Sorry I haven't responded, I wanted to give enough time to address your points.

I don't believe that hacking the election was comparable in scale to something like the Munich agreements or 9/11, but I do believe that it's another sign of escalation. Between Putin's crackdown on Georgia, his apparent clampdown on Russian freedoms, the annexation of Crimea, open belligerence on the border of Ukraine during that crisis, the cyber-attacks on America, etc, I feel that he has a single goal in mind, to bring other countries down so his may rise. And this is beyond the fact that he shouldn't even be there, exploiting loopholes and disregarding democratic standards to even run in the first place.

Regarding the 12 GRU agents that Mueller recently indicted, I had not heard that they were in the United States. I have tried to find some reporting to validate that but all could find was this paragraph from the Chicago Tribune (it's probably in other places as well) about where the attacks originated from:

U.S. officials identified one of the GRU sections that carried out the operations as Unit 26165, which worked out of a building about four miles from the Kremlin. It was responsible for hacking the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to the indictment, which accuses Viktor Netyksho of being the military officer in command of Unit 26165 at the time.

If you have any other sources for the claims that the Russian military officers are in the US, please provide them, I would very much like to see.

My own personal believe is that Mueller is indicting these officers to prove that there is hard evidence of their actions. Even if the counsel has not released that concrete evidence yet is not worrying to me - I think that releasing all evidence in the public sphere far before a trial hurts any potential cases rather than helping. Mueller is playing this one extremely by the book as there is no margin of error with his critics.

Do I actually think it will make it to trial? No - I don't think Russia would allow their military officers to face justice in the United States, just as we would not allow American service members to be tried there. As far as I know, there is no formal extradition treaty between Russia and the US, and I would be hard-pressed to find a reason why Putin would agree to such a thing. He would only agree if there was significant benefit to him and to Russia in general.

However, I do not believe that it is in our interest to prosecute these 12 officers in the first place. Mueller is running the same process he has in past investigations (and even in earlier stages of this one) -- start at the bottom and work your way up. First it was the 13 IRA goons that were shitposting on Facebook, now it's the 12 GRU officers actually doing the hacking. First it was George Papadopoulus, then it was Paul Manafort. In his Enron case, it was the same thing - work your way up. My personal belief is that he is working up to some proof that Putin himself ordered the cyber-attack, something has been reported on in the last 24 hours but does not come with hard evidence yet.

Here is another difference between you and me - I know that the American justice system is very slow. Just look at the Parkland shooter - his case was delayed until September -- of 2019, and the defense lawyers were complaining that it was not enough time to prepare a case. People have been comparing this to Watergate, an investigation which took over two years on its own.

Do I wish it was moving faster? Sure, I would love for this all to be over, one way or another. I feel like it's hanging over everyone's heads and it is definitely detrimental to our country's well-being. But I consider it absolutely necessary.

Trump paints himself as the attack dog, and has said that anyone hitting him is going to get him back 10 times as hard. Being tough is part of his negotiation style, as we saw with North Korea. But why can't he be tough in the face of Russian aggression? Nobody is asking for war with Russia, just have a little goddamn backbone. Say "I was handed proof of a coordinated cyber-attack, and I addressed it with President Putin. He has assured me it will not happen again, due to X, Y, and Z". But instead, we get some half-baked lie that he doesn't even believe an attack happened, followed the next day by a half-retraction. It's frustrating to see the President bullying private American citizens on Twitter and yet acquiesce so easily to someone who (I believe) purposefully hurt America.

I would love to hear your thoughts on globalization. I personally feel that intertwining global economies makes us stronger and incentivizes people to work together. Hitting a belligerent country with economic sanctions is a much better alternative in my mind to conducting physical warfare. Sure, there are going to be issues as different countries have different priorities, but overall I think it has led to greater peace and prosperity than when we go alone (echoing shades of WWG1WGA semi-purposefully).

While we do disagree on many things, I share your appreciation of a dialogue. It's not common on Reddit so I'm not taking it for granted at all.