2 very different outcomes, each 50% likely
Identifying possible outcomes and their probability
You can be pretty accurate predicting future events by taking powerful people seriously. Listen to what they say. Watch the progression/evolution of their speech and account for the relevant background.
My take away from 30 years of US action and speech since 1991 is a 50% probability, increasing daily, that the US will cease to exist within 18 months.
Let’s call that outcome 1: The United States will cease to exist within 18 months (50% probability)
The reason for this assessment is decision making authority in the hands of neocons, who:
recognize no limits whatsoever
Who set for themselves unachievable goals while preparing none of the requisite tools
1 and 2 are clear signs of detachment from reality, derangement
Who are fanatics/zealots/true believers, magical thinkers…ideologues
Who have no care whatsoever about any of the necessary planning and development required for realizing their grandiosity, their dream/obsession of dividing Russia and ruling its pieces.
Who’ve lost the arms race, definitively, to Russia
Who are both unequipped for recognizing anything resembling reality, and who’s mental illness requires they proceed until they either get what they want, or annihilate everything trying
These people will continue to escalate, and continue to face Russian response that matches and exceeds their escalation step by step.
Because neocons are delusional, they’re incapable of accepting limits or loss.
Because they’re fanatical, they’re incapable of negotiating. They’ll take no off-ramp. When, soon enough, they reach the penultimate step on their ladder, there again they’ll be overmatched. Then they’ll climb their last step: a Dr. Strangelove “total commitment” nuclear strike to take out Russia.
Within a couple of hours this will be the neocons’ last step of any kind, ever.
They’ll lose everything. The Russians will not.
Russia will be damaged but with adequate success destroying most US nukes in flight, because Russia has the (proven) technology capable of doing so.
The US does not.
As I mentioned, I measure this scenario 50% likely by summer 2024.
But what other scenarios are credible?
I heard another scenario that admittedly sounds credible. The US/UK/EU will lose but pretend it didn’t.
Wow, there is a great deal of precedent for this. They’ll take the off ramp but pretend otherwise. They’ll declare victory and get out. You may remember that from any number of engagements in living memory.
And of course they and their audience are masters of projection and doublespeak, and self-delusion.
outcome 2: The US declares victory and gets out
Let’s see which of these we get.
Outcome 2 is plausible but every move toward 2 is at constant risk of slippage back to 1. The reason is the exceptionally low intellectual quality of neocons. One would have to dig very deep indeed into the entire span of time and space to find people of lesser quality.
But to put it (their desperately poor quality) in purely practical terms:
When Napoleon in 1812 marched Europe’s most proven military force, an Army of 600,000, into Moscow, subsequently losing 580,000 of those, at least Napoleon had substantive reason to believe he’d be victorious.
In 1941 when Hitler’s Wehrmacht Barbarossa’d into Russia, at least they too had legitimate reason to believe they’d succeed.
Today there is no basis for belief in defeating Russia whatsoever. The gap between the entire collective west and Russia in terms of military industrial technology (weapons design) and production capacity (prolific) is greater than ever before.
Led for decades by neocons we are nihilists, our words empty, our ideas idiotic. Our fate likewise: