Sarah Paine

And they understood that war is easy to get into, hard to get out of, very unpredictable.

So for them, it was proxy wars.

And they loved it when the United States got into hot wars.

What is not to like about the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where the United States just tied down and Americans tearing each other's eyes out about these things?

Great, great, great.

Russians stayed out of it until after Brezhnev's stroke,

which that's when they make the big boo-boo in Afghanistan.

And they go into Afghanistan, and then all of a sudden we have loads of fun giving Stinger missiles to the other sides, inflicting costs on the Russians.

And the person who wanted to get into Afghanistan is Yuri Andropov, who was not a veteran.

The uniformed military of Russia said, don't go into Afghanistan.

Well, Andropov and friends ignored it, did their thing.

If you look at Putin, he has risen to power on a diet of hot wars.

He comes to power in the early phase of the Second Chechen War, where he levels the Chechen capital of Grozny and leaves most of the rest of Chechnya an environmental waste zone.

But he sorts that one out.

And then he gets quite popular for his war with Georgia in 2008, where he detaches South Ossetian Asia from Georgia.

Now he wants to build a naval base in Abkhazia because he's having trouble with his base on Crimea.

And then when he eliminates term limits for himself in 2012, which isn't very popular in Russia, he solves that by going into Ukraine in 2014 and walks off with about 7% of Ukrainian territory at very little cost.

And Russians think that's great.

So if you look at these little stepping stones, this is the way continentalists look at it.

You've got all these little places lined up.