Twilight Years
By John Batchelor on July 11, 2009 at 9:01 AM in Current Affairs
Originally published July 9, 2009 at the blog for The John Batchelor Show.
First Cold War.
First aired, January 22, 1960 (with Ike in the White House, JFK, Humphrey, Johnson preparing to run), and it has stayed with me this half-century, and it comes back to me now as a warning.
During the First Cold War, there was a general, fashionable dread of the future. Smart folk asserted that the US and Soviets were determined to exchange nukes. War would come, holocaust would descend, and then we would fall to anarchy.
The Soviets went away, yet the weapons remain deployed;and now there are desperate, stupid rogues who have small nukes and big appetites.
The Second Cold War is far less imaginable than the first. Anything negative is possible.
Sunday 12 am speaking with Steve Cohen, NYU, re the Moscow version of the dialogue. [ADMIN NOTE: CHECK NoQuarter's front page Sunday for a link to The John Batchelor Show. Larry Johnson is a weekly panelist on the show.] The topics were certainly not limited to the bric-a-brac of nuclear arms. They discussed Ukraine, Georgia, Afghanistan, trade, but mostly they talked about how Russia does not need the US and yet the US needs Russia.
Russia can help on Iran, on Afghanistan, on the jihadists. Also implicit was that POTUS believes he is a new Reagan on nuclear disarmament, believes he can talk and barter to disarm both nuke powers. John Bolton publishes a warning on what he learned of the POTUS and Putin dialogue.
“Obama’s inability to do so is not surprising, because he made these commitments without waiting for an up-to-date “nuclear posture review,” the definitive mechanism for assessing America’s strategic needs. Avoiding this authoritative process, coupled with the administration’s hell-for-leather insistence on ratifying a new treaty by December, and its proposed cuts in missile-defense expenditures and critical weapons systems such as the F-22, demonstrate just how ideologically committed Obama is to a less robust U.S. defense posture.
Not only are the proposed cuts in nuclear weapons levels dangerous, but the reductions in delivery systems are even more reckless, as the United States now significantly relies on such systems to deliver conventional warheads. Russia does not.
Obama’s approach weakens our nuclear and conventional capabilities, while leaving Russia exactly at levels to which it would otherwise be driven by its own bleak economic realities. Moreover, Russia still insists on linking reductions in U.S. missile defenses to offensive cuts, and Obama hasn’t unequivocally rejected this dangerous connection.”
The English and the French fought world wars with each other from 1740 until 1945, and the last phase from the massacres of the First War to the Vichy disgrace included terror, tyranny, extreme cruelty and finally the atomic bombs.
The Americans and the Russian have only been at odds since 1920. I favor the Russians as allies. George Friedman regards them as unstable, and leans toward an alliance with a reinvigorated Poland over the next half century.
Since I began this sober speculation with a look back 50 years to what frightened American audiences in 1960, “Third Planet from the Sun,” I can try to look out 50 years to 2059. The Russians are threatened by the jihad, by the nuke mullahs, by the American aggression in the Black Sea. China is a helpless, pitiless giant. Japan will not surrender. India must focus on projected power, not just patrolling the Line of Control.
The US has lost its naval superiority in the Pacific basin. Europe is compliant, undergunned, timid. That’s all I can see. Third planet in an unusual summer. One hundred years ago, King Edward died, all the crowns arrived for the funeral in London with TR representing the US. The Astor House was the right address on Times Square.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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.by David Fredosso who wrote 2008's 
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