I’ll coin a - dreadful! - word to describe the likely response of the loonycon Swampies (not Biden, he’s just a ga-ga puppet; the delusional criminal faction which is running him): the word is fantasescalation; a portmanteau of ‘escalation’ and ‘fantasy’.
My hunch is that the USAmerican military ‘hegemon’ is being laid bare progressively right now, by events in the Ukraine, to be a ballsless paper tiger. Neither it, nor its underling appendages in ‘NATO’, are going to be able to counter the Russian gambit with any even remotely effective conventional military response. (An effective British response? Really? Grand Fenwick takes on the world! ROFLMAO!)
And there are enough sufficiently-sane people, both in civilian politics in the Swamp and amongst the genuinely-patriotic career military, who understand clearly that a nuclear gambit by the US would bring instant devastation - civilisation-ending devastation - to both the continental US and to its underling states in the Anglozionist empire, from the modernised - and currently unstoppable - Russian nuclear arsenal.
Note that the Russians are currently continuing their slow, methodical, infrastructure-damage and casualty minimising conquest of the Ukraine with only a relatively small expeditionary force, not even made up for the most part of their crack forces, whilst holding the great majority of their military power in reserve (and with their entire nuclear force openly-announced to be on continuing high alert in the background).
Confident/determined, or what? Vlad doesn’t bluff.
If a nuclear outbreak seemed really close, I’d expect those sufficiently-sane people in the US to stage a coup-d’etat in Washington, and arrest the loonies.
(Additionally to the situation, there’s the wild-card of the human-generated poltergeists - currently characterised in popular startrekkytechietechie culture as ETs in super-space-ships - which have been interfering with the ageing, iffy and in-need-of-refurbishment US ICBMs in their silos; but that’s a whole other conjecture…)
For almost the whole of my life, the chatterati have been entertaining themselves with horror-stories about nuclear annihilation. So far, it’s always been a Chicken Little panic. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. But it seems to me that it’s much more likely that the DC-delusionals will try their other option of firing up another expendable-‘islamic’-loonies war somewhere else - re-igniting Syria, for example - to try to proxy their way to a - fantasised - victory over Russia. Their delusional aim is to conquer and divide up Russia, install puppet regimes in many balkanised inheritor statelets, and then rape the whole of Siberia to death, of all its natural wealth; whilst also picking a fight with China over Taiwan…
Gangster-capitalist BAU at its last gasp, in other words. And this as the Long Descent begins really to get into its stride? Yeah, right…
My money goes on the bet that Russia - with China hovering supportively in the background, and with a growing range of dissident countries gravitating to their BRICS+/BRI/SCO/EAEU-axis, away from US overlordship - will go remorselessly on, as the Russian war-machine does once it starts to roll, until it’s ended the SMO to its overall satisfaction.
That will also include, probably, the complete outing of ‘NATO’ as the empty sham that it is; together with the US crashing down into a close analogy of the collapse which overtook the USSR in the '90s; as is happening right now, in fact.
To my mind, the Putinistas, with virtually the entire Russian populace behind them, have decided that enough provocative crowding of their borders is enough, and now, having nowhere left to retreat to, they’re determined to put a final decisive end to the nightmare of big-bully USAmerica, calling the shots everywhere.
Those days are over. As JMGreer puts it in his latest essay, ‘The Twilight of Empire’:
“The horrifying realization creeping through the corridors of power in Washington right now is that the US no longer has the power to enforce its will in eastern Europe—or, potentially, much of anywhere else.”
