Russia poses 'existential' threat to US

[ingemann]

Is Russia really that dangerous?

More than that - right now it's on par with ISIL (though - in different ways) - one of 2 biggest threats to Western world

Um, no.

Only in the sense that it is a much bigger threat than ISIL.

Almost every state in the world is a bigger existential threat than ISIS. ISIS are bunch of goat-inking slave keeping vermins, who have succeed in filling a power vacuum, but who will be exterminated the first time Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran decides to use five minute on finding a power sharing compromise or the minute USA decides to send in land troops.

[ingemann]

Is Russia really that dangerous?

More than that - right now it's on par with ISIL (though - in different ways) - one of 2 biggest threats to Western world

Um, no.

Only in the sense that it is a much bigger threat than ISIL.

Almost every state in the world is a bigger existential threat than ISIS. ISIS are bunch of goat-inking slave keeping vermins, who have succeed in filling a power vacuum, but who will be exterminated the first time Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran decides to use five minute on finding a power sharing compromise or the minute USA decides to send in land troops.

So you're saying that ISIL is going to around for quite a while. As you pointed out ISIL isn't a threat to the US, so we're not going to send in ground troops beyond maybe some special forces in Iraq. The idea that Iran and the Saudis would agree on anything is also laughable. I wouldn't be surprised now if the Syrian Civil War didn't last another decade so as to be at least as long as Lebanon's was.

It's not entirely unlikely that ISIS will still be around ten years from now. But it can also die in other ways; from Iraqi Shia Militia continuing into Syria after they have defeated them in Iraq, the Syrian government breaking the west Syrian rebels and afterward cleaning ISIS up, internal collapse (quite likely in Syria, less likely in Iraq) mixed with tribal uprisings against them. I wouldn't be surprised to see the end of ISIS being swift and brutal. Eastern Syria and western Iraq are not Afghanistan it's much easier to clean up and ISIS have little local backing in Syria.