Ken said: 'I have never known, even in the cold war, a time in which our rulers were so out of touch with reality that they mouth these kinds of insanities so glibly.'

Pride before a fall? There are surely going to be some consequences in the pipeline for the UK for all this sabre-rattling and escalation, possibly not just the consequence of the economy getting wrecked. Giving the American's yappy attack dog a good hard smack might be just the thing to get the hegemon to back off and cement the new multipolar order (compare Sue C's analogy of the UK as the boorish drunk always picking fights with people). That said, for all the talk of Putin making nuclear threats, I think the real danger will be a first strike, with or without deniability, from the West when it sees its power start to slip away beyond retrieval. I'm sure the graun will find a way to justify it as a perhaps wrong-headed but ultimately well-intentioned humanitarian act.

jeers,
I