The Little Guy
Many large nations have a little guy near by that can be confused with the larger one: Austria to Germany, Ireland to the United Kingdom. Conflict with little guys can quickly expand in complexity, as combat reveals passive observers who swiftly move to action. This begins to inflate the little guy and what they are capable of. In 1812 the Americans looked over to Canada, at that time, there was a magical discourse on Manifest Destiny confident of swift success, but didn’t realise they were undertaking war with the British Empire. Today Russia is fighting a little guy in Ukraine and speaks of the Nazis there, but their conflict is now with a wide swath of the world. This swath is uninterested in the fanciful rationale Russia is serving. The main concern is upset to the previous order that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons.
Russia for a long time has not cared for this order, with state-sponsored sports cheating, international assassination with weapons of mass destruction, and sowing discord on social media; an environment created for light conversation and sharing baby pix has been influenced into a toilet of hostility, and social friction. This program of “active measures” has had significant success using the re-enumeration motive of the companies against the people they serve. The murder of internal opposition and constant lies on every subject, from shooting down Malaysian Airways 17 to military vehicle maintenance. In the regard of removing opposition leaders, the current leadership has given their nation the national equivalent of AIDS, without an immune system to protect their nation or refresh the politics, it continues to operate without regard for the world it is in. The threat that Putin is feeling to his nation is accurate, but what he is missing, is that he is the cause.