Why stop with Alaska and Eastern Europe? The whole world is Russia. And the moon says dasvidaniya too and so do Mars and Alpha Centauri.
Does it matter? He’d claim that Putin would be too scared to do that on his watch, or that maybe he’s right about Russia “owning” Alaska, or he’d talk about Joe Biden failing to do anything, etc… There is no point in pushing him on policy, since he’s full of shit and never tells the actual truth about anything… And it’s not like his voters or the GOP voters in general care anyway… most of them would rather hand the whole country over to Putin than vote for a Democrat, even with an obvious fascist as their front-runner…
and then he’d broker the deal for selling it back, pocketing an appropriate commission.
I doubt it… he’s too scared of old Putey-put… he’d just give it to him.
Not to put too fine a point on it (and as @docosc says, not something to bet on), but at one point about 75% of all the Polaris warheads were duds due to a design error.
At least the rest of the US was explicitly stolen, though - the land explored, mapped and the native peoples murdered or subdued. Alaska wasn’t even stolen. It was colonial powers setting up trading posts in one tiny corner, waving expansively at lands they had never even been to and proclaiming (quietly, so the native population wouldn’t hear them), “all that over there is ours, too.” There were internationally accepted rules for how you stole lands, and what happened with Alaska didn’t follow them. It was like one of those sovereign citizens who break into someone’s house and proclaim that they now own it - and everyone just sort of shrugged and went along with it.
Sarah Palin was right, she can see Russia from her house. She’s in Russia!
The figure Wikipedia gives for how much the US paid for “Seward’s Folly” (Alaska) would be worth in 2021 or 2022 was between $125 million and $150 million. But taking into account how much we’ve invested in Alaska (surely Putin doesn’t want us to rip out all the improvements we’ve made since the treaty that he claims is now illegal) and using Donald Trump Real Estate math, I figure if he were willing to pay $125 trillion that would be worth it. [Russia’s GDP in 2021 was 1.779 trillion USD according to Google, so that’s just about 70 years worth of Russia’s GDP.]
Cash in advance, please. No credit or personal checks.
Seriously, Russia has around 400 land-based ICBMs, ~170 sub-based missiles, 70ish “nuclear capable” bombers, various cruise missiles, and admits to (boasts of? lies about?) having about 6000 warheads. Between MRVs and MIRVs, nuclear-capable shorter range aircraft, and the likelihood of smaller, more portable “tactical” nuclear arms being available to local commanders, if Putin orders a nuclear strike the odds of at least one such system working as designed approaches unity.
Russia historically has like their strategic weapons big, to make up for an admitted lack of accuracy, but the recent threats of 150MT bombs for robotic subs and attacks at the Yellowstone supervolcano are ignorable as being both ineffective militarily while ensuring Russia would effectively be nuking itself, probably just propaganda. Even so, a single warhead, not one of the city-stomping 800KT strategic monsters, but a relatively small 10KT tactical missile strike that some desperate commander managed to hack into working order despite the fuel mostly having been drunk, the control modules sold, software sabotaged, and whatever other mischief foreign spy agencies have done to ensure these missiles can’t fly, and lobs it at Ukraine successfully, the Western response will ensure that millions will be dead, even if all the Russians managed to nuke was an empty field somewhere.
The best case scenario, in that sort of instance, would be that there is restraint and a non-nuclear response: that all those billions allocated to nuclear weapon detecting satellites and systems have pinpointed the locations of every warhead; that the stealth, speed, and accuracy of the non-nuclear anti-material missiles so much of humanity’s wealth has been spent on strike fast and true; and that literal fallout from those weapons’ destruction be small and easily contained.
I’m not holding my breath.
He is serious in that this is positioning for Trump (if he wins) to dust of The Art of the Deal and sell it back to him. Which is not beyond Trump to actually do.
ETA Looks like @FGD135 gets a few sips of Coke.
Maybe we can finally trade for Greenland.
We can also count on the lack of amphibious warfare necessities to invade Alaska. Their Pacific Fleet is a barely funded mess wildly outclassed by neighbors Japan and South Korea.
Russia is having a tough enough time invading a neighbor where the logistical train in far shorter. Its ability to take Alaska back are next to nil.
Demand a refund from the Russians, is how he should respond, since that would then give him the cash to pull off his genius deal for Greenland.
Well, let’s be fair here. The US paid Russia $7.2m in 1867, and the US has had an average stock market return of about 10.5% since then, so pay them the lost opportunity cost of that $7.2m and I think they would call it good. By my calculations that comes out to only $46.3 trillion.
How much of that would be lost in various financial panics?
If only I had invested that sum with Bernie Madoff!
This might be a new bit of top grade wankery from the Kremlin. The BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg wrote on Twitter last week that a massive electronic poster had just gone up at a very prominent position in the city with a Putin quote: ‘Russia’s borders do not end anywhere’.
There was some debate if the word actually translates as ‘borders’ or ‘limits’, but since Rosenberg’s a fluent Russian speaker, I assume he knows how it is meant to be read.
There’s a bit more over at:
Was it an entire squadron?
Even if he isn’t.