… at this point in the cycle the only way anyone will interpret anything you say about Biden is that it’s either for or against his reelection
You linked an article, you don’t have any additional information, if you keep posting the same thing the only thing left to talk about is your motives 
My motives are to point out that it’s weird that people are cool with the president sharing classified/secret/sensitive/whatever information with donors. I want Biden to win. That doesn’t mean I’m incapable of calling out bullshit from him when I see it.
… and that’s not the topic here, is it
As everyone suspected, your real issue is not with the president, whom you support — or whom you need to pretend to support — instead your agenda is to start shit with strangers on the internet who are not having the feelings you want them to have
When you say ‘every conceivable scenario’ and that they do do ‘especially silly’ ones; does that just include exceptionally unlikely but architecturally plausible(urgent need to annex Canada, say, seems most unlikely to arise; but would be nontrivial if it needed to be done); or does it genuinely include ‘especially silly’ ones on the scale of “Antigua becomes hyper-militarist bellicose nuclear power”; rather than just “Antigua: what’s the best regime change you could deliver?”
My layman’s assumption would be that some things are just too contrafactual to be educational(unless they are being used strictly as a name change/palette swap, the way some video games use “North Korea” as an opposing force when they really mean “China”; but don’t want the hassle of upsetting someone commercially relevant and prickly about their image); but I’m curious because me spitballing is of obviously lower relevance than someone who is actually familiar with the matter.
And films.
Russia’s threats were widely publicized at the time, so the threat of nuclear war was not at all classified information.
Now, let’s look again at the direct quote from the NYT.
So I’m not really sure what you think Biden did wrong here. Especially when citing an article that specifically says that Biden didn’t say what you say he said.
You do realize that the journalist had other sources in the administration and is not just reporting straight from Biden’s mouth, right?
The details these new articles are providing weren’t widely known at the time. The public wasn’t aware of how close Russia was to using nuclear weapons.
And how does the detail about Biden not telling the donors that it came from classified information make it OK?
My entire issue is that he provided sensitive information to members of the public, but only those rich and connected enough to be at his fund raiser. How’s this OK? Is Rupert Murdoch’s son more entitled to knowing we’re at risk of nuclear annihilation that you and I are?
And neither were the people at the fundraiser. All of the context in the article came from later interviews with unnamed administration sources. Only in hindsight does it becomes clear that Biden was talking about the threat of nuclear war based on classified intelligence.
Perhaps some of the people there that night might have thought, “Gee, the Russian threats must be serious,” but they did not know it.
The president has access to all sorts of classified intelligence. Would you rather he not talk about anything outside of the public record because people might make inferences about why the topic is on his mind?
Oh, for sure, and I have no idea what’s happening on the top levels at NSA, NATO, etc. Those are the agencies game-planning the global power structure questions and scenarios. But in this case specifically, Russia deploying tactical nukes, it was very much in the realm of reality to the degree that Lavrov explicitly threatened their use.
As far as “silly” scenarios, assuming we mean highly improbable, but not impossible like your Antigua scenario (Ok, maybe that’s in the realm of impossible, but I know where you’re going), they are definitely running through scenarios by the moment, especially in the midst of an emerging conflict. The one that immediately came to mind was trump’s extrajudicial assassination of Iran’s Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Before that action was even authorized, they certainly had detailed contingencies for every conceivable response scenario… and then the inconceivable happened and Iran mistakenly shot down a passenger aircraft. I’m sure there was a generalized “international incident” or “mass civilian casualty” set of scenarios, but I’m sure they also had to adapt them in real-time to confront the emerging reality.
So, with the caveat that I was just a dumb soldier with no deep insight beyond seeing dozens of scenarios played out, there are groups within every branch of government that is concerned with national security actively playing out and reassessing scenarios constantly. And if they failed to overlook a high-probability scenario like this, it would be a complete failure on the part of numerous agencies akin to 9/11 where you saw a complete strategic collapse at the local, state and federal levels.
And I think you nailed the best-case-scenario planning with:
Tangentially related:
Author:
Haydn Belfield has been an academic project manager at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk for the past seven years.
Sounds like a real uplifting job. /XLs
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