Diplomacy, compromise and all soft stuff that doesn't work with Russian culture. They see it as weakness, and push further. But when you show them force, that they can respect.
Source?
I’m being sarcastic. This didn’t happen, though many people advised Kennedy to do exactly that. Had the U.S. done it, we very likely wouldn’t be here today.
And literally every single outcome led to the defacto end of the world, or at least the Northern Hemisphere. Following the outcome of those wargames we shifted to a policy of de-escalation and negotiation - by 1991 the Soviet Union would collapse, their leaders hand in hand with American leaders. At one point Russia was even interested in joining NATO. We could be living in a very different timeline had we chosen to maintain positive ties with mutual respect of interests.
The current escalation is not only the fault of current Russia, but to a large extent US and European countries which decided to take the current path. Russia and other iron curtain countries didn't need to end up being plundered and left at the hands of oligarchs.
Let's forget about Russia for a moment abd look at eastern Germany. Current voting behavior there cannot be blamed on anything other than failure of the West after the collapse of communism to seize the opportunity to create a better integrated Germany. The west German capitalist choose to plunder it, buy old factories and sell the scrap metal instead of keeping them operational and gradually modernizing. All the wealth of the people there were just evaporated after unification. Now we have the political crisis as a result.
This now classical approach where the US is some absolute evil confronted by the nice guy Stalinists could be funny if not widespread
I feel that in recent times this degree of objectivity, and even humility, has largely been lost. It perhaps started most clearly with the wargames around a conflict with Iran - 'Millennium Challenge 2002'. [1] The problem we had is that the US lost that wargame, badly. So rather than learn from that, we changed the rules and the entire expensive exercise turned into a scripted event where the good guys naturally won and the bad guys naturally lost.
Another issue is I think an increasingly large number of countries being coerced into no longer acting in their own self interest. This is a sure-fire way to enter into catastrophe because the reality is that the coercer often cares very little for the coerced, even more so when the coerced's loss is the coercer's gain.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002