagner fighters are following him? if it's a hudred, no big deal. if it's 20,000 ... well, they're hardened urban warfare specialists.

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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Wednesday, August 23, 2023 1:27 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin feared dead as his private jet crashes in flames soon after takeoff in Russia

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/23606429/wagner-boss-yevgeny-prigozhin-f
eared-dead-crash/

Yevgeny Prigozhin dies in plane crash

https://www.ft.com/content/812c9da3-80f2-4fe1-8fad-0b4441d1977a

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Wednesday, August 23, 2023 2:17 PM

Wow if true. It isn't like we didn't see that coming though.

T

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Thursday, August 31, 2023 7:53 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Prigozhin's right-hand man in Wagner buried quietly near Moscow

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/prigozhins-hand-man-wagner-buried-112626379.
html

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:

It isn't like we didn't see that coming though.

You didnt see it coming, instead you parroted nonsense on the news and said Moscow would burn to the ground and Putin killed

Remember your Taliban fleeting moment of victory prediction as they were over running Kabul?

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Friday, October 13, 2023 6:18 PM

Anybody hear anything new?

Too funny...

T

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Friday, October 13, 2023 6:41 PM