A few things:

(1) Democrats form a circular firing squad whenever things go wrong. If you were not politically active in 2004, 2016 comes as a real shock. If you campaigned and volunteered for John Kerry, 2016 is drearily familiar. Ain't nobody getting elected this year, ain't no amount of liberal self-vitriol going to change laws one iota. Let the poison out. In 2004, Barack Obama was a senatorial candidate who gave the DNC keynote. In 2016, the DNC keynote was Elizabeth Warren. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

(2) Since the end of WWII, the preferred war method is soft power, the exemplars being the Marshall Plan, the Export Import Bank, the World Trade Organization and so on. The trouble with nuclear weapons is you can never use them. They aren't weapons so much as extensions of policy, and their power is in possessing them, not deploying them. Soft power, on the other hand, allows for a great deal of global influence without firing a shot.

(3) The intelligence community disagrees about your assessment of Putin's preferences.

I didn’t notice it at the time, though I was in the room, and the C-SPAN video of the hearing doesn’t capture it, but Democrats told me that there was, at this point, a minor commotion on the dais. King had just revealed that the classified version of the report had concluded “that historically Russians have supported Republicans.”

this is not a controversial conclusion.

I've noticed an alarming trend amongst all this "fake news" - people of conscience and intelligence assuming that if a subject is controversial, the truth of the matter is unknowable. This is not the case. Anthropocentric global warming is changing the climate, medicaid is insurance not charity, Russia meddled in the election to damage the credibility of Hillary Clinton and the goal of disinformation campaigns is to create exactly this sort of uncertainty.

I'd much rather people at gay pride marches attack each others' Stars of David in 2017 than in 2018. By 2018 I expect we'll have our shit together.

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."

Wallace Sayre