McCain Wants To Restart the Cold War

[justgotback]

Originally Posted by Frenchy

You are part of the system jgb...You are excused!

I'm a part of the system that is ridding the US of the guys that are here illegally and to do us harm. Why would I need to be excused? I don't think it is necessary......

[LUVMYSIGP225]

[quote=afmo;1085078]keep dreaming...as much as i don't like McCain, Putin has been posturing for a re-do of the cold war for some years./quote]

We have a winner. Could anything be any more true?

I watched an interview with Putin. He reminisces about the "good old days" of the Soviet Union. This guy has actively started flying bomber "training missions" over Alaska and the Northern Pacific again. Bear 'H' Cruise Missile bombers, no less. That right there is a Cold War tactic, and if you ask me the Cold War started up again over 4 years ago, and escalates more by the day.

So, if McCain wants another Cold War, he won't have to look too far. I think he already has it. The Strategic Missile Defense program in Europe will assure that we stay right on the Cold War path. Cool.

I kinda like the red flag with Sickle and Hammer, anyway.

[xds&chevys]

[quote=LUVMYSIGP225;1085700][quote=afmo;1085078]keep dreaming...as much as i don't like McCain, Putin has been posturing for a re-do of the cold war for some years./quote]

We have a winner. Could anything be any more true?

I watched an interview with Putin. He reminisces about the "good old days" of the Soviet Union. This guy has actively started flying bomber "training missions" over Alaska and the Northern Pacific again. Bear 'H' Cruise Missile bombers, no less. That right there is a Cold War tactic, and if you ask me the Cold War started up again over 4 years ago, and escalates more by the day.

So, if McCain wants another Cold War, he won't have to look too far. I think he already has it. The Strategic Missile Defense program in Europe will assure that we stay right on the Cold War path. Cool.

[quote]


I agree, with Korea and I heard today that China has some kind of underwater nuclear program working, we are beginning to see another Cold War

[Etta Place]

Originally Posted by LUVMYSIGP225

We have a winner. Could anything be any more true?

I watched an interview with Putin. He reminisces about the "good old days" of the Soviet Union. This guy has actively started flying bomber "training missions" over Alaska and the Northern Pacific again. Bear 'H' Cruise Missile bombers, no less. That right there is a Cold War tactic, and if you ask me the Cold War started up again over 4 years ago, and escalates more by the day.

So, if McCain wants another Cold War, he won't have to look too far. I think he already has it. The Strategic Missile Defense program in Europe will assure that we stay right on the Cold War path. Cool.

I kinda like the red flag with Sickle and Hammer, anyway.

The Bush administration's policies are largely responsible for Putin's actions.


Excerpt

March 26, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
To Russia with RealismThe White House senselessly risks a new Cold War.
by Anatol Lieven

As if the U.S. did not have enough on its plate, the latest strongly anti-American statements of President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials suggest the possibility of a new Cold War with Russia. And from the Russian point of view, these statements are only responding to a series of bitterly anti-Russian statements and actions by the Bush administration over the past year, including plans to bring Ukraine into NATO; the speech by Vice President Cheney in Vilnius last July attacking Russia; backing for Georgia in its conflict with Russian-backed breakaway republics; and the latest move to extend American anti-missile defenses to Eastern Europe.

At best, deep mutual hostility be-tween the U.S. and Russia represents a serious distraction from America’s infinitely more important and urgent problems elsewhere, including Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rise of China, and the deterioration of U.S. influence in Latin America. At worst, this tension could lead to Russia arming Iran, joining global energy cartels to put pressure on the West, and inflicting on Washington geopolitical humiliation on the territory of the former Soviet Union. This would occur if the U.S. agreed to defend Ukraine and Georgia as part of NATO and then proved unwilling or unable to defend them when Russia attacked.

***

And in contrast to the launching of the Cold War, for the U.S. to take these risks is not remotely justified by vital American interests. In the late 1940s, the Soviet Union was the heartland of a revolutionary ideology that threatened to suppress free-market democracy, freedom, and religion across the world and, by dominating Western Europe and East Asia and fomenting revolution in Latin America, to pin the U.S. within its own borders, surround it, and eventually stifle it.

Today’s Russia is like many U.S. allies past and present: a corrupt, state-influenced market economy with a partly democratic, partly authoritarian system. Russia has no global agenda of ideological or geopolitical domination but mainly wants to exert predominant influence (but not imperial control) within the territory of the former Soviet Union and the centuries-old Russian empire. Moves by the state to dominate the oil and gas sector are unwelcome to Americans but entirely in line with world practice outside the U.S. and U.K. Russian corruption is extremely serious, but on the other hand, the fiscal restraint of the Putin administration holds lessons for the present U.S. administration, not the other way around. Like India, Turkey, and many other democratic states, Russia has used brutal means to suppress a separatist rebellion.

Like Turkey for several decades when it was a member of NATO, Russia combines an increasingly independent judiciary and respect for the rule of law with selective repression (both formal and covert) against individuals seen as threats to the state or the ruling elite. The media scene is rather like India until the 1980s—a combination of state domination of television with a free and vocal, but much less influential, print media.

Above all, when it comes to the main lines of its foreign and domestic policy, the Putin administration has the support of the vast majority of ordinary Russians, while the Russian pro-Western liberals we choose to call “democrats” are supported by a tiny minority—mostly because of their association with the disastrous “reforms” of the 1990s. Thus, far from rallying democratic support in Russia, American attacks on Putin in the name of democracy only foment the anger of ordinary Russians against the United States.

Russia today is by no means a pretty picture, but to compare it in terms of repression and state control with the Soviet Union—or indeed with contemporary China—is grotesque. We should remember that as late as the summer of 1989, a Soviet leader who envisioned Russia as it now exists would have been received with incredulous joy by the West as representing a future beyond our most optimistic dreams. And at that time a Western policymaker who advocated such megalomaniacal, horribly dangerous projects as drawing Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian military alliance, and taking responsibility for their security, would have been regarded as completely insane.

On two recent occasions, I have assumed that U.S. hostility to Russia, and anti-Russian U.S. geopolitical agendas, would largely evaporate. The first time was immediately after 9/11, when the extent of the murderous threat of Islamist extremism to the U.S. was fully revealed. It seemed self-evident that the American political elites would automatically reconsider their attitude toward Russia. After all, since the end of the Cold War, Russia had not been responsible for the death of a single American or threatened a single truly vital American interest and had itself suffered terribly from Islamist terrorism.

The second time was in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as the extent of the debacle there, and of America’s military overstretch, became fully apparent. Once again, it seemed that U.S. policymakers would instinctively wish to reduce their military commitments accordingly or at the very least not seek to undertake any new ones—especially given the rise of Chinese military power, and the threat to Taiwan, in the Far East.

As we know, things have not turned out that way. Instead, hostility to Russia in the Bush administration, both parties in Congress, and the American media has only grown. So too have American ambitions vis-à-vis Russia. Last year, the administration, with the full support of the Democrats, was pushing an offer of a NATO membership action plan for Ukraine at NATO’s summit in Riga, in the face of private Russian threats of drastic retaliation including a massive program of arming Iran against the U.S.

The case of Ukraine and NATO is worth considering as a prime example of the deep irrationality affecting U.S. policy in the former Soviet Union. For it is not just a question of Ukrainian NATO membership infuriating Russia, real though that threat is—and understandable. After all, the Russians have lost far more men fighting in Ukraine in various wars than have died in all of America’s wars put together, and the Russian flag was flying over the naval port of Sevastopol before the United States was even created. Even more important are two more facts almost never mentioned in the American debate on this subject—if one can call it a debate. The first is that according to every reliable opinion poll, the great majority of Ukrainians do not even want NATO membership. They are convinced that far from bringing Ukraine greater security, inclusion in the alliance would lead to fierce internal divisions and potentially even split up their country, as well as vastly increase the threat from Russia.

***

The behavior of America’s political and media elites with regard to Russia shows some of the same mixture of fanaticism and cowardice that afflicts the U.S. “debate” on the Middle East. Powerful elements are obsessed with particular loyalties and hatreds. Others, with no particular axes to grind but passionately concerned with their own careers, are cowed into silence by the prevailing atmosphere.

***

Finally, there seems to be a particular hatred of Russia on the part of many members of the Washington elite because long before the Iraq disaster, Russia “betrayed the magic,” the set of beliefs forming the ideological basis of America’s global empire since the end of the Cold War and used to justify the costs of that empire to the U.S. public. Put starkly, “the magic” is a completely irrational set of assumptions, at the center of which is the idea that America represents and leads the spread of Freedom and Democracy around the world and that nascent democracies will automatically follow its lead both politically and economically, if necessary sacrificing their own national interests in the process.

***

In all these places, growing democracy is associated with growing nationalism (or, in Muslim countries, a mixture of this with religious radicalism) and therefore with hostility to the United States. In the case of Russia, it was always quite crazy to think that the Russian public would willingly accept the replacement of Russia by the U.S. as the predominant power in the former Soviet Union, any more than the American public would ever accept the loss of predominant influence in Central America and the Caribbean.

To Russia with Realism

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

The Bush administration's policies are largely responsible for Putin's actions.

I agree to a degree but Putin is old guard KGB, and his style is to move Russia back to world prominence.

[Etta Place]

Originally Posted by Frenchy

I agree to a degree but Putin is old guard KGB, and his style is to move Russia back to world prominence.

And what do you base this on?

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

And what do you base this on?

Cracking down on journalists...or worse.
Involvement in the politics of former Iron Curtain countries.
Hand-picking his successor.

Just for starters....

[Etta Place]

Originally Posted by Frenchy

Cracking down on journalists...or worse.
Involvement in the politics of former Iron Curtain countries.
Hand-picking his successor.

Just for starters....

Are any of these things the business of the United States?

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

Are any of these things the business of the United States?

They are things that need to be watched.

[Etta Place]

Russia to increase security if Georgia, Ukraine join NATO

11/04/2008 13:56 MOSCOW, April 11 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will be forced to strengthen security on its borders if Georgia and Ukraine join NATO, Army General Yury Baluyevsky, chief of the country's General Staff, said on Friday.

At a summit in Bucharest last Thursday, NATO members decided to postpone offering Georgia and Ukraine the chance to join the NATO Membership Action Plan, a key step toward full membership, but promised to review the decision in December.

"Russia will undoubtedly take measures to ensure its security near the state border. These will be both military and other measures," Baluyevsky said.

When asked to give details of the possible measures, Baluyevsky said that "We will wait, as the issue is ambiguous."

"Ukrainians are unanimously against Ukraine joining NATO," the military official said adding that in Georgia about 70% of the population is in favor of membership, but there is still time and this could change.

NATO's eastward expansion, as well as U.S. plans to deploy components of an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, have been a source of concern for Moscow.

Last week Russian President Vladimir Putin told a news conference after meeting with leaders of the 26-nation alliance on the sidelines of the Bucharest summit that "The appearance on our borders of a powerful military bloc... will be considered by Russia as a direct threat to our country's security."

In an interview with RIA Novosti on Friday Mikhail Kamynin, a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said that one of the problematic issues between Moscow and Kiev is "the course of the Ukrainian authorities toward integration into NATO."

The issue of Ukraine's drive for NATO will be discussed among other issues between Ukrainian Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Moscow on April 15.

Konstantin Kosachyov, the head of the international affairs committee, said that Ukraine's possible NATO admission would completely destroy cooperation between Moscow and Kiev in the defense sector.

"Bilateral cooperation between Russia and Ukraine in the security sphere, which was established in the Soviet era by integrating respective structures and continues developing, will end if Ukraine joins NATO," Kosachyov said.

RIA Novosti - World - Russia to increase security if Georgia, Ukraine join NATO