Category: Tsar-A-Largo

Ten Minutes to Midnight: What Happens If Trump Nukes Pickaxe Mountain

In the early hours of November 2, Tucker Carlson posted on X that the Trump administration “may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran.” His target was Pickaxe Mountain, the tunnel complex Iran has been carving into the rock south of Natanz. He set a decision window that closes around November 7, three days after the midterms. (Drop Site, Newswire)

It is worth being precise about what is known. The broad frame of Carlson’s story is corroborated: Axios reports that Benjamin Netanyahu is pressing Trump to strike Iran right after Tuesday’s vote, and that Trump, for now, prefers to let negotiations run. Trump himself said over the weekend that Pickaxe Mountain still needs to be “taken care of” and that the job is planned and could be done “in 10 minutes.” (Axios)

What is not corroborated is the word that matters most: nuclear. No outlet has independently confirmed that a nuclear weapon is among the options. The White House does not comment on military plans, and Secretary of State Rubio says no decision has been made. Carlson, who broke with Trump over this war and has already called for his removal, is an interested messenger. (investingLive, Newsweek)

So this post does not argue the rumor is true. It asks a narrower question that deserves an answer before the window closes, not after: if an American president did detonate a nuclear weapon on Iranian soil this month, what would the world look like on the morning after, and in the decade that follows?

The target, and why anyone would reach for a nuke

Pickaxe Mountain (Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La) is the one piece of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure that conventional American bombs may not be able to reach. It sits just south of Natanz, about 140 miles south of Tehran. Iran began tunneling there after repeated sabotage at Natanz. The IAEA has never been allowed inside. (NBC/AP, NBC/AP)

The problem is depth. Analysts at the James Martin Center estimated in 2023 that the main halls sit 80 to 100 meters down, and digging has continued since. America’s heaviest conventional penetrator, the GBU-57 “bunker buster” used on Fordow in 2025, is rated to plow through at least 60 meters of earth. US officials have reportedly discussed dropping two in succession, but it is unclear even that would reach a facility this deep. Trump himself has acknowledged the depth problem. (NBC/AP, Dhaka Courier)

That gap is the entire logic of the nuclear rumor. If you believe Iran is spinning centrifuges under a mountain you cannot crack, and you have decided the site must go, the menu shrinks to three items: a ground raid, a negotiated shutdown, or a nuclear earth-penetrator. Trump has ruled out a ground operation. CNN has reported that the administration is weighing the MOAB, the largest conventional bomb in the arsenal, though analysts doubt a surface-blast weapon would touch a target under granite. (Al Jazeera)

The hardware for the nuclear option exists. The US fields low-yield warheads, including the W76-2 on Trident submarines, introduced under Trump’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. The Federation of American Scientists estimates its yield at about five kilotons, roughly a third of Hiroshima. FAS also argued at the time that the weapon’s most plausible first-use scenarios were not Russia but North Korea or Iran. (FAS, JoongAng)

One physical fact matters for everything that follows. No weapon can burrow deep enough to fully contain a nuclear blast aimed at a target this far down. A nuclear strike on Pickaxe Mountain would crater the surface and throw radioactive debris into the air over central Iran. “Tactical” describes the delivery system, not the fallout.

Breaking an 81-year taboo

The single largest consequence would not be in Iran. It would be the end of the longest-running norm in modern statecraft: nobody has used a nuclear weapon in war since Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

That norm has survived Korea, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Afghanistan twice, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was never written into a treaty. Tactical nuclear weapons, in fact, are covered by no arms control agreement at all. (Al Jazeera) The taboo holds because every nuclear power has believed that being the one to break it would cost more than any battlefield gain. A strike on Pickaxe Mountain would test that belief in public, and the whole world would study the bill.

The timing makes it worse. New START, the last treaty limiting US and Russian strategic forces, expired on February 5, 2026. For the first time since the early 1970s, nothing caps or verifies the two largest arsenals. (GlobalSecurity) Trump has also called for ending the US moratorium on nuclear testing. (The New Arab) A first use layered on top of that would land in a system with no guardrails left to absorb the shock.

The target also matters. Iran is a non-nuclear-weapon state that has signed the NPT. For decades, US declaratory policy has said America will not use nuclear weapons against such states if they comply with their obligations. Washington could argue Iran forfeited that assurance by hiding enrichment. But the IAEA has never inspected Pickaxe Mountain, and Iran denies any nuclear activity there. (UCS, investingLive) Much of the world would hear a different message: the guarantee that came with giving up the bomb was conditional, and the United States decides the conditions.

Iran: a strike that could manufacture the bomb it was meant to prevent

The most likely Iranian response is not surrender. It is retaliation now and a dash for a weapon later.

Tehran has spent October spelling out the retaliation in advance. Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, has warned that any new US-Israeli offensive would bring strikes on oil facilities, undersea cables, data centers and AI infrastructure in as many as seven Gulf countries. (La Voce di New York, Daily Caller) These are not idle threats. On March 1, Iranian drones knocked two Amazon Web Services availability zones in the UAE offline for more than a day. (The Next Web) Those warnings were issued against a conventional strike. A nuclear one would remove whatever restraint remains.

The longer-term problem is that the strike might not achieve its own goal. The IAEA estimates Iran holds about 440 kg of uranium enriched to 60%, enough for roughly ten weapons if enriched further. Rafael Grossi has said most of it is probably still at Isfahan, not Pickaxe Mountain. (Asharq Al-Awsat, Al Arabiya) Vaporizing a centrifuge hall does not vaporize the material, or the knowledge of how to spin it.

Meanwhile the political brakes on an Iranian bomb are already wearing thin. Ali Khamenei, whose verbal fatwa declared nuclear weapons un-Islamic, was killed on February 28. His son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has said nothing either way. (NBC/AP) A bill to leave the NPT has been in parliament since before the spring review conference, though Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has not reached consensus. (Arms Control Association, Responsible Statecraft)

A nuclear strike would settle that debate. The argument Iranian hardliners have made for two decades, that only a bomb guarantees the regime’s survival, would be validated by the only country that has ever used one. Expect the NPT exit to pass, enrichment to scatter into smaller and better-hidden sites, and the program to become the regime’s founding cause rather than its bargaining chip.

The Gulf and the oil shock

The Gulf monarchies would absorb the first physical blow, and they know it. That is why most of them have spent weeks lobbying against any escalation.

Washington has already told several Gulf states to prepare for a “short, intense” campaign after the midterms, according to the Wall Street Journal. (investingLive) Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman, along with Egypt, have pressed for restraint. (Alhurra) Earlier in the war, Mohammed bin Salman reportedly warned Trump that strikes on Iranian energy targets could bring retaliation against Saudi oil and gas. The UAE, by one WSJ account, privately argued the opposite: that only major escalation would move the Revolutionary Guard. (Ynet)

A nuclear strike would scramble that debate. Even hawks in Abu Dhabi asked for escalation, not radiation drifting downwind of a war they host. Gulf rulers would face street anger over a nuclear attack on a Muslim country launched partly from their bases. They would also face an Iran with no remaining reason to spare their oil fields, desalination plants and data centers.

The energy market is already primed. Iran has controlled traffic through Hormuz since February, charging tolls and attacking ships that defy it. Brent touched $126 in April, fell back during the June truce, and has been trading around $100 or higher since autumn; it topped $114 in late October on Iran’s threats. (The National, Al-Monitor, La Voce di New York) Earlier this year, S&P Global Energy put a sustained-disruption scenario at $200 to $250 a barrel. (WION)

A nuclear strike, followed by Iranian attacks on Gulf production, is exactly that scenario. Most Hormuz crude goes to Asia, so the shock would hit China, India, Japan and Korea first, then return to American gas pumps. (Wikipedia) Add insurers refusing to cover Gulf shipping near a nuclear exchange, and a global recession becomes a reasonable base case rather than a tail risk.

Moscow and Beijing: the precedent and the pulpit

Russia would not need to fire a shot to profit from an American nuclear strike. It would only need to quote it.

For four years, Moscow’s nuclear threats over Ukraine have been treated in the West as bluff. Dmitry Medvedev marked the invasion’s fourth anniversary in February by again threatening “non-strategic nuclear weapons” against Ukraine and its suppliers. (Kyiv Independent) Those threats have carried a hidden cost: no state has used such a weapon, and the first to do so would be a pariah. An American strike on Iran would erase that cost. The next time the Kremlin faces a battlefield collapse, it could point to Natanz and argue that a great power may use a low-yield weapon against a non-nuclear state to remove what it calls an existential threat. Western objections would sound like hypocrisy, because they would be.

Russia is also already a quiet participant in this war. It has reportedly shared targeting intelligence with Iran and enjoyed a windfall from high oil prices that funds its Ukraine campaign. (GlobalSecurity) A nuclear strike would push oil higher still and hand Moscow a diplomatic opening across the Global South.

China’s reaction would be quieter and possibly more consequential. Beijing has kept a careful distance, calling the war a conflict that “should never have happened” while declining to pressure Tehran. (Oman Observer) About half of China’s crude imports normally pass through Hormuz. (Al-Monitor) China also keeps a declared no-first-use policy. A US first strike would let Beijing cast itself as the responsible nuclear power and Washington as the reckless one, a contrast it would press in every capital from Jakarta to Brasília.

The Taiwan angle is subtler. Beijing would not copy the act. It would study the reaction: whether allies stood with Washington, whether markets punished it, whether the world moved on within a month. Every lesson about what a great power can get away with near its own neighborhood would be filed away.

The proliferation cascade

The deepest damage would be to the bargain that has kept the number of nuclear states in single digits: give up the bomb, and you are safe from it.

That bargain was already fraying before Carlson’s post. Iran had threatened to leave the NPT as the treaty’s review conference opened in April. (Arms Control Association) In July, the AP reported that Trump approved a civil nuclear deal that may let Saudi Arabia enrich uranium. CNN later reported the terms could allow enrichment without the usual safeguards. (PBS/AP, Militarnyi) Mohammed bin Salman said in 2018 that if Iran built a bomb, Saudi Arabia would follow. (Euronews)

A US nuclear strike would add a second, harsher lesson to the first. The Iran war already taught that nuclear latency (the ability to build quickly without building) invites preventive attack. (IFRI) A nuclear strike would teach that latency can invite a nuclear attack. The rational response for any state that fears Washington, or fears being abandoned by it, is to stop hovering at the threshold and cross it.

The pressure would not stay in the Middle East. In August, a Gallup Korea poll found 65% of South Koreans want their own nuclear weapons, after Trump curtailed joint exercises with Seoul. (Korea Times) Seoul’s question has always been whether America would risk nuclear war on its behalf. An American president willing to use nuclear weapons for its own purposes, while scaling back commitments to allies, answers a different question: whether the umbrella is shelter or weather.

Likely candidates for a faster hedge include Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea and, more slowly, Japan. None would announce a bomb program next week. But nuclear decisions are made in planning offices years before they are made in public, and this would be the week the planning began.

Allies: complicity by runway

Europe has spent this war trying to stay out of it. Germany’s defense minister said in March that “this is not our war.” Macron said France was not a party to the conflict. (Neos Kosmos) Britain refused the initial request to use its bases, then allowed RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for what Keir Starmer called “defensive” operations once Iran began hitting Gulf allies. (NewsNation)

A nuclear strike would collapse that careful line. Any allied base, tanker, radar or intelligence feed that touched the mission would make its host a participant in the first nuclear attack since 1945. Governments that already struggle to justify a conventional war at home would face a choice between public breach and quiet complicity. Expect at least some to restrict US basing rights, and expect the push for an independent European nuclear deterrent, which Macron has already floated, to accelerate. (Postmodern Conservative)

Israel’s position would be the strangest of all. Netanyahu is the leader reportedly pressing hardest for a strike, and he emerged from the October 27 election without a clear majority. (Axios) Israel is widely understood to possess nuclear weapons it has never acknowledged. (The New Arab) An American nuclear strike urged by Jerusalem would drag that ambiguity into the open. It would also make Israel the most obvious target for whatever Iran, or its allies, chose to do next.

And for American standing generally: the United States has spent 80 years arguing that its nuclear arsenal exists so that it never has to be used. The day it is used against a non-nuclear state, every future American lecture on nonproliferation, from Pyongyang to Riyadh, loses its premise.

The home front

At home, the legal machinery would barely slow a president down, but the political shock could be enormous.

Under current US procedures, the president alone can order a nuclear strike. No cabinet vote, congressional approval or second signature is required. Congress has tried to rein in this war: in June, the Senate adopted a House-passed war powers resolution 50 to 48, the first time both chambers approved such a measure since the War Powers Resolution of 1973. (ABC News Radio, People Daily) Trump dismissed it as “meaningless,” and as a concurrent resolution it does not bind him. (Daily Mirror)

The timing in Carlson’s account is the midterms. A strike in the week after November 3 would land on a Congress in lame-duck session, with results possibly still being counted. Whatever the vote produces, a new majority would not be seated until January. That leaves weeks in which outrage could be loud but structurally toothless.

The pressure would come instead from inside the chain of command and from the president’s own coalition. Officers who receive a nuclear order are bound to refuse only a clearly unlawful one, and the legality of striking a non-nuclear state’s buried facility would be argued for years. Politically, the MAGA movement is already split on this war. Carlson, Steve Bannon and Rep. Thomas Massie have argued that “forever wars” violate America First. (CBS News, NPR) A nuclear strike would turn that split into a rupture, and Carlson’s call for removal would stop sounding like the fringe.

At the gas pump, an oil shock on the scale described above would reach every household within weeks. Trump has repeatedly promised that oil prices would fall once the war was won. (Al-Monitor) A nuclear strike that sends them sharply higher would test that promise against reality.

The case that the damage would be contained

A fair analysis has to take the other side seriously. Defenders of a hard-line approach would make several arguments.

  • Escalate to end it. The war is eight months old, deadlocked, and costly. Hormuz is choked and Brent is near $100. A single, overwhelming demonstration could force Tehran to accept terms quickly, the same logic Truman’s defenders apply to 1945. A short war, even a terrible one, might cost fewer lives and dollars than an open-ended one.
  • The yield is small and the site is remote. A low-yield earth-penetrator on a military facility in the desert is not Hiroshima. Defenders would argue civilian casualties could be lower than a weeks-long conventional campaign against infrastructure, which is the alternative reportedly on the table.
  • Deterrence would be restored, not broken. Adversaries from Moscow to Pyongyang have bet that Washington would never actually use its arsenal. Proving otherwise could make every American red line more credible, and make future wars less likely.
  • The great powers act on interest, not precedent. Russia’s nuclear decisions on Ukraine will turn on its battlefield position, not on American example. China has kept its distance from this war precisely because its interests point that way.
  • Proliferation is coming anyway. Seoul’s public already wants the bomb. Riyadh already has an enrichment deal in progress. On this view, a strike changes the speed of a trend, not its direction.

Some of these points have real force, especially the last. But they share a weakness: each assumes the strike works. If most of Iran’s highly enriched uranium sits at Isfahan rather than under Pickaxe Mountain, a nuclear strike could destroy a facility without ending the program. In that case America would have paid the full price of breaking the taboo while handing Iran its strongest argument for the bomb. The escalation case has to be right about the target, the yield, the fallout, Iran’s response and the world’s reaction, all at once. The cautionary case only needs one of those to go wrong.

The window, and what to watch

The best evidence against Carlson’s claim comes from Trump himself. In April he said he would not use a nuclear weapon against Iran and that nobody should ever be allowed to. In mid-October he told Newsmax, “I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to.” (Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera) Yet on October 28 the White House said only that Trump “keeps all options on the table.” (Israel Hayom) Those two statements can coexist. They do not settle the question.

What is not in doubt is that a major US strike on Iran after the midterms is being actively prepared. That alone carries most of the regional risks above. The nuclear question determines whether those risks stay regional or become global and permanent.

Over the next week, these are the signals that matter:

  1. November 3: the midterm results, and whether Trump reads them as a mandate or a warning.
  2. Around November 7: the decision point Carlson named. Silence from the White House is not confirmation either way.
  3. Doha and the mediators: whether Qatar, Pakistan or Oman announce new talks, which would signal Trump is still choosing negotiation.
  4. Force posture: the arrival of the additional carrier strike group, and any movement of bombers or ballistic-missile submarines that is reported.
  5. Tehran: any parliamentary vote on NPT withdrawal, or any statement from Mojtaba Khamenei on nuclear weapons.
  6. Oil: the market’s own read of the odds, which will move faster than any official statement.

The nuclear taboo has survived 81 years because every leader who could have broken it decided the world after would be worse than the war before. If Carlson is wrong, this post is a thought experiment. If he is right, it is a list of the bills that would come due.

Sources and disclosure

This post was researched and drafted by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, at the request of Trumplandia Report. The nuclear-strike claim at its center is unverified; facts are as reported through November 2, 2026.

Proof of Treason Is The Only Thing I Can Think Of That Might Cause Trump To Be Impeached Should Democrats Take Congress

Indications already suggest that, should Democrats regain control of at least the House, their oversight efforts may focus primarily on Cabinet officials rather than the president himself.

Historical patterns show that presidents have often faced scrutiny directed at subordinates rather than personal removal. The constitutional impeachment process requires a simple majority in the House to impeach and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict and remove. President Trump was impeached twice—once in 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, and again in 2021 on a charge of incitement of insurrection—yet the Senate acquitted him on all counts both times, falling short of the required supermajority.

Experience with this administration has demonstrated a willingness to test institutional boundaries further than many observers anticipated. Should Democrats assume control of the House in 2027, it is reasonable to expect that any significant escalation beyond prior controversies could trigger formal investigations. Among potential grounds, treason stands out as the most constitutionally explicit. Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason narrowly: “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Conviction requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act or a confession in open court. The Framers deliberately constrained the offense to prevent its use as a political weapon.

Even a charge of that gravity would confront the same structural barrier that has protected every impeached president to date: the difficulty of securing a two-thirds Senate vote for conviction. Actions that in another era might have been treated as disqualifying—such as the unauthorized disclosure of classified information—would likely remain subject to intense partisan division rather than bipartisan consensus for removal.

American political institutions have so far shown limited capacity or willingness to confront the president directly through the impeachment mechanism. Looking ahead, the more consequential question concerns the period after the current administration ends. That transition will test whether constitutional norms, separation of powers, and liberal-democratic practices reassert themselves, or whether the political realignments of recent years produce lasting changes in the character of American governance.

Russia Doesn’t Have to Defeat NATO -It Only Has to Weaken It

When people imagine a war between Russia and NATO, they tend to imagine the wrong thing. Tanks pouring through the Suwałki Gap. Russian missiles striking bases in Germany. American aircraft fighting Russian fighters over the Baltic. Perhaps, eventually, nuclear escalation. It is an understandable picture because it resembles the wars we know how to think about: one side attacks, the other side responds, and eventually somebody wins or loses.

But that may obscure the more interesting strategic problem. Russia does not necessarily have to defeat NATO in a conventional war to achieve an enormously important geopolitical victory. It may not even want such a war. A much cheaper and potentially safer strategy would be to steadily weaken the political cohesion on which NATO’s military power ultimately depends.

The distinction matters because NATO is an unusual military organization. Its strength doesn’t principally come from the armies of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia or even Poland. It comes from the promise that attacking one of those countries means acquiring all the others as enemies. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty turns dozens of separate national militaries into something approximating a single deterrent because an adversary must assume that aggression against one member could eventually bring American, British, French, German, Polish and other forces into the conflict.

That means NATO has an extraordinary amount of military power but also a potential political vulnerability. The entire arrangement depends upon adversaries believing that the members will act together when the moment comes.

Russia therefore faces two very different strategic questions. The first is: Can Russia defeat NATO? The answer would involve armies, aircraft, logistics, industrial production and eventually nuclear weapons. It is an extraordinarily dangerous proposition.

The second question is subtler: Can Russia make NATO members doubt one another?

That is a much more interesting question.

NATO itself increasingly describes Russian activity in these terms. At a September 19 meeting of NATO military chiefs in Copenhagen, Military Committee chairman Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone described recent airspace violations, drone incidents and hybrid activities as attempts to “test Allied resolve.” He also said Russian investment in what NATO calls cognitive warfare is intended to undermine trust and weaken Alliance unity. That is NATO’s interpretation of Russian behavior rather than an independently provable window into Kremlin decision-making, but it is revealing of the problem Alliance planners believe they face.

The European Union has reached a similar assessment. It says Russian-linked hybrid activity since the invasion of Ukraine has included sabotage, cyberattacks, interference operations, disruption of infrastructure and information manipulation, and describes the broader campaign as seeking to destabilize European states and undermine support for Ukraine. Recent EU statements have specifically characterized these actions as attempts to produce fear and distrust within European societies. Moscow has repeatedly rejected accusations that it is waging such a hybrid campaign.

This is where the concept of the “gray zone” becomes important. A conventional invasion produces clarity. If Russian armored units crossed the Polish border tomorrow morning, there would not be much philosophical debate about whether Poland had been attacked. NATO governments would still have enormous decisions to make, but identifying the event would not be particularly difficult.

Hybrid confrontation is almost the opposite. Its strategic usefulness often comes from uncertainty.

A telecommunications cable mysteriously breaks. A railway system experiences a cyberattack. A warehouse supplying Ukraine catches fire. GPS signals disappear over part of the Baltic. An unidentified drone crosses a border. A Russian aircraft briefly enters NATO airspace. A ship behaves aggressively toward another country’s military aircraft. A political information campaign amplifies an existing domestic disagreement.

None of those events looks like the beginning of World War III.

That is precisely the point.

A 2026 CSIS analysis describes Europe as occupying a gray zone between peace and war in which Russian cyber and information operations can erode European cohesion while staying below the threshold that would reliably provoke a conventional military response. Whether every suspected incident is attributable to Moscow is a separate evidentiary question, and attribution is often one of the central difficulties. But strategically, ambiguity itself can be useful.

Consider the difference between destroying a NATO military unit and creating an argument among NATO governments.

Destroying the unit requires weapons, exposes the attacker to retaliation and produces an obvious victim. Creating the argument can be dramatically cheaper. If Poland believes an incident was deliberate while another NATO government calls for further investigation, Russia has learned something about Alliance decision-making. If one government demands retaliation while another fears escalation, the political disagreement becomes almost as important as whatever physical damage occurred.

That suggests a different way of thinking about Russian probing around NATO’s borders.

The objective does not necessarily have to be territorial gain. The objective may be information.

How quickly does NATO respond?

Which governments hesitate?

What level of provocation produces a coordinated response?

What level produces arguments?

How much uncertainty is necessary before public opinion begins opposing escalation?

What happens if an incident kills nobody? What happens if it kills one person? What happens if Moscow says it was accidental? What happens if responsibility cannot immediately be established?

These are questions that can potentially be explored without ever ordering an armored division across a NATO border.

And that is why a hypothetical Russian attack on the Baltic states would make more strategic sense as the culmination of such a process than as its beginning.

Imagine that years of increasingly aggressive probing had convinced Moscow that NATO was politically brittle. Perhaps governments repeatedly argued about attribution. Perhaps American leaders signaled reluctance to become involved in small European confrontations. Perhaps European publics increasingly concluded that incidents around the Baltic were not worth risking a larger war. Perhaps NATO responses consistently arrived late enough that Russia developed confidence it could create a fait accompli before the Alliance made a decision.

Only then does something like the Suwałki Gap become truly tempting.

The military objective might still be limited: sever the land connection between Poland and the Baltic states, seize some territory or manufacture some supposed security crisis involving Kaliningrad. But the strategic objective would be much larger.

Russia would be asking NATO the most important question NATO can ever be asked:

Do you really mean it?

Suppose Russian forces occupied a small amount of Lithuanian territory and immediately stopped. Moscow announces that it has no intention of proceeding farther. It proposes negotiations. It warns that any NATO attack on Russian forces could produce catastrophic escalation. It perhaps puts nuclear forces on heightened alert for emphasis.

Suddenly NATO’s overwhelming aggregate military superiority becomes almost secondary.

The real battle takes place in Washington, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, London, Rome, Ankara and the other Allied capitals.

Is recovering that territory worth a European war?

Is it worth risking Russian missile attacks?

Is it worth losing thousands of soldiers?

Is it worth even a small possibility of nuclear escalation?

That is the Russian victory condition that deserves more attention.

Not Russian tanks reaching Paris.

Not the conquest of Poland.

Not recreating the Soviet Union.

Rather, a situation in which NATO possesses the military capability to reverse Russian aggression but cannot assemble the political will to use it.

If that happened once, the consequences would extend far beyond whichever patch of territory was originally contested. Estonia would immediately have to reconsider what NATO protection actually meant. So would Latvia and Lithuania. Poland would begin making decisions on the assumption that collective defense might fail. Finland and Sweden would reconsider their security calculations. Countries farther west would confront the same uncomfortable question from the opposite direction: if the guarantee failed once, what exactly were they obligated to risk the next time?

Article 5 would still exist on paper.

But deterrence operates primarily in people’s heads.

Once adversaries ceased believing in it, NATO could possess thousands of aircraft, tanks, ships and nuclear weapons while being strategically weaker than it had been before the crisis.

That helps explain why NATO leaders react so strongly even to incidents that appear militarily minor. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said this month that Russia wants to divide the Alliance and reduce its support for Ukraine; NATO’s public position is that the response should therefore be solidarity rather than reciprocal hesitation. Again, this is NATO’s stated assessment of Russian intent, not neutral proof of every alleged Russian operation. But it illustrates how Alliance leaders understand the contest: unity itself has become part of the battlefield.

There is an irony here. If weakening NATO is indeed an important Russian goal, many Russian actions since 2022 have produced the opposite short-term result. Finland and Sweden joined NATO. European defense budgets have increased substantially. NATO has reinforced its eastern flank. Germany is permanently stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania. The Alliance has expanded its planning for infrastructure resilience, cyberattacks, hybrid warfare and rapid reinforcement.

This doesn’t mean the political strategy has disappeared. It means the contest has become recursive.

Russia probes NATO cohesion.

NATO responds by demonstrating cohesion.

Russia observes that response and adjusts.

NATO changes its defenses again.

The danger is that both sides can gradually climb an escalation ladder while believing they are merely signaling.

And that brings us to the deepest problem with the idea that Russia might want to weaken NATO rather than fight it: a strategy designed to avoid war can accidentally produce one.

Gray-zone operations work because they hover near boundaries. But boundaries are not always visible. One country’s warning is another country’s provocation. One military sees a drone approaching critical infrastructure and shoots it down. Another military interprets the shootdown as escalation. A cyberattack unexpectedly shuts down a hospital. A missile that was supposedly intended for Ukraine lands several kilometers inside NATO territory. Soldiers die.

Suddenly governments are making decisions that neither side expected them to make.

This may be the central paradox of NATO-Russia relations in the coming years. Moscow has strong reasons not to fight NATO directly. NATO has equally strong reasons to avoid a war with Russia. Yet precisely because outright war is so unattractive, competition gets pushed into the ambiguous territory immediately below it.

That territory is becoming crowded.

Sabotage. Cyber operations. Drones. Electronic warfare. Airspace incursions. Information operations. Infrastructure incidents. Maritime confrontations. Political intimidation.

The temptation is to look at each one individually and conclude that it isn’t serious enough to matter.

But perhaps that is the wrong unit of analysis.

The strategic question isn’t necessarily whether Russia can win any particular confrontation.

It is whether, after enough confrontations, NATO becomes a little slower, a little more divided and a little less certain that its members will take enormous risks for one another.

Because the greatest Russian victory over NATO would not require defeating a single American division.

It would occur the moment Russia became convinced that it didn’t have to.

Something Curious Is Afoot Between The USA And Russia

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I just don’t know what to make of this. The head of the CIA went to Moscow today to talk to Putin about something…then left within a few hours. It doesn’t make any sense.

I just can’t imagine that Russia would attack NATO. It only has an economy equal to Italy’s. Yes, it has nukes, but it’s not like they would ever use them.

I suppose another possibility is Putin is thinking about using tactical nukes in Ukraine and the Americans were warning him not to think about it.

The Reason Why This Nobel Peace Prize – Greenland Thing May Bite Trump Is Its Simplicity

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about what’s going on in the US right now is everyone is distracted that Trump can get away with seemingly anything before anyone notices enough to look up from their video game play.

But, occasionally, something does break through and usually it’s because of one thing: it’s simple.

It’s simple enough that the late night talk show hosts can make a joke about it without any explanation.

Trump wants to take over Greenland through force because he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize — how much more simple can it get?

I don’t think that anything is going to really happen — at least in the United States — because of these Greenland-Nobel Prize shenanigans on Trump’s part, but I do think it’s going to leave a little bit of a mark.

People will couch things that happen later in terms of, “well at least Trump isn’t starting a war because he didn’t get the Nobel Peace prize.”

The issue is that it’s still up to the Europeans to do something about Trump. The US is “Trumplandia” now so, lulz, we can’t do anything. But if the Europeans don’t blink, then that just MIGHT have some sort of political consequences for Trump in some shape or form.

Europe Needs To Stop Appeasing Trump & Stand Up To Him In A Constructive, Concrete Manner

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh boy. It definitely seems as though Europe has the opportunity to do what the US population — to date — just hasn’t been able to do: stand up to Mad King Trump.

There is a small chance that if Europe collectively took a swing at Mad King Trump and actually clocked him that that in itself, MIGHT break the spell the US population is under and cause something to happen.

The thing about Trump to date is he’s been nuts, but just sane enough that people are willing to ignore the deranged part of his personality. But, with this weird letter to Europeans, we may — just maybe — have crossed some sort of Rubicon that SHOULD cause Europeans to stand up against Trump’s lunacy.


And, yet, in this New Age of Trumplandia that we live in, anything is possible. I guess it’s possible that Europeans will back down and let Trump have Greenland. Ugh. Do something, Europe. Anything.

Civil War / Revolution ‘Problem Areas’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I do not want a civil war. I do not want a revolution. But everyone else seems to have these potential events on the brain, so let’s contemplate some “problem areas.”

The first thing to remember is if things get really bad, and it seems like there is going to be a civil war or revolution, many, many, many people are going to flee their homes so where they actually live fits their politics better. This is going to be not only scary, but the first real sign that the USA is going to implode soon.

And, remember, the nastiness thing about civil war or revolution is all those Blue cities in Red states will be flashpoints for some pretty horrible, horrific events. Many people will die. It’s even possible that crazed rural people will “empty” a city and murder its residents in Kill Fields-like cold blood.

Yikes.

Here are some areas around the country that will be real problems in the event of a civil war or revolution.

  1. Virginia
    This is an obvious problem area. Virginia is two states, one Red, one Blue fused together who hate each other with growing rage. If the country implodes then the state will implode into intra-state political violence. It’s going to be like the Balkans in Virginia with very messy attempts to unite the state one way or another. A lot — A LOT — of people will die needlessly for a very dumb reason
  2. Oregon
    This state also is kind of two states fused together. I don’t know the intra-state politics of Oregon very well, but it’s my impression that its coast is liberal and its interior is conservative. I could see the state imploding like Virginia and a there being a real attempt by the Reds to take Portland out of spite, if nothing else.
  3. Ohio
    This is not as obvious, but Ohio is very much like, say, Poland. It’s got high population density and it’s strategic. It’s also very Red and I could see if Blues somehow got to the point where they were re-uniting the nation under their standard that Ohio would probably be a bloodbath the likes of which have not been seen since WW2.

    And, lastly, remember that if there is a revolution or civil war that WMD will be used by both sides AND there could be a race war in the South. So, there you go. Hopefully we won’t have to think about any of this in any serious way in the real world — ever.

‘realignment’

The American Century is over. Full stop. We’ve got a clown in the White House, and whether by accident or design, he’s doing a remarkable job of tearing the country apart. Some days it’s hard not to wonder if Trump is secretly working for Moscow.

If we were being honest with ourselves, we’d face reality: it’s time to “bring the boys home.” Slash the defense budget. Pull the troops back. Admit we can’t afford to be the world’s policeman anymore—especially when our own social safety net has been gutted under the same excuse of “saving money.” The logical move would be to embrace Fortress America. The world might collapse into chaos, but at least we’d be honest about who we are and what we’re willing (or unwilling) to do.

There is, oddly enough, one possible silver lining: if we stop spending trillions overseas, maybe we could finally afford something like Universal Basic Income. Maybe. But let’s be real—our leaders have shown us who they are. If there’s extra cash lying around, they’d rather chase trillionaire status than fix inequality.

And inequality is the elephant in the room. The gap between the haves and have-nots is now so obscene that it feels unstable. I don’t think revolution or civil war is likely, but I can imagine a scenario where tech upheaval—AI, automation, the looming Singularity—pushes the poor and working class past their breaking point.

Do I think it’ll happen? No. But am I worried enough to keep one eye on the possibility? Yeah.

We’re Doomed — Goodluck

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Unless something really, really, really unexpected happens, we’re totally fucked in regards to MAGA going forward. Or, put another way, there seems to be a spectrum when it comes to MAGA: either we go full blown autocracy or there’s a civil war / revolution.

I just don’t see us having a civil war / revolution, so autocracy it is. Though, I will admit that we have something of a slow cold civil war going on at the moment. The country is being torn apart by macro forces beyond anyone’s control.

There are all sorts of solutions had Democrats gotten there act together, say, in 2015, but we were all so busy assuming the good times would last forever that we didn’t realize how important it would when Biden decided NOT to run in 2016.

And, yet, because Trump is such a both weird and inevitable historical character, he, or someone much like him, was inevitable in American political history starting around 2016. Something about the social progress that happened during Obama’s second term really cracked the minds of conservative white Americans. As such, I fear someone like Trump was going to arise as an reaction.

But, the point is — it’s over. The America I knew and loved is no more. The plum of autocratic smoke from Mt. Trump has reached the horizon, to use an extended metaphor. Even under the best of circumstances, it would take a generation to fix all the fucking damage that Trump and MAGA have done to the country.

So, America is going to grow weaker, have more income inequality and probably eventually align itself with other autocratic states. And that doesn’t even begin to address what the fuck is going to happen when the technological Singularity finally happens.

Anyway. It’s over, folks. Good luck.

‘New World Order’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

All of this is very speculative, but if you take Trump’s expressed desires to their logical conclusion, it seem inevitable there will be some sort of “New World Order” established by him soon.

What I imagine it would look like is something like this — the USA will destroy NATO and, instead, align itself with Russia, Hungary and Turkey. It will begin to pull troops out of nations across the globe, the better to police the streets of an ever-more-militarized America.

All of this will happen in the context of taxes being cut and cut and cut for the wealthy — probably to zero, the rise of AI / androids and maybe, just maybe the replacement of the entire social safety net with a very weak and low UBI. And there probably will be a 30% VAT.

That, my dear friends, seems to be our “day after tomorrow” future.

The only potential “zag” that might happen is, well, some sort of revolution / civil war. If that happened, it would be very, very nasty. I could definitely see a race war happening in the USA as well as the use of WMD throughout the country by both sides.

Anyway. That seems like one potential future for us going forward.