“Good analogy, Dave. Hitler initially had no intentions of occupying France or planning an invasion of Britain, but when it came to it, he found it much easier than he’d expected. Then he realized that if he inflicted a crushing defeat on his enemies, they’d never be able to come back at him. The President is not only paranoid with his fear of NATO, but he’s also paranoid because he knows that the only way he’ll leave the Kremlin is feet first . . . either as a result of old age, or with a bullet in the back of his head. If he’s to make it the former, he’s got to stay in power, come what may, and that means he’s got to keep going. If he’s found it so easy to take the Baltics, what is to stop him marching into Warsaw? Or even Berlin? He’s making the age-old mistake of thinking that war has a logic and that he can control it. But no one can control the dynamic of war once Pandora’s box is open. He’d have done well to have studied Clausewitz.”

McKinlay, recalling his Commandant’s paper on Carl von Clausewitz at Camberley, quoted from the Prussian philosopher of war: “War has its own grammar, but not its own logic.” Then he added, “And he’s also forgotten that strategy has a human dimension.”

“That’ll be our opportunity, Dave,” continued Howard. “In his quest for dominion. What do the Russians call it . . . Derzhava. He’s failed to take account of the reality of war; that there will always be completely unexpected turns of events that mean his intention to settle for one thing will become unrealistic and he’ll have to settle for something else. He thinks he can apply his professed A2/AA—anti-access/area denial—strategy to lock us out of the Baltics. But he’s not thought through the second- and third-order implications of that. Not least the fact that people in the Baltics won’t settle for it. And it’s my guess that most of the Russian speakers there will be outraged by what he’s done and join the opposition. They may have been getting hot under the collar with the internal politics of some of what was going on over there. But that’s the very point. It’s politics, and when push comes to shove, I’ll wager they much prefer living in an imperfect Western democracy than under the President’s boot. Look at the numbers of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who’ve been fighting the Russians there.”