Russia and China have just completed a $400 billion natural gas deal for the next 30 years. They've been dickering back and forth on this for a decade, and there's little doubt that the US Empire's interference in Ukrainian affairs (as well as meddling in the East and South China Seas) helped to finally seal the deal.
An alliance between these two countries would be an unstoppable force. Shave the Donbas region off of Ukraine and bring the planned Eurasian Economic Community of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan into fruition, and you see much of the former Soviet Union reassembled. The US would do well to quit trying to run the planet, because the more it tightens its grip the more countries slip through its fingers.
To the US and EU: Let Crimea stay Russian, quit propping up the fascists in Kiev, and move on!
The post that was quoted here has been removedYou're right of course. The head honchos in Kiev may be illegitimate greenhorns who at least partially owe the success of their putsch to the efforts of nationalist thugs in the street, but they are not likely cut from the same cloth as those thugs.
The coup leaders in Kiev are certainly hypocrites. They came to power on a wave of outrage over military (or at least paramilitary) force being used against protesters in the Maidan, but now we see them using the military against civilian protesters in the Donbas region. They've got hold of a tiger's tail and don't know which way to jump to avoid getting devoured.
The post that was quoted here has been removedI don't think China was keeping Russia from invading Western Europe. The US prevented Russia from invading Western Europe.
The main difference between 1950 and now is that China is a much greater threat. It isn't Russia we should be concerned about, it is China.
Originally posted by EladarNeither Russia nor China need have been perceived as enemies to the USA if it had not suited the USA to make them into enemies. There were many alternative ways to handle the relationships involved without invoking threats of total war. But as long as the USA, with its ludicrously huge arsenals and its ability to reduce the planet to an uninhabitable hulk, was directly threatening them, it was pretty inevitable that they would invest in some level of defence, to the extent that their far lesser resources permitted.
Russia and China have been our enemies since they were taken over by the Communists. Perhaps Russia wasn't an enemy during the time when the Communists were not in power, but since Putin has taken power the Communists are back.
For some time, paranoia about communism enabled Americans to oppress their own people far more effectively than they could influence the people of China or the USSR.
The war in Vietnam was farcical. At the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations in Versailles, 1918, Wilson and the Americans allowed the British and French to dismiss the nationalist aspirations expressed by Ho Chi Minh and they drove him, for lack of alternatives, to seek communist support for his perfectly justifiable bid to evict the French from his country. The war they did fight was never likely to result in a victory for the South, so its political objectives were a mess. Once the nationalist goal of independence and unification was achieved, guess what - the communist aspect of the regime quickly faded out of sight. As it would always have been out of sight but for the idiot (but hideously violent) Americans.
Generally, the Cold War was terminated when it stopped being useful to all concerned. Whether that has saved us from a nuclear winter remains to be determined.
In March television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly current affairs show: "Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash."
This has the virtue of being true. Russia's long-range (intercontinental) nuclear arsenal is roughly as modern and as large as the US arsenal, and by some measures it is arguably larger. China's arsenal, in contrast, has only a limited number of long-range missiles, and so lacks that certain MAD* je ne sais quoi in this day and age of antimissile defense systems.
*Mutually Assured Destruction