Not content with grinding up our armed forces and trashing the Constitution, BushCo has decided to restart the Cold War by making an in-your-face deployment of antimissile systems in the Czech Republic and bringing confrontational trade policy challenges against China. Here is a link to an article on the deliberate provocation of Russia:
Russia threatening new cold war
Like other attempts by BushCo to play with matches, this is likely to have serious negative consequences, which I describe below:
- Both Russia and China have large and sophisticated defense research and production establishments. Their weapons production capabilities have not been neutralized by the rampant corruption that has crippled US weapons research and deployment. Thus, a new weapons competition between the US, Russia, and China is not a contest that we are likely to win.
- As Russia increases its counter-measures against the deployment of US ABM systems in Europe, their "buildup" will be used as an excuse to further strengthen the US ABM systems, and we will be back to the arms race fiasco of the post-WWII era. Of course, this is exactly what the US Military-Industrial Complex wants.
- Restarting the Cold War is a fallback to the fading of the War on Terror, which seems to be reaching its expiration date and is no longer salable to a public that feels grossly deceived by a "threat" that never materialized after 9/11.
- The Cold War featured many proxy struggles in the Third World, as each side armed combatants in politically unstable countries. This is the last thing that the poor nations of Africa and Asia need. Russia could easily turn the tables on us in Afghanistan and supply their own high-tech weaponry to the Taliban to chase NATO out of that country.
- China owns us. The Chinese hold so much US debt that they could trigger a financial diaster in US markets by simply dumping their US holdings. Thus, provoking the Chinese is a very bad idea.
The Bush administration seems determined to leave office after inflicting as much damage as possible on the United States. Restarting the Cold War would be a very costly mistake for America, and the Democrats in Congress should act vigorously to stop this folly.