I assume Western intelligence services are already gaming out what happens if the Putin regime falls. Maybe not in America, though. The Director of National Intelligence appears to be wasting her attention span on some fantasy crusade against Obama, who hasn't been in power for almost 10 years.

But what does happen when the autocratic regime in Russia falls?

Estimates vary, but Russian casualties in Putin's idiotic war are somewhere in the vicinity of a million. That's a lot of dead people to capture a couple of old Soviet steel mill towns.

But, of course, the real reason for this war is that Putin started it out of fear, fear of the example of European democracy flourishing just a few hundred miles from Moscow.

Oddly enough, if Trump and the Europeans really do want to shut down the shadow fleet carrying Russian oil to India and China and Brazil, I understand, too, then things could be fun.