{"id":86321,"date":"2019-04-15T13:00:05","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T17:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=86321"},"modified":"2019-04-15T12:40:50","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T16:40:50","slug":"86321","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=86321","title":{"rendered":"The Cold War is dead… and it had better stay dead"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Blackbird spy plane<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

None of this ever appears in my local newspaper, probably because it’s either posted online or brought up for a one-minute look-see in the rather vapid evening news reports. If the real news is not being published in print, are we required to go searching for it?\u00a0 Apparently, the answer to that is ‘yes’, because print costs more to produce than electronic sourcing.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, when the following articles came up in Military Times, I read both of them, as they are connected. My only responses to this news are: 1) Is this what Vlad Putin is spending his oil and gas profits on? Because that’s just ridiculous. And 2) Does he really, truly want another war in the Balkans?<\/p>\n

This is from March 13th, via Military Times:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.armytimes.com\/news\/your-military\/2019\/03\/13\/russian-aggression-on-the-rise-in-the-balkans-army-four-star-says\/<\/a><\/p>\n

If this is some attempt to restore the USSR to its former self, that seems like a waste of time, money and effort. Eastern Europe never belonged<\/em> to Stalin’s Soviet Union. He simply confiscated it when he dropped the Iron Curtain on Berlin at the end of World War II. That was then. Things are different now, and per Reuters, Russia’s Gazprom says 2018 net profit is up 49 percent. That could be put to use to build Russian industry. China figured that out a while back.<\/span><\/p>\n

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Gazprom Neft, the oil arm of Russian gas producer Gazprom, on Thursday reported a 48.7 percent jump in 2018 net profit to 376.7 billion<\/b> rubles ($5.8 billion<\/b>) buoyed by higher prices and output. – <\/span>Feb 21, 2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Per the MT article, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. European Command, in March, told Congress that Russian belligerence<\/a>\u00a0and especially its\u00a0meddling<\/a>\u00a0in the Balkans have increased in recent months but also assured political leaders that U.S. military forces in the region are at the \u201chighest readiness rate\u201d since he took command three years ago.<\/p>\n

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Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti testified alongside Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Kathryn Wheelbarger before the House Armed Services Committee. – Article<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

GEN Scaparrotti also noted that troops near the eastern border of the Balkans seem to be regularly subjected to what he termed aggressive behavior and moves by the Russian troops located in the border area.\u00a0 Some of the smaller east European countries such as Macedonia and Montenegro are interested in joining NATO, rather than be pushed back into the control of the Russian government.<\/p>\n

Moving ahead to this month, the report is now that a chill in US\/Russian relations seems to be growing. Since we’ve watched Vlad since he started riding horseback without a shirt to get elected several times, it’s probably safe to say he may be trying to recoup what Gorbachev lost to the bankrupting Soviet government in its attempt at annexing Afghanistan.\u00a0 This is not a good idea, since the countries that regained their independence and autonomy after the fall of the Iron Curtain generally don’t want the Russians back in town. They don’t even want them back in Tajikistan. Those people want hikers and backpackers and other tourists in that barren but strangely beautiful country full of mountains, glaciers and shallow lakes. And Azerbaijan has its own conflicts to resolve.<\/p>\n

The second article is from yesterday.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.militarytimes.com\/flashpoints\/2019\/04\/14\/the-chill-in-us-russia-relations-has-some-worried-about-stumbling-into-a-military-conflict\/<\/a><\/p>\n

“During the Cold War, we understood each other’s signals. We talked,” says the top NATO commander in Europe, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who is about to retire. “I’m concerned that we don’t know them as well today.” – Article<\/p>\n

Where is this going? This appears to be the old Soviet cat-and-mouse game that most of us remember from the Cold War. Real war is not an industry. The Cold War was. Most of today’s military development originated in the Cold War period.<\/p>\n

So maybe Vlad is just flexing his biceps. Posturing is a bad idea. Maybe I should invite Vlad to dinner. And where does China come into this, with all their fussing over the South China Sea’s islands? Are they annoyed with Russia? There was a brief period about two years ago, during which a ferry ran cargo from Vladivostok to North Korea and returned to Vladivostok with tourists. Stay tuned….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

None of this ever appears in my local newspaper, probably because it’s either posted online or … The Cold War is dead… and it had better stay dead<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[375,9,10,387,306,384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cold-war","category-foreign-policy","category-historical","category-international-affairs","category-nato","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/653"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86322,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86321\/revisions\/86322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}