There’s been lots of talk about whether we’re back in the cold war between NATO and Russia. Let’s clear this up a bit by defining what made the cold war so bad, what made it end, and then let’s see where we are now.
The cold war was defined as a non-friendly but not openly hostile political situation, aggravated by the possession of nuclear arsenal by both sides, and further aggravated by the advances in rocket technology which reduced times from launch to mutual destruction to cca. 35 minutes.
What made this especially dangerous was aggressive political posturing which made a nuclear attack possible, forcing both sides to implement a hairline trigger on the nuclear arsenal, with short reaction times making the system dangerously sensitive to false positives. Essentially, it’s like the situation where you are constantly harassed by burglars and thugs to the point where you respond by arming yourself to the teeth and responding to every suspicious noise during the night with gunfire, which eventually results in killing a family member who forgot to turn on the light.
The cold war stopped being a credible threat when Americans stopped their political posturing, Reagan agreed to meet with Gorbachev and they signaled to the Russians, in no unclear terms, that they don’t intend to nuke them. Once the political hostilities stopped, the nuclear war stopped being a credible threat, regardless of the fact that both nuclear arsenals were barely reduced; as with handguns, the weapon itself is not a danger, but the mindset of the owner.
When the cold war ended, the Soviets decided that since the outside threat has ended, it’s now time to deal with their economy because standing in lines for bread and everything else during peacetime makes no sense whatsoever, and in their hasty and poorly devised reform attempt they wrecked their own country. Americans then decided to interpret this as their victory in the cold war, although the cold war itself ended several years earlier.
This resulted in a very dangerous change in American mindset, where they stopped viewing the Russians as an equal power, and instead started seeing them as some sort of a failed country of a defeated people, with decaying military that is a threat only to the local ecology. This was actually true for an entire decade, but since Vladimir Putin came to power, he implemented powerful and effective measures which stabilized the country, repaired the economy to the level that is far better now than it ever was, even during the best of times. He also worked on reconstructing the industry and the military functionality. As a result, the Russian army is now not as massive as it was in the Soviet times, but is much more effective. The nuclear functionality was rebuilt, and nuclear deterrent is now completely functional on a level superior to that of the Soviet Union. Very accurate tactical and aerospace-defense rockets were also developed in the meantime.
So basically, the reason why the cold war was bad was because Americans were actively performing hostile propaganda against the Soviet Union, which was armed with strategic nuclear weapons, and political hostilities made it a conceivable supposition that the purpose of the political propaganda was to justify a nuclear first strike against the demonized enemy.
The situation we have today is that the Russians have fully functional strategic nuclear weapons and the Americans are in the middle of an unprecedented military-political campaign of putting thousands of troops on the Russian border under the guise of “military exercises”, they apparently attempt to weaken the Russian nuclear deterrent by activating an Aegis Ashore station in Romania, building another one in Poland and placing Aegis warships in the Baltic sea, they already politically destabilized Ukraine and are trying to provoke Russia into responding militarily, and they are actively and consistently implementing a propaganda campaign against Russia, ever since the Sochi Olympics. The Russian president, who is an extremely calm, moderate and competent politician, is portrayed as a Hitler-like psychopathic dictator who needs to be stopped, which looks very much like all American recent justifications for war, where the attacked country is first exposed to strong propaganda which portrays it as a prison-country that is held hostage by some Hitler-Satan hybrid of a dictator and his ridiculous henchmen, and needs to be invaded in order to free the people, who will then magically proceed to follow a natural human tendency to form an America-like democratic paradise, where you don’t have just one party to vote for, but two, and it’s not like you have to go through a complicated vetting process where the elites check out or even propose the credible presidential candidates, and where you have free economy, not like other countries where the government regulates the economy by bailing out failing banks and businesses. Oh wait…
But I digress.
We actually passed the point of being back in cold war and we are on the very brink of hot war. NATO tanks are on the Russian borders, which was never the case before. American anti-ballistic defenses, which were the crux of the “Star wars” crisis of the Reagan administration, which provoked the Soviets almost to the point of losing their cool and starting to take out the Pershing II intermediary-range silos in West Germany, are surrounding Russia. Russian fighter-bombers are performing close warning runs above American Aegis ships in the Baltic and Black Sea. Also, America is provoking China in the China Sea. Turkey, a NATO member, actually shot down a Russian fighter-bomber in Syria, where the Turks had no right to be. This is all almost identical to the war games from the 1980s, where a realistic political and military escalation leading to a nuclear exchange was modeled. The only reason why this didn’t escalate further is that Russian president is one very cool and calculated person.
The problem is, the Russians are pissed off right now, and I mean the entire people, not the government. They didn’t like being insulted, they didn’t like being lied to, they didn’t like their allies being taken out systematically, they didn’t like the former Soviet republics and Warsaw contract countries being recruited into NATO, they didn’t like the surrounding countries being infiltrated by CIA and their minions under the guise of “promoting democracy”, and they certainly didn’t like the greatest president they had since Peter the Great being portrayed as some Hitler-like maniac. They also didn’t like America sponsoring the Nazis in Ukraine, they didn’t like the fact that openly anti-Russian governments are installed in the former Soviet bloc despite great popular support for Russia in those countries, they don’t like the fact that all the journalist in Europe work for CIA, that the Russian opposition is briefed by the American embassy and paid either from the State Department budget or by CIA-sponsored “NGOs”. They don’t like America artificially reducing the price of oil on the world market and introducing sanctions against Russia in order to weaken its economy, and they are basically completely disappointed in America, after initially having embraced the American values in the 1990s. Americans think that their “democratic” pro-western puppets are the opposition to Putin. No, they have zero popular support in Russia and if not for the State Department financing they would already have starved. The true opposition to Putin is the Communist Party, and compared to them, Putin is incredibly calm and moderate. The problem is, if the Communist Party wins the parliamentary elections, this will reduce Putin’s ability to respond calmly and rationally to further American provocations, and if he is forced to respond in a way that will be demanded by the people and the parliament, he will be forced to take down the threatening American assets, and take further initiative to secure their immediate borders. From there, it’s nuclear exchange in several predictable moves, and no credible alternative.
The situation could be immediately resolved by removing idiots from power in America, and disbanding NATO, for whose continued existence there is no valid reason anyway, and it’s merely a bureaucracy that tries to create problems for which its continued existence would be the solution, at the cost of degrading the actual security of the world to the lowest point ever outside of open world wars. Also, America would have to remove their military installations from the former Soviet bloc, and you’d be surprised to know how many of those there actually are, including concentration camps for extrajudicial detention and torture of “undesirables”.
The problem is, I just don’t see America stopping the thing it’s doing, because it thinks it’s winning, which is the most dangerous state of things because that’s how the wars start. The even bigger problem is, I don’t see how America can be shown it’s not winning in ways that don’t include hundreds of nuclear mushrooms sprouting over American cities. So yeah, how dangerous is it? Very. It’s as dangerous as handling a deadly poisonous snake without being aware that it is poisonous. If you know it can kill you, you’ll be careful. It’s the absence of this awareness that makes this current crisis so much different than the ones before. Before, the Americans were aware of the fact that the Russians had the amount of nuclear weapons that is enough to turn Earth into Mars. Today, they seem to think that those nukes for some reason don’t count, as if they’re props made of plastic, and you can play with tanks and planes and it will somehow magically stop there because you brainfucked yourself into believing that nobody will ever use nukes, even when his existential interests are threatened. It reminds me of the bullies who get shot because when faced with an armed person, they act as if the gun doesn’t exist and actually continue bullying the person until he pulls the trigger, and then they act surprised as if nobody could see that coming. One such fucktard actually won the Darwin award by daring his 10 year old son to stab him with a knife, repeatedly, until the distraught kid actually stabbed him in the chest, to which the fucktard responded with “I can’t believe the kid actually did it” and died.
I can see the nuclear war coming for over a year, and so do the American experts on Russia. The Russians were refurbishing the fallout shelters in Moscow year ago. Anyone who doesn’t see what’s going on is either blind or delusional.
The only real question is, are the Americans doing this on purpose or are they just incredibly stupid?