The President of the United States wants to put a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.
Sure, says Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Just don't mind while we add counter-defensive systems and make new ICBMs the missile defense system can't hit.
But there's much more to this than Bush's hegemonic dreams. There's more than Putin's new Russian ICBMs. But they're all part of the big new game. The New Cold War, which is going to be even bigger and even better than the last one!
Many people have seen the writing on the wall for a while. Despite Bush looking into Putin's eyes, or his hoped-for missile reduction (just don't mind the tactical nukes, eh?), Putin has been flexing Russia's newfound strength, which has primarily come from oil. (Ech, oil. Couldn't Russia be a biodiesel production powerhouse? Couldn't we kick up an old-fashioned American Midwest-Ukrainian breadbasket rivalry? "We can make more biodiesel than you with our good ol' American soybeans!" "Nyet, biodiesel production has increased by 125% in the past quarter alone!")
There's the former Soviet republics. There's Chechnya, the connection of some Chechen terrorists to Al-Qaeda. We love democracy, but don't mind too much when they kill the right sort of bad people in the name of protecting
Of course, since the U.S. helped get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, there's been peace in the region. Just like how things are hunky-dory in previous Cold War proxy states Iran and Iraq. We did everything right. Nothing bad came of it. Right?
Part of what we'll do here is explore just what happened there, at least what we think happened. By and large, most people don't know about any of this, how Iran and Iraq were proxies in the Cold War, who the U.S. paid to fire rockets at Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. (That one tall guy with the beard... what was his name? Bush was so hot to get him for a while. Oh well. The important thing to remember is that we got Saddam Hussein, and Iraq has been a shopper's paradise ever since.)
So then. We'll be exploring the ever-evolving U.S.-Russian relationship, nuclear treaties and armaments, leaders of countries involved in both The Old Cold War and the New One. We'll delve deep into Russian geography of all sorts (political, social, ethnic, etcetera).
I can't do it all myself. Want to help write? I'm looking for people who can write coherently, are interested in Russia/the New Cold War/The Old Cold War — there's so many topics that it would be foolish to try and condense them into a short list. Please send a note if you would like to help. Posts will be occasional, at least for now. But things are getting too darn interesting to let this go without writing about any longer.
