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Of all of these actions, the most troubling has been the reaction to Russia's reemergence as a regional power. While Russia will probably never be a superpower again, the U.S. seemed to be unwilling to see it assert any power at all, and this confrontation can't have a happy ending.

I dont think the largest state in the world, which could destroy most of the world within hours, and possesses a major share of the world's resources - can be called a "regional power". Neither do the US planners think so. It certainly would not be very regional if Russia deployed missiles or strategic bombers in Venezuela or Cuba - plans for both were discussed recently and a nuclear cruiser fleet and long range bombers have recently visited Venezuela. The USSR certainly had a much larger influence, mainly because of its numerous satellites, and was more in a balance with the US, but whether the current imbalance will stay forever - as you suggest - I very much doubt it. economically, the US has been losing ground rather continuously vs. the rest of the world in the last decade, so its central remaining trump card is the military. If several other states - e.g. China, Russia - get to a level where they have a mobile military capable of opposing the US one anywhere in the world, or, alternatively, if the US backs off from its big-stick foreign policy, the world would probably become a more balanced and safer place again.

Of the events, the ugliest diplomatic reactions have been the handling of the Russia-Georgia war ("We're all Georgians now"!?) and the encroachment of the ABM towards Russia's borders without paying any heed to Russia's interests. Both are very uncomfortable attitudes to hold.

both have been consistent within the general US foreign policy. the very fact that Georgia started this miniwar was because the US had basically installed its current regime - in the so-called "Rose Revolution" - and massively supported it with weapons and military aid in the last 4-5 years. the current Georgian president Saakashvili is a former law graduate of Columbia University, with a US Dept of State scholarship, and he has previously worked in several American law firms. Georgia's military budget went from $30 million in 2002 to over $1 billion in 2008 - most of it being loans from the US/NATO/Israel. at the time of the Georgian attack on Tskhinvali, there were at least several hundred US military advisors in Georgia. McCains advisor Randy Scheunemann continues to be on Georgia's payroll for lobbying its interests in the US.

a similar picture exists in Ukraine. the so-called "Orange Revolution" there was also heavily US-sponsored (through shady NGOs). the current Ukrainian president Yuschenko's wife is a former US Dept of State employee.

imagine a similar situation the other way round - if Russia sponsored fake "revolutions" in Mexico and Canada, installed KGB employees as their presidents, supplied them with weapons, and supported a war by say Mexico to reclaim its South Californian territories stolen from it by the US in the 1840s. how would you react to that?

I don't think that there's going to be much progress towards a more stable nuclear regime until it's foreign policy undergoes a sea change when it comes to diplomacy.

yes. which is exactly why i said in the other thread that any discussion on nuclear proliferation is meaningless babble unless you also talk about policies and history.

That's not to say things like the Geneva Convention didn't matter, but it is to say that once some countries started hitting civilian populations in their war efforts, others followed.

listen, the USSR or China, after all the damage they suffered from the Axis powers, may have had the moral right to do so. they didnt, however. the US never suffered any significant damage to its civilian population, so any attempts to justify the US genocide of the Japanese civilian population by "it was a total war so anything goes" is demagogy and little more.

The stakes were high during World War II. This wasn't just a limited offensive to achieve specific strategic goals, in which you're trying to minimize casualties in order to save face on the political front. World War II was about total victory versus total defeat. The defeated populations were at the complete mercy of the victorious ones, and they were frequently enslaved or slaughtered.

again, that may have been true for the USSR, but is empty demagogy when applied to the US. defeat was never even considered by the US by the time it dropped the nuclear bombs. it was clear Japan would lose.

I'm not justifying what the US did - I'm saying that what it did has to be evaluated relative to what other countries were doing at the time.

the US is at the top or close in two aspects: 1) it suffered by far the least of all major nations involved (actually profited immensely in the long term) 2) despite its minimal own losses, it was way up there with the Nazis regarding targeting civilian population deliberately.

Would it have been possible to avoid the atomic bombing of Japan? Yes, but it would've required moral and political restraint beyond what most of the countries involved in World War II were exercising, at the time.

what "most countries"? the US was the only one who had the bomb at the time. there was zero restraint necessary, Germany was defeated, and Japan was clearly doomed with the USSR having entered the war against it as well.

I think, rather, it was an amazing display of cruelty and coldbloodedness along with a complete contempt for the Japanese. a mentality along the lines of "better a 100,000 of those yellow-faced Japs die than a few of our boys".

what is most amazing is that those people - I saw a recent report with an interview with the crew of the Enola Gay - still believe (or believed - pilot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tibbets died last year) they were in the "right". that is.. i'm at a loss for words. a case for psychotherapy. how can you even go on living knowing that you have instantly killed a hundred thousand innocent people, women, children? i'd commit suicide in their place.

We need a US which is able to look inwards. I'm not saying that they should abandon all their objectives overseas. But, US infrastructure needs some serious fixing. There are some parts of the world that don't exactly welcome you. Take some hints and return home to do some over-due maintenance work? I think Thomas Friedman said it better than myself.

this is way too soft. the cold hard facts are: the US runs a suicidally dangerous foreign policy at the moment, with a large illegal war aimed at controlling and exploiting the state with world's 2nd-largest oil resources, another disastrous war in a meanwhile almost completely ruined state - which exports record amounts of opium since it's so poorly controlled, an oppressive foreign policy towards many Latin and South American states (some of which are in the meantime uniting against that), a blindly pro-Israeli policy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - which leads to hatred from millions of Muslims, instigating fake revolutions and installing puppet regimes around the Russian borders, and trying to shift the nuclear balance between US and Russia towards a disbalance in US favor.

if the US abandoned at least some aspects of that ludicrous policy, the world would be much better off.

Refine the tactics learned in Afghanistan/Iraq, and come up with a REAL exit strategy just in case they have to do another police work in some godforsaken 4th-world twilight zone

this expression amuses me. since when does the US do "police" work? it cares jack about the vast majority of conflicts and deaths going on in the world, or actually supports that by financing local guerillas or militaries - take Central Africa or Georgia. a more adequate comparison would be that of a Mafia don who extorts stuff from everyone who's weak and occasionally cracks down with force on goons who walk out of line - like Saddam Hussein - or simply people who refuse to be extorted - like the Milosevic government when it refused to implement the IMF neoliberal reforms.

The US is not the only countries making nuclear warheads. There is Russia, China, Israel, India, France, etc... Both Russia and China are more than willing to use it if they do end up in a war, not mentioning that Israel is in the same boat.

none of the other nuclear states is even remotely as aggressive as the US. except maybe Israel, but they're a special case in other respects as well. it is clear that currently nobody except the US and Israel would start a large-scale war(if we ignore the local but dangerous Indian-Pakistani situation), and even more clear that nobody wants to use nuclear weapons.

It is true that the United States has been engaging in wars since the end of WWII, but most of their wars are actually approved by the leaders of the United Nations, such as Russia and China with the exception of the Iraq War.

where'd you get that from? the opposite is the case. most of US wars, especially all the large ones - Vietnam, Iraq 2nd, Yugoslavia - were not approved by the UN. there was a resolution on Korea but only because the USSR had been boycotting it because it wasnt China but Taiwan (!) who had a permanent seat in the UN SC at the time. that resolution is largely regarded as "faked" since it was based on data supplied by the US army, and passed without the consent of the USSR or mainland China.

the only one that I can think of which had UN approval was the '91 Gulf War because that was clearly started by Saddam attacking Kuwait, and the US was merely disciplining him to stay in line. the funny thing is of course that Saddam had been consistently supported by the US with weapons and aid prior to that. in Nicaragua as i've said the US was even judged guilty of aggression and ordered to pay billions of reparations by the World Court.

on the other hand, with many conflicts where there are clear UN resolutions - such as Rwanda, Congo or Sudan - the US doesnt want to provide any troops because it's uninteresting geopolitically.

However, which country supported the Republican camp during the American elections? China, China did meaning they are also very supportive of the Iraq War.

no, it doesnt mean that at all. China was consistently against the Iraq war both before it and during it, up until today. check something like http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/li...la-daily01.htm

If all the leaders of the United Nations are against the aggressive American foreign policy in the Middle East, it would not have occurred, yet it did. I wonder why.

they are against. why it still occurs? because the US and its 51st state Israel dont care jack what the UN thinks. UN resolutions on the Israeli-Palestinian situations consistently get votes like: 178 "yes", 2 "no" - US and Israel. or take a recent UN resolution for US to lift embargo on Cuba (17th straight year that the UN votes for that) - 185 to 3. want to know who voted "no? you guessed it. want to know who was the third who voted "no"? thats a tricky one: Palau. maybe they were drunk and pressed the wrong button or something

http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com/2008/...t-embargo.html

actually if you go and look up the history of UN voting, you will find that in the OVERWHELMING majority of cases where a meaningful and good resolution is voted against, it's the US and its 51st state who do it. that isnt really published in Western media, but you can look it all up on the UN site. its public information.

want a few examples?

lets look at nuclear disarmament which teh other thread was about. instead of empty babble as to why Iran is crazy and would launch nukes, and how the US should prevent nuclear proliferation, you should just take a look at the US voting record in the UN on nuclear disarmament. brace yourself. the US has the worst voting record of all other nations in history on nuclear disarmament. It was the only one to oppose ALL 15 UN resolutions on nuclear disarmament last year.

http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/...rd.php?krieger

its the same for votes to condemn terrorism - US has consistently voted "no" because its own actions can be interpreted as terrorism by the UN charter, reducing nuclear testing - the US has consistently voted "no" because it actively develops nuclear weapons, prohibiting chemical and biological weapons - the US has consistently voted "no" because it wants to go on developing them, and even completely ludicrous votes like "no" on the human right to food and work - because that might mean the US would have to allocate money for UN programs in the 3rd World giving people food and work.

anyhow, just look at http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_whyusa03.html or http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve03/1132usun.html or something..

Generally, in the future.. There may be an outbreak of nuclear war and the invovled countries would most likely be US, China, and Israel. I am not sure whether Russia would do such a thing or not, I don't think they would, but I may be wrong. The chances of India using nukes on Pakistan isn't very likely, because their countries are geographically located next to each other, any country that invokes nukes will end up hit by the radiation due to wind blows.

actually, I think that the most likely candidates to use nukes in a war in the near future are Pakistan/India. the reason is that Pakistan is very instable at the moment, and if the current government falls and extreme islamic nationalists come to power - those may actually use a nuke in the Kashmir conflict against India. and India would obviously not hesitate to strike back since its not exactly on good terms with Pakistan.

whether that will be before or after a single nuclear bomb is exploded by terrorists in a US or Israeli city - dont know.

regarding large-scale nuclear war - Russia vs US vs China - that is the least likely of the existing scenarios. still, with the way the US behaves recently towards Russia, it is becoming ever more realistic.