Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Mr. X, as I will call him, does not wish to publish this under his own name. He has, however, given me permission to do so. "The Russian regime under Putin," he begins, "doesn’t advance because it is especially devious or intelligent ...

"It scores its victories because its opponents are weak or unintelligent. There’s much that could be done to reverse its gains and deter its aggressions.

"Eastern Ukraine could, with some judicious engagement, become a real cauldron that grinds Russian armor and aircraft to pieces. The airspace-violation game could be pursued as much by the West — which arguably invented the practice — as by Russia.

"Diplomatic staff which serve as assassins’ cover could be radically curtailed. European energy policy could adjust to reduce dependency on the likes of Gazprom. Edward Snowden could find love letters from American agents slipped into his pillowcase.

"Student and tourist visas allowing Russian access to Western knowledge and institutions could drop dramatically. The electronic correspondence of Russian officials could make its way to the Internet.

"Access to international banking, along the model of what was done to Iran, could simply end. The overseas fortunes of every regime figure and family member could simply be confiscated — permanently.

It’s the last one that probably would have the most effect.

But because we are in fact weak and unintelligent, none of these things ever happen. The Russian state as constituted is essentially a parasitic entity that needs the West to survive. The reverse is not the case.

Yet that state conducts itself as an aggressor in nearly every sphere, and suffers little by way of return. Vladimir Putin’s aircraft clipped Estonian — and therefore NATO — airspace en route to Helsinki. This is not an accident.

Russian officialdom has announced that the President of the United States consented to new military agreements in his one on one with the Russian autocrat. No one knows what the agreements are, or even if they exist. This is also not an accident. It will also not change.

Not until we want it to.

--Mr. X

My own addition: @john_sipher, we have but to decide "enough of this" and it's over. But we can only win through our strengths, not our weaknesses. An open society can't truly harden itself against information warfare. We can't build "defenses" against it.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible to stop. It doesn't mean we can't win. We are a military and an economic superpower, and if we decide we've had enough, we can simply crush a shit state like Russia.

Could this escalate to nuclear war? Yes. But so could doing nothing. We are all but begging Putin to take greater and greater risks. One day, he will go too far--so far that even the most ardent American Putinists realize, "We cannot accept this."

The question is not, "How do we make friends with Putin?" We can't. Putin does not want to be our friend. He wants to do to us what we did to the USSR.

So the fight is coming. We can't win by playing his game. We're intellectually and politically incapable of responding to asymmetric warfare. He will always be better at it.

But we are better at the things that really matter. And we will win -- again -- so long as we fight in a way, a time, and a place of *our* choosing.

One more thought: I am sure we have the ability to take down critical Russian infrastructure through cyber attacks (and if we don't, folks, get on the stick).

*We* should not be the ones worrying that Putin will attack our electrical grids and our banks and our power plants.

*He* should be worried about that.

And the lights in Moscow should have gone out long ago.

@threadreaderapp -- please unroll! Thank you. (It is so odd that I *know* this is a bot, but I still can't bring myself to omit the words "please" and "thank you." I suppose years of my parents saying, "What's the magic word?" really did convince me that those are magic words. )