We're Not About to Have World War III

We're in no danger of WWIII. Putin's game is both not as terrifying and in some ways even more terrifying. He has always wanted to conquer the world, but he knows he can only do it through something other than war because in a war, he knows that Russia's world standing is finished forever. Before all this, the idea was to do it through intelligence and misinformation. That's ultimately what swung a critical mass here to Trump and in Britain to Brexit. Now his objective is to bleed the Western alliance dry by turning them all into Russia. Russia does not have much influence on the world except with oil, but on the issue of oil, the world economy is as delicate as a stack of cards until we finally switch to an alternative energy source. With Europe so dependent on Russian oil, a long term boycott of Russia ruins the European economy, which in turn can ruin the US's.

Furthermore, if China does to Taiwan what Russia's doing to Ukraine, will the US respond with a similar boycott to China? It would ruin our economy in an instant. Europe would see the American hypocrisy right away and turn still further away from alliance with the US. And in a year or two, many Europeans would long for a Farrage or Le Penn or Chrupalla who can normalize relations with Russia, restore economies to normal, and throw out immigrants who take jobs from the native-born citizens (and there are many more now...). This would lead to the breakup of NATO and potentially Western democracy itself for the rest of our lifetimes as conservatives in every major democracy work to tip the political systems to their favor in every single election.

In Putin's office is not a picture of Lenin or Stalin, it's a picture of the 18th century Czar, Peter the Great, who is still regarded as the single greatest Russian leader. Putin's objective is not to restore the Soviet Union or to be Stalin or Hitler, his objective is to be a new Peter the Great that re-modernizes Russia for the 21st century and is well ahead of all other world leaders in understanding how to use the internet to control populations - and we all now see how easy that is every day. Controlling a bit of territory is no power at all compared to the ability to control the opinions of people around the world through propaganda. The confusion about his motives is because in order to do that, he also has to restore Russian pride after the 'humiliation' of losing the Cold War; but in a war with the US, he becomes known as the Russian ruler who subjected his people to the ultimate humiliation - the wholesale destruction of Moscow and Petersburg. He would be remembered with exactly the opposite legacy of what he wants to be.

We are not going to get nuked. And though they will undergo unfathomably dreadful things, Ukraine won't get nuked. It just runs counter to every Putin objective to escalate to a nuclear level, even if the fear of it is very much in his interests. Even after a nuclear war, America could rebuild to its full capacity and possibly better than ever before, but Russia wouldn't even be able to build to the level of what Ukraine was before this. That doesn't mean none of that could ever happen, but it does mean it's extremely unlikely, and if it ever happened, it's because events got out of Putin's control - which has never really happened before. Putin surely had to know the extent of the Western response before he went in, Putin has had less miscalculations than any major world leader, and for his judgement to change like that is impossible, even if he's sick. The point is to get into this sort of quagmire, unite the Russian people in their hatred of the West, and turn the rest of the world into places like Russia that resent the hell out of liberal democracy. What's terrifying is how close he's already come before, and even if he dies soon, he can still come closer to his goal.