From the article, more at the link (bold added):

U.S. and European NATO hawks and liberal interventionists want above all else, to see Putin, humiliated and repudiated. Many in the West want Putin’s blood-soaked head atop a pike towering above the ‘city gate’, visible to all as a resounding warning to those who challenge their ‘rules-based international order’.

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Yet the hawks see that they dare not – cannot – go the ‘whole hog’. Despite the belligerence and posturing, they want the kinetic aspect to the conflict confined within the borders of Ukraine: No U.S. boots on the ground (though those whose very existence cannot pass our lips are already there, and have been ‘calling the shots’).

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The Pentagon, for one (at least), does not relish risking a war with Russia that escalates badly, and could evolve to the use of nuclear weapons. (This stance however, is now being challenged by leading neo-cons who argue that fears of Russia’s resort to nuclear capabilities are exaggerated, and should be placed to one side).

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There is indeed a major strategic error – that is the decision taken by the West primordially to fight a financial war against Russia – which may well prove to be the undoing of the western war agenda.

Yet, contrary to the G7’s expectation that western sanctions would collapse the Russian economy, the FT is acknowledging: “Whisper it quietly … But Russia’s financial system seems [today] to be recovering from the initial sanction shock”

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The second strategic error is the failure to understand that Russia’s economic resilience does not stem alone from the EU continuing to purchase gas from Russia. But rather, it is by Russia playing both sides of the equation – i.e. linking the rouble to gold, and then linking energy payments to the rouble – that its currency has risen.

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In this way, the Bank of Russia is fundamentally altering the entire working assumptions of the global trade system – (i.e. by replacing evanescent dollar trading by solid commodity-backed, currency trading) – whilst at the same time triggering a shift to the role of gold back to being a bulwark underpinning the monetary system.

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Paradoxically, the U.S. itself prepared the ground for this shift to trading in local currency by its unprecedented seizure of Russia’s reserves, and the threat to Russia’s gold (if it could only lay its hands on it). This spooked other states who feared that they might be next in line, incurring Washington’s whimsical ‘displeasure’. More than ever, the non-West now is open to local currency trading.

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This ‘boycott-Russian-energy’ strategy is ‘curtains for Europe’, of course. There is no way for Europe to replace Russian energy from other sources in coming years: Not from America; nor from Qatar, nor Norway. But the European leadership, consumed by a frenzy of ‘moral outrage’ at a flood of atrocity images from Ukraine, and a sense that the “liberal order” at any cost must prevent a loss in the Ukraine conflict, seems ready to go ‘whole hog’.

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Well, what might the West’s Plan III be? The war frenzy; the visceral hatred; the language which seems designed to exclude a ‘coming to political terms’ with Putin, or the Moscow leadership is still there, and the Neo-cons are smelling opportunity...

The Neo-cons are cock-a-hoop that financial war is failing. From their perspective it puts military action back on the table, with a new ‘front’ opening: An attack on the original key premise that a nuclear exchange with Russia must be avoided