> [The whole thing.] You're comment is excellent, and articulates a lot of thoughts I've had around the Western response to the war in Ukraine. The sneaking s

> [The whole thing.] You're comment is excellent, and articulates a lot of thoughts I've had around the Western response to the war in Ukraine. The sneaking sense I have is that NATO is just a paper tiger. There's little to no political will on its part to actually collectively take the risk to militarily defend allies against naked Russian aggression. If Putin actually invades Lithuania, he might just end up exposing the whole thing as a sham. The other countries focus on saving their own skin in the short term, so will hem and haw and send some guns and rockets to the resistance, but ultimately decline to get involved, which over the long term allows Russia to pick them off one-by-one until (at least) the Warsaw Pact becomes a thing again. The Russians will likely also learn from their mistakes, and conduct the next invasion more competently than this one. Eventually, smaller countries will realize, if they don't want to get invaded and absorbed by the Russian empire, they need their own nukes, and the whole project of nonproliferation gets flushed down the toilet. May be most rational long term response is to answer Putin's threats with a very stark warning: do not use nukes unless you want the capital of your empire to be a smoking pit.