WW3 Threat Expert: Russia Is Coming For Europe, Attack On This Country Pulls Us In! | Dr Sarah Paine
In a Nutshell
Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Trump's war on Iran are pivotal errors that have destroyed the US alliance system and accelerated the collapse of the post-WWII rules-based order, with Europe rapidly building alternative institutions and middle powers realigning away from America. The continentalist powers—Russia, China, and Trump—seek spheres of influence through territorial expansion and coercion, while maritime democracies must support Ukraine as the cheaper alternative to fighting Russia directly and restore deterrence through sanctions rather than endless wars. Current US leadership's combination of unlimited objectives, normalized lies, and strategic incompetence is incentivizing nuclear proliferation worldwide while destroying the economic and security architecture that has kept peace for three generations.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
We're potentially barreling our way into a world war and it looks like World War II. Once wars start, it's really hard to stop them. We have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world and they're all lying about it. The problem with normalizing lies is that the Soviet Union collapsed in large part because it was built on lies.
History's moving really fast. It's like the log jams busted and we don't know which way it's going to go. Putin decided to kick over the chess board by invading Ukraine. Donald Trump decided to get into a recreational war in Iran. This war has trashed the US economy and blown the US alliance system. It also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy.
These people are historically unqualified. They don't care how many people they kill.
History doesn't start. It's a long continuum. Countries used to organize themselves by land as the currency of power. The continentalist world is all about taking territory. When you're doing that, you're burning wealth.
An alternate possibility came from maritime powers. Britain is a maritime power. Then you get to the industrial revolution where suddenly you can compound wealth. That changes the currency of power from land to industry, commerce, and trade. If you do those things, you get compounded wealth. With that, you can buy your armies or do whatever you want.
The maritime order is about compounding wealth from having universal rules. This is the rules-based order. If it goes away, the billionaires who've been funneling their money into the continentalists, their world will disappear too.
We're potentially barreling our way into a world war. We have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world. Once wars start, it's easy to do that part. Really hard to end them. Because whoever's losing doesn't want to lose, so they keep doubling down long after they've lost.
A positive objective is making something happen, like snatching Maduro and putting him in a New York prison. You can verify that the guy's in a New York prison. A negative objective is preventing something from happening. You can't prove how many times a world war was avoided in the last whatever years.
Negative objectives are incredibly important. Governments are primarily about negative objectives. Preventing disasters. Disaster number one would be foreign invasion. Other things include preventing bridges from collapsing by inspecting them, preventing malpractice across professions by licensing people, and preventing illiteracy by having education. Governments don't actually get credit for what they do because on a normal day it's normal.
The Iran war is probably one of the most incompetent wars in human history. In a war, if you're doing it right, you put all the costs on the person you're fighting and minimize costs yourself. This war has trashed the US economy and blown the US alliance system. Iran is hurting without a doubt, but it also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy. This transforms the United States to an annoyance to just about everyone's primary adversary for threatening their economies.
When you do an assessment before you even do a war, you need to look at not just my strengths and your weaknesses, but also your strengths and my weaknesses, plus all the other people who might be interested. Clearly that was absent. The people who should have been saying the first thing they're going to do is shut down Hormuz weren't there.
Narrow seas in wartime are easy to shut down. Ukraine shut down the Black Sea. These places close down in wartime because between shore artillery and mines and other stuff, things don't move. The United States had its big naval base in Bahrain. If that gets shut down, the alternative would be Diego Garcia, which would be 2,500 miles away and like in the middle of nowhere.
In the first Trump administration, there was General Mattis around. Now we have Major Pete, who is really good at identifying Blacks and women and firing them. Now they're doing testing on testosterone. When you're an adolescent and testosterone's peaking, there's no correlation with that and your greatest reasoning powers. These people are historically unqualified for a job. That makes them profoundly dangerous. They've undermined the futures of their own children and they're undermining the prospects for the Republican party.
Type A American hubris is the belief that all decisions in the world that matter happen in the United States. Type B American hubris applies to some of the tech bros. Just because you're really good at something doesn't make you really good at everything. You need to have the humility to understand the limits of your expertise and when you need to listen to others.
Another piece of it is listening to divergent opinion. It's really important to talk across political divides. What's going on now is just straight up yesmen. They've committed pivotal errors. They've permanently damaged US national security.
Trump was talking about taking Venezuela. He's a continentalist. He's a real estate guy. He sees real estate. He was saying he was going to take Canada and make it the 51st state. He thought Iran would be a walk in the park, that he would behead the leader and the people would rise up.
Halfcourt tennis is when you're only looking at your own side. In foreign policy, you're not studying the other side. Iran's Lego videos demonstrate that the Iranians have a deep understanding of Americans, whereas Americans don't know up from down on what's going on.
There are certain things that as desirable as they are are just not attainable. It would be great if everyone on the planet was a multi-millionaire, but it's not feasible. If you're going after an unfeasible objective, you're going to overextend yourself. It's going to have a very bad ending.
A problem is something that maybe you can solve. The United States, the greatest generation, understood that the Soviet Union was a lethal threat, but you couldn't solve it. You try to solve that and it'll be the nuclear end to all of us. So then what you're into is managing it.
You use various elements of national power. One of them was sanctions so that you're going to depress Soviet growth. Unlike now where we're tariffing everybody, what you're trying to do is maximize the growth within your alliance system. For those who behave, you want to maximize their growth. Those who can't behave, you want to minimize theirs so that over time the relative threat diminishes over time.
You're also trying to get accurate information out, not propaganda, but accurate information hoping that in generational change, maybe the other side reassesses. If they don't, you're perfectly safe behind the castle walls and you're handling this thing at affordable costs because the sanctions are really costing them much more than they're costing you.
There are 90 million people in Iran. Nazi Germany had a population of about 80 million. The occupation force after World War II was about 1.5 million just to occupy Germany, not counting all the millions of people coming from Russia everywhere else. When you're talking Iran equivalent size, it's not feasible.
The lesson for Iran is get a nuke. With these wars, it's like if you don't have one, you're toast. We've incentivized proliferation. Putin with his war initially and then us with this Iran thing. It's profoundly self-defeating.
A pivotal error is once you've made it, the choices that you had before are a lot better than ones you have now, and you never get the old ones back.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine was a pivotal error. Russia has burned through its cold war arsenal. Putin would have been doing much better when he did the easy walking with his little green men into Crimea and Donbass, just sitting with that and slowly destabilizing Ukraine over a number of years. Instead, he has massively contributed to Ukrainian national identity. National identities often come out of wars.
Britain massively contributed to the development of the US national identity during the American Revolution because it was all these separate colonies that by the time that revolution was over had a much more cohesive sense of nation and all these national institutions that grow up as a result of it.
For the United States on the Iran war, we've lost our alliance system. We will never be the trusted partner ever again. It's done.
The post-World War II world is collapsing. Systems work by norms that we follow. The way to think about it is like traffic. Most of us follow the rules of the road. If everyone decided to just do whatever on a given day, there aren't enough policemen ever to enforce that. It would just be mayhem.
The rules-based order was always based on norms of following them. The US legal order was based on norms of everyone more or less following them.
An example of those norms is when you lose an election, you congratulate the other side and say you will do better next time instead of saying they cheated.
The United States is pulling out of this order. The existential threat that this is posing has led to the most rapid institution building in Europe. The Baltic 8, Nordic countries including Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, plus Iceland, have been organizing all sorts of security things together.
There's remilitarization going on. There's also work on space ports all over the place. Britain is going to build a new one up in the Shetland Islands. Europe is going to be launching their own satellite system. They're sick of American credit card payment systems.
There's an app that's been put out. If in Europe you want to buy stuff, your app will tell you immediately whether a product is American or not, so you don't have to buy that product. It's called the B-word boycott, which is happening to America right now.
Prime Minister Carney of Canada is traveling everywhere organizing the middle powers. That'll be the new world order. It's unfolding.
By all means, do not send combat troops all over the place. Position people like Ukraine to succeed. Give them what they need to solve this. That is the cheap thing to do. The expensive thing is to blow our alliance system. People are boycotting us. There are all kinds of industries in the United States that are being hurt by this. Kentucky bourbon makers have to shut down because the Canadians won't buy our booze. Canada's arranging to sell its energy to Europe and other places and trying to derisk from us.
An unlimited objective is regime change. The most unlimited variant is genocide. Hitler had both. Putin has a very unlimited variant because he wants to not only take over Ukraine, but he also wants to shoot up a good part of the government down to small children. He was trying to execute the Zelensky family. He wants to eliminate the purveyors of Ukrainian culture. You kill them. That's called genocide.
Russia has unlimited objectives. Putin wants to restore the old Soviet empire. Russia has been the backwater of Europe forever under the Tsars. There's not one Russian product that you have ever wanted to buy. Smirnoff's is a British company. They don't even produce the vodka. Russia has a failing economic model. During the cold war, it was exporting communism everywhere, setting back living standards everywhere.
Putin thinks based on his sheer legacy of incompetence that now he has the right to rule everyone else. He's a continentalist and wants to steal everyone else's stuff. In the beginning of the Ukraine war, people were stealing washing machines. The Ukrainians don't want to live that way.
Russia underestimated the Ukrainians. There's Russian type A hubris. The Russian soul is superior to all others because they can't figure out what they're superior on. Zelensky told me that when the Russian soldiers rolled in, he found that they had brought food for 3 to 10 days. They thought the war would be over in three or 10 days. They also brought uniforms to celebrate and do a victory parade because they thought the war was going to be that easy.
They were met with Ukrainian civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks.
If you have an unlimited objective against someone, you're putting them on death ground. If you don't fight, I'm going to just come kill you. So your only alternative is to fight.
Countries facing existential threats can transform from dysfunctional to lethal adversaries, as Hitler discovered with the Soviet Union. Stalin had executed much of his officer corps and created a famine in Ukraine, the breadbasket of the region. Putin has done exactly the same to Ukraine now. The United States is undoubtedly doing this to Iran, where the Ayatollah was against having nuclear weapons, but no one knows who will replace him.
If Iran is on death ground while Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu remain in power, they will cause trouble until those leaders are out of power. There is concern that Trump might drop a tactical nuclear weapon, making the United States the only country to have dropped nuclear weapons three times - twice on Japan and potentially once on Iran.
Ten years ago, the current state of affairs would have seemed insane - the United States tossing alliances, telling Canada it is the 51st state, and threatening to take Greenland. The situation demonstrates how rapidly geopolitics can shift.
One-third of Americans voted for current conditions, one-third voted against them, and one-third could not get off their couch to vote. Citizens must participate in elections because outcomes affect their children. Americans need to talk across party lines rather than believing only one party can win.
A two-party state is necessary because each party can see the other's blind spots. If voters want gas prices to decrease, they need to elect the opposing party since politicians rarely admit errors. The way to reassess policy in democracies is through electoral change.
When British citizens suggest letting Russia take Ukraine to stabilize energy prices, the fundamental problem is that the enemy gets a vote. Russians are continentalists who expand continuously. Russian history shows they go forward and keep going. There is no historical evidence they will stop.
Putin took Belarus politically and seized territory from Ukraine. He came to power during the second Chechen war, which Russians supported. In 2008, he attacked Georgia and helped two regions separate. The pattern shows a continentalist approach - expanding outward in all directions like a 360-degree view from a spaceship dashboard.
The Cold War ended on Western terms through masterful diplomacy by Bush Senior and Helmut Kohl. This was followed by a magical inter-Cold War period where China and Russia turned inward. If Putin keeps any part of Ukraine, it becomes a destroyed wasteland. Zelensky stated the Ukrainians will fight forever.
Zelensky described finding a trench with 500 tortured bodies of all ages. He implied that families of victims will not accept a sudden stop to fighting and will seek revenge. Zelensky admitted wanting revenge after what he witnessed. The Russians have committed unspeakable acts.
Vladimir Putin now owns the crown of infamy previously held by Germans for World War II atrocities. Germans reformed their educational system and bear no responsibility for past events, but Russians bear responsibility for current actions.
Russians claim the Soviet Union has nothing to do with them, but Russia ran the Soviet Union. The French use the word France to include all five republics and monarchies, including Napoleon. Russians alone try to distance themselves from Soviet history, but they had everything to do with it and remain unrepentant.
Continentalists want to divide the world into spheres of influence like old Eurasian empires. They will fight on the edges of these spheres. The continentalists are Russia, China, and Donald Trump, who has claimed Canadian territory, Greenland, and kidnapped a head of state.
Trump claims the war would never have happened if he were in power, but he started this conflict. Foreign policy consequences usually unfold over years, making causation hard to prove. The Iran war is an exception - every time people fill up at the pump, they receive a weekly reminder that Trump's war has damaged them.
Normalizing lies in the United States is problematic. No one likes being lied to. The Soviet Union collapsed partly because it was built on lies. Under the communist system, everyone exaggerated needs and understated resources, creating garbage data that led to gross misallocation of capital and labor.
An economy doubles according to the natural log of two divided by the growth rate. At 1% growth, an economy doubles in 69-70 years. At 3% growth, it doubles in 23 years. A 2% differential changes doubling time from 23 to 71 years. Sanctions over wars offer advantages - they shrink the opposing economy while growing one's own through allied cooperation.
Putin has already made a pivotal error and will continue escalating forward because he cannot go back. Dictatorships lack offramps where leaders survive. Putin has arranged his system so there is no retirement plan except something ugly. It is unlikely he could step down and live peacefully because his immediate entourage would kill him.
Dictatorships appear eternal until they shatter, after which outcomes become impossible to predict. The Romanov dynasty ended when Nicholas II entered an unnecessary war against Japan in 1904-1905. Russia is the largest country with abundant resources, but lacks an economic model to develop them because it refuses to follow norms allowing people to start businesses and keep their earnings.
Nicholas II lost the Russo-Japanese war, creating opportunity costs. Money spent on war meant no railway system in western Russia. When World War I came, Nicholas could not deploy troops effectively, and main ports were shut down. Better railways might have delivered food and allowed foreign aid, preventing the food riots in St. Petersburg that led to his overthrow.
China supports Russia because it wants the United States out of everyone's business and does not particularly like Russia. If Russia weakens itself, China benefits. China needs Russian resources and is getting them at reduced prices while driving hard bargains. Russia squandered its nuclear deterrent by failing to deal with Ukraine.
Russia has nuclear weapons, but India and China have told Russia that nuclear use would be unacceptable. However, when people are cornered, outside influence diminishes. Zelensky will not yield an inch of Ukraine, while Putin needs to appear victorious to his people and send messages to border nations and NATO.
Unlimited wars like World War II resulted in 55 million deaths. The better approach is deploying diplomats and lawyers through international institutions. Imperfect deals allow wealth to compound when people can start businesses under proper legal frameworks.
Ukraine should be supported because they are doing the heavy lifting. Morals, honesty, and civility matter. Governments must protect national security and prosperity. For Britain, protecting national security requires a healthy Western Europe.
Europe feels weak economically with internal conflicts. France has seen street violence with balaclava-wearing people smashing shops. Britain faces three trillion pounds in debt with 110 billion pounds in annual interest payments, leaving little room for maneuver.
The generation after World War II was indebted and Europe was leveled, yet within ten years they established institutional architecture that maintained peace for three generations. Current history is moving rapidly with tremendous risks but also opportunities to establish new institutions before conditions solidify.
Americans blame immigrants for problems, but the real issue is the tax code that has enabled a handful of people to become billionaires over 15 years. Monopolies allow price-setting, while monopsonies allow wage dictation. A thousand families worth a billion dollars or more exist in the United States.
The tax code allowing such extreme wealth concentration is an error. There is a missing podcast that would read and break down the tax code, connecting it to human consequences.
Midterm elections involve electing a percentage of the US Senate and all of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives serves two-year terms while senators serve six-year terms with staggered seats. Governors are also elected during midterm cycles.
Currently Trump controls both the House and Senate, giving Republicans more power than Democrats in the Supreme Court. However, polls suggest Trump will likely lose both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterms.
Trump has discussed sending ICE agents to polling stations and taking voting machines, while offering $5,000 incentives for Republican votes. These actions represent the "end of the norms" where traditional democratic boundaries are being crossed.
The Republican Party has fundamentally changed from what it was under Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan. It is now centered around one individual rather than traditional party principles. Americans should identify with their goals rather than party affiliation, focusing on protecting national security and promoting prosperity.
Pete Hegseth, a major, was confirmed by Republicans to run the Pentagon, which is viewed as an act of supreme dereliction of duty. Republicans could have demanded another General Mattis and potentially avoided current conflicts in Iran.
If Republicans lose midterms, they have made clear they will not cooperate with Democrats to pass legislation. Trump can still exercise executive power through executive orders and "change facts on the ground." Even if actions are later deemed illegal, the changes have already been implemented.
An example given is Trump cutting down legacy trees at a golf course in Washington, creating irreversible damage that cannot be walked back.
The democratic core consists of democracies including Western countries, Central Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. However, threatening to invade Greenland and make Canada the 51st state undermines democratic values.
China's interest in Taiwan stems from Taiwan demonstrating that vibrant democracy is possible among the Han ethnic group, contradicting the racist notion that democracy and the Han are mutually exclusive. Dictators fear fair elections because they would not win them.
Neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin would remain in power under fair elections. The existential threat to dictators is the demonstration that democracy works. Democracies produce massive wealth because they tolerate each other, provide legal protections, and allow people to keep the fruits of their businesses.
China was created through a succession of wars. The Qing dynasty fell in 1911-1912, followed by the warlord period where provincial leaders fought until coalescing into the communist-nationalist conflict around 1927.
In 1930, the first "America Firsters" responded to the Great Depression by implementing huge tariffs despite economists warning President Hoover that other countries would respond in kind. This led to a massive trade war that deepened the Great Depression.
Trade-dependent Japan, cut off from cooperation, decided they needed an empire to become self-sufficient and moved into Manchuria in 1931. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to stop US aid to China.
Massive warfare tore China apart from 1911-1912 through 1945, followed by the Chinese Civil War ending in 1949. Additional conflicts included Mao's political campaigns, the Korean War (1950-1953), and Deng Xiaoping's conflict with Vietnam.
The 1962 border war with India resulted in China defeating India and creating a permanent enemy, which was considered a strategic mistake. The Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward caused massive internal turmoil, with the Great Famine killing millions while food was exported.
The generation that experienced all this warfare is now dead, potentially removing the memory that might prevent future conflicts.
The trajectory suggests World War III is possible. Nuclear weapons do not guarantee safety through mutually assured destruction, as Putin has already "flipped" this concept by threatening NATO countries and violating airspace.
Putin has been sending drones into territorial waters of Bulgaria and Romania, which were shot down. At some point, this enters Article 5 territory, requiring all NATO members to go to war together. The Europeans are reluctant because it would be catastrophic.
The generation that remembered World War II was careful not to trigger Article 5. This caution is not present in current leadership.
If Putin invaded Poland, World War III would begin. The consequences of nuclear war are described as obscene, with computer programs able to calculate megatonnage and casualties for any city.
Dark personalities like Putin do not care how many people they kill. Most people cannot imagine inflicting such pain on others, making it difficult to identify these personalities until it's too late, as with Adolf Hitler.
Trump will not back out of Iran, and Putin will not back out of Ukraine. A solution proposed is for the next Congress to impeach and convict Trump, forcing his retirement.
History will remember Zelensky as a hero and great statesman. He refused Biden's offer to leave Ukraine, famously stating "I don't want a ride, I want ammunition." He is praised for his communication abilities and leadership during clear-cut aggression.
The brutality with which Russians are treating Ukrainians indicates something fundamentally wrong with those committing such acts. Ukraine needs to be put on its feet while Russia receives a massive timeout.
The world is fleeing from the United States. When the US can simply take leaders away (as with Maduro), other countries counterbalance with China as the less lunatic option. US actions in Iran and Venezuela have made everyone else feel less safe.
The paradox of strength is that using it causes loss of power. The US has killed its own power by flexing it and threatening others.
Global wars are fundamentally about the nature of world order - whether it will be continentalists ruled by dictators where connected individuals can simply take businesses and force people to the front lines, or democracies that generate the highest per capita standards of living and real wealth creation.
While focusing on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, the greater danger comes from tech billionaires buying elections. Elon Musk has put $160 million into Texas politics as a dysfunctional South African with no right to buy elections.
Many tech billionaires are foreign-born and are attempting to take down democracy to avoid higher taxes and regulation of their media platforms. The real dangerous immigrants are those trying to buy elections rather than the handful who commit crimes.
America did not turn against Zelensky and Ukraine - Donald Trump did. Trump is not America, he is himself. He has killed the US legacy through serial bankruptcies where he leaves the trash behind and moves forward.
Only a third of America voted for Trump, a third did not, and the other third would not get off the couch. Americans correctly identified that the system was not working for them and voted for someone to throw over the chessboard, but that proved worse than the alternatives.
The current generation is leaving a mess for young people to fix. The United States is currently making things worse globally. The recommendation is to read, keep learning throughout life, talk across dividing silos, be polite to each other, and vote as a civic duty.
Despite the overwhelming challenges - wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, AI displacing jobs, global warming, forest fires - there are many wonderful people worldwide. Dark personality types are few in number, and collective action across different spheres will get through this crisis.
War operates at three levels:
- Tactical level: Individual units like tanks with specific capabilities, range, and armor
- Operational level: Fighting battles or campaigns using combined units with information campaigns
- Strategic level: The fundamental question of why fighting occurs in the first place
At the strategic level, politicians should focus on protecting national security and promoting national prosperity. The Iran war is incentivizing proliferation in the worst possible way while being incredibly costly.
The Republican Party's focus on the operational level of winning elections has led them to enable Trump's actions that blow up the alliance system protecting their children and grandchildren. Officers love focusing on the operational level where killing more of the enemy's forces than they kill of yours is considered winning.
However, in Vietnam, the enemy took multiple casualties compared to US losses yet won the war, demonstrating that operational success does not guarantee strategic victory. There is no South Vietnam today.
The United States did not force countries to join NATO. Instead, former Soviet bloc countries including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia were stampeding to NATO's doors. These countries sought NATO membership because they understood Russia's imperial ambitions and witnessed Russia's post-Cold War behavior of installing trained cadres, communist expats, and taking control of power ministries including the military, interior ministry, justice department, information ministry, courts, and agriculture sectors.
Russia conducted massive purges throughout Eastern Europe, murdering political opponents, jailing others indefinitely, and forcing communist systems on populations. In 1953, Russians beat up Germans unhappy with communist rule. When Hungarians attempted adjustments to the failing communist system, Russians sent tanks and killed the head of state despite promises otherwise. Russia has never atoned for or acknowledged these actions.
Dr. Paine lived in the Soviet Union in 1988-89 during early Gorbachev years when supply systems collapsed. A typical grocery store had only 77 items total. Meat counters emitted such strong odors from rotting meat that shoppers avoided them. Items labeled "import na import" (imported) sold purely on the basis of being foreign. Dr. Paine ate rotting Hungarian apples and noted Romanian canned tomatoes as relatively good products, highlighting what Russians could not produce themselves.
Russia views the world through a "half court" perspective where everyone else appears to be picking on them, ignoring their own history of threatening and harming others. Despite Russia's vast size, the country seeks more territory rather than developing existing resources. Scandinavian countries demonstrate what can be accomplished with limited resources through functioning states, while Russia attempts to steal from others.
Dr. Paine argues that Ukrainians should not become slaves to their murderers. The Declaration of Independence contains core American values: the right to life (preserving one's own, not taking others'), liberty (making one's own choices rather than dictating to others), and pursuit of happiness (as defined by the individual, not externally imposed).
Claims that Trump made a diesel export deal with Putin are disinformation. Russia lacks capacity to export diesel in quantities that would affect global prices. Diesel price increases correlate with the Iran war and refinery grade specifications. Refineries require millions of dollars and significant time to reconfigure for different output grades. The diesel situation results from Trump's war policies, not Ukraine.
Grocery prices have worsened dramatically in the last two years. Dr. Paine observed oatmeal priced at $10 for a small package. Tariffs on food imports from Mexico and Canada have contributed to price increases. The Republican Party's actions are described as wrecking the United States for current generations and beyond.
Ukraine is currently winning by successfully defending itself. Ukrainians have developed various drone types and ballistic missiles. The United States' failure to mass-produce Patriot missile systems represents incompetence, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have directed companies to prioritize quantity over unit cost during wartime.
Musk's Starlink kill switch during Ukraine operations has damaged the company's reputation internationally. India reconsidered Starlink purchases, while French alternative companies saw share price increases. Ukraine is developing independent missile systems without Starlink involvement.
Russia has lost up to 50% of operating oil refinery capacity. Ukraine has conducted strikes on Yandex and other Russian infrastructure independently. Russia cannot afford to replace refineries built with Western technology. The economic cost includes 40% of the national budget devoted to defense spending, labor shortages from mobilization and emigration of skilled professionals, interest rates above 20%, loss of European energy markets, and 300 billion in frozen central bank reserves.
Europe will not abandon Ukraine because Russia will target the rest of Europe under Putin's model. European security attitudes changed permanently after 2022. Putin's cronies may eventually remove him under stress. Young men at the front lines, described as "only children" due to Russia's demographic situation, may eventually riot or turn against commanders. Their mothers may also intervene against the war effort.
An offramp could involve Western offers of safe passage with billions in exchange for Putin's retirement. After Putin, Russia faces a free-for-all succession with no democratic institutions. Putin's network resembles a mafia structure with concigliaries. The transition could lead to civil war or profound instability lasting approximately 10 years. Democratic countries should maintain contingency plans for dictator deaths.
Ukraine surrendered nuclear weapons with Western promises of protection that were subsequently broken. This undermines American leverage since Ukraine knows Trump has sold them out. The best strategies create win-win outcomes, which explains the strength of maritime order where 90% of world trade occurs.
The maritime order represents the only infinite game positive-sum world order. International institutions, despite flaws, prevent conflict. Rather than reforming the UN, parallel institutions could be created with governments gradually shifting operations. China under Xi Jinping studied the Soviet collapse and identified ethnic organization as a vulnerability factor, leading to genocide against Uyghur Muslims through concentration camps for men, cultural genocide through boarding schools for children, and exploitation of women due to China's shortage of childbearing-age women.
Born in 1957, the year Sputnik launched with Laika aboard, Dr. Paine grew up during the Cold War and Vietnam War era, developing interest in Russia and China studies.
What makes Dr. Paine emotional is watching sorrow and children suffering. Adults allow tremendous numbers of children to suffer. Republicans need to improve conditions for future generations rather than lose elections while doing the right thing. Nothing matters more than generations that follow, and the focus should be on building for them rather than grifting. Continentalists should not be supported.
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