Re: Scoff as much as you like
"They are so skilled at self-deception that they may well believe they can defeat Russia anyway. Otherwise why waste such colossal sums of money on surrounding Russia with bases and weapons?"
For the same reason as most US Gummint money is spent - pork-barrelling for their domestic military-industrial complex. It's been going on for generations - politicians inflate the possible threat out of all proportion to reality (via "military intelligence", my favourite oxymoron), then use that inflated threat as an excuse to put billions of tax-dollars into the trousers of the arms company executives who then fund the campaigns of those selfsame politicians. No real threat is required - it's just a circle of money and political power, fleecing poorer US taxpayers who aren't in the loop - you know, the ones whose resentment was so effectively harnessed by the Trump campaign. Turkeys vote, yet again, for Christmas.
Meanwhile, Putin's posturing works along the same lines, and also has a distinguished history (remember Khruschev's "We will bury you!" speech, when he actually had about two ICBMs, neither of which would probably have worked). But because Russian leaders are not (except in the loosest possible sense) elected, and there is even less freedom of information there than in the US, they don't need vast sums of money to stay in power. So they don't need to actually build any of the weapons they say they are building - or indeed make them technically plausible. They just need to inflate the threat, say they are dealing with it, fake a few videos of scary weapons, and thereby retain enough popular support to avoid being overthrown.
Mr Putin's announcements are not aimed at Americans, any more than Trump's are aimed at Russians. This is really old, tired stuff - please can we have something more original and fun on a Friday afternoon?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
