Re: Invasions East and West
Reply #5 –
Not to mention the military industrial complex had much to gain from overplaying the threat.
The military-industrial complex is not a separate institution from the government. It's as if a party or a club with members in all important branches of the government. Think of it as "hawks" versus "doves". Or, if you like conspiracy theories, the military industrial complex is like Freemasons with their secret agenda and backdoor handshakes, while the overwhelming majority is ignorant or negligent of where the situation is being steered, finding out about things only when it's too late.
In any scenario, there is always a group gaining, but it's not always the same group. The only group that is always gaining is the sleaziest political careerists who betray all values at any change of wind, but they betray even each other, so they are not a particularly cohesive group. They are like a heap of sand, where no particle has any regard for the heap.
During the cold war, the world was evidently bi-polar, with the United States and Soviet Union playing as power centres against each other. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world politics has been unipolar, with the United States calling all the shots, putting the military bases right next door from Russia, messing and invading at will anywhere in the world. Clinton sent rockets to some African countries and airplanes to Kosovo and Serbia. Bush invaded countries surrounding Iran. All for flimsy reasons, with unclear or obviously false aims, and with adverse outcomes. All other countries have simply watched this happening. This is a unipolar world.
I live next door from Russia, and here's a sense of Russia waiting for another chance to become a world power again, equal to EU and China, if not more. The likely outlook for the countries between Russia and the biggies of EU is that our independence will be sold at a crisis very cheaply and dishonourably without any war or struggle. The politicians here are intensely competing with each other in who has the least backbone, exactly as dictated from Brussels. For Brussels, this enables "dialogue" with Russia, but for the population here, this creates a strong sense of estrangement from and illegitimacy of the power. Any passerby can fill in the power vacuum and take over the strings of the puppets. The closest passerby is Russia.