After being run out of Afghanistan, the US government started lecturing the Taliban on how the US government expected the Taliban to behave. That is, the side that lost pretended to dictate terms to the side that won. From the US State Department web site:
“The United States condemns in the strongest terms the Taliban’s indefensible decision to ban women from universities (etc.) … The Taliban cannot expect to be a legitimate member of the international community until they respect the rights of all in Afghanistan. This decision will come with consequences for the Taliban.”
Oh, consequences, huh? Oh no! You just got your asses handed to you. “Consequences,” LOL. You people.
The psychology of this is hard to parse, but presumably has two purposes (insofar as one can ascribe purpose to the spastic emotional reactions of insane people): One was to front the image of “We’re not defeated! We’re totally not! We’re not cowed! In fact, you know what? WE’RE going to dictate terms to YOU!” It’s a weird mutant leftist version of putting on a brave face.
The other purpose is, I suppose, the vain hope that if they bluff that they’re tough guys, the other side might believe the bluff and submit to the US’s demands. Obviously this is insane, since the Taliban just chased the US out of Afghanistan. Maybe it’s induced by long habit, by decades of making such statements and having countries submit to them because they feared US military power. Wake the fuck up, State Department.
This takes us to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Regarding that conflict, one of the US war faction’s strategies is bluff. It consists of acting like the US is still an unlimited hyperpower (which it never really was) and hoping that that leads, by some sort of psychological magic, to Russia surrendering. So we get statements along the lines of, “The US will not tolerate defiance of its sanctions against Russia,” and “There will be consequences for countries that help Russia to evade the sanctions” (Oh no, “consequences”!) and “The State Department today warned China that if it ships weapons to Russia then…” Oh, “warned,” huh? And then there’s “We might be forced to put US troops in Ukraine,” the implication being that Russia wouldn’t dare to directly attack those troops. Why they think that, who knows.
So the US war faction is attempting victory through bluff.
This takes me to an incident from April: This tweet contains a 10-second video of illegal immigrants from Mexico strolling across the New Mexico border into the US. (Note to non-US readers: New Mexico is a US state that borders Mexico.) The tweeter: “Unbelievable. A Border Patrol agent in Sunland Park, NM just told us a mountain in the United States is ‘not ours’ anymore. ‘It’s theirs.’ Referring to [Mexican drug] Cartels. We literally spent five minutes on Mt. Cristo Rey and a group of illegals breezed by.”
(The X/Twitter link is spotty, so here’s a news story prompted by the tweet and video.)
Memo to AINO’s self-appointed ruling class: You can’t bluff foreign governments – e.g. Russia’s, China’s – into being scared of you if you can’t even hold your own territory. Deliberate immigration as a demographic weapon is one thing. This is not that; this is another nation taking a piece of your territory from you: note the Border Patrol agent’s statement that the mountain belongs to Mexico now.
This while your plan is to bluff your way to victory by tricking Putin into thinking you’re too formidable to fight.
You cannot do this.
You can’t be ass-raped out of your own territory – by drug dealers from a second-world nation, no less – and make other countries fear you.
(It’s made all the more absurd by this obvious fact: Because policy is not to defend the US-Mexico border, Russian saboteurs can simply go to Mexico and then walk into the US. From there the damage they can do is incalculable. Yes, to YOU. Russians know damn well that their enemies are in Washington DC, New York City, et cetera, and not e.g. Idaho.)
If bluff is all you have, it’s time to put this to bed. You are not going to conquer Russia.
Let alone Russia and China.
Neurotoxin 
The bluff might target their own population. If the soldiers (conscripts and volunteers) believe the bluff for long enough to get them deployed and the war machinerie going, then they will likely get killed.
Look at Ukraine. Do you think winning the war is the primary objective for the Ukrainian government? At first, it wasn’t that difficult to draft people into the army, there were even some volunteers. By now, everybody not yet in the army tries to dodge the draft and uses increasingly desparate means to do so. What would a Ukrainian government do differently if getting as much Ukrainians killed as possible were not the primary objective?
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It is indeed plain that some governments are working to genocide the populations of “their” countries. That includes the US and Ukraine. But I was thinking more of externally-directed communications, as in, “The State Department warned China that…”
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