Russia and China are not nearly the threats to the U.S. that its own politicians are. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:
This article is a continuation of “A Nobel for the Donald?“
To repeat: the geopolitical equivalent of a tree is about ready to fall unheard in the global forest. Once the Trump/Putin peace deal is inked, not one element of the neocons’ scary bedtime stories about Russian aggression will be heard anywhere on the planet.
To wit, Putin has no interest in what will be the nationalist anti-Russian rump of a neutralized Ukraine. There will be no Russian flag flying over Kiev or Lviv.
Likewise, nothing untoward will happen in the three Baltic states, either. That’s in part because once they see that poking the Bear next door doesn’t pay and isn’t safe, the often noisy anti-Russian fulminations of politicians in these countries looking for some cheap campaign demagoguery will go radio silent forthwith.
The same goes for Poland. And why in the world would Putin invade eastern European countries like Slovakia or Hungary, which have stoutly opposed the NATO aggression in Ukraine or even Romania, which actually elected a Russian-favoring president until it was ixnayed by Brussels and the CIA. And, then, after having even failed to conquer all of Russian speaking Donetsk, what kind of idiot actually thinks that Germany, Italy, France and England are next in Putin’s alleged expansion plans?.
With respect to China, the single most important thing to recognize is that it is the very opposite of the old Soviet Empire, which was based on economic autarky and scant trading relationships with the world outside of the Warsaw Pact. Accordingly, had it been both inclined and capable of offensive military aggression toward the rest of Europe and or even the US – for which the now open archives of the old Soviet Union reveal scant evidence – there would have been no collateral disruption of its basic economic function. The latter was purely an internally-focused regime of centralized state socialism, which, needless to say, didn’t work but didn’t depend upon commerce with the so-called “free world”, either.
By contrast, after Mao was sent off his rewards in Red Heaven, China pivoted sharply to the outside world under the leadership of Mr.Deng and his successors; and they did so under the banner of so-called Red Capitalism, which amounted to an extreme version of export mercantilism.
