Was that all it took? A bit of a dust-up on the Black Sea and now the cold war is on again.
The dynamics are rather different this time. There’s no Iron Curtain and it’s more of a joint enterprise than a genuine stand off.
But everyone’s happy by the look of things. The War on Terror outlived its usefulness. It lost its power to terrify the citizenry of the US and Europe. And while it achieved much useful erosion of voters’ rights and expectations, the project needed a new impetus and focus.
Militarily, the WoT only delivered insurgencies in dusty places. No justification for grand weapons programmes. And too much influence for the spooky side of the business–the NSA, GCHQ and the rest.
What the people behind the people we elect to lead us here in the West want is a proper bogeyman. Right on our doorstep. Bristling with weaponry. And with convincing form.
Putin has been building that form for years–with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Western media, of course. Now the time has arrived for everyone to cash in their chips, pack away the WoT and move on to CW2.
As a plot, it has everything going for it. It sandwiches the EU (henceforth to be known by its US name, the “fucktheEU”) between Uncle Sam and Big Boris. It’s a perfect cover-up for a further carving-up of Europe’s plum assets and plump citizenry. Big military spending comes back into fashion even though lights are going out and shops are shutting on the reverse slope of Hubbert’s peak. The list goes on.
No wonder Putin and Obama spend so much time on the phone to each other these days. There’s a hell of a lot to organise.
The organisers gratefully acknowledge the unstinting cooperation of all major US and EU media organisations in making Cold War II possible.
QuadRanting 