The United States, NATO, and Russia

By Michael Curtis

Will Cold War II begin because of bananas? The Obama administration has made it clear, “Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today.” Nevertheless, the distinguished Russian champion figure skater and now politician Irina Rodnina, who lit the Olympic flame at Sochi in February 2014, disagreed. Earlier, on September 2013 she had tweeted a racist picture of President Barack Obama, his mouth full of food, with a hand in the foreground waving a banana at him.

The banana warfare continued. In the Russian city of Perm, a number of posters appeared addressing the U.S. President as “Banan-Obama.” On them were images of bananas labeled “Ukraine,” and the message “don’t choke.” At a festival in Moscow in 2015 a playful competition featured four participants in blackface alongside an Obama impersonator chasing a banana.

Ben Rhodes, the spin doctor at the White House, has not yet misled us about the eating habits of President Obama. However, we do know the next U.S. president has to contemplate Putin’s political and military appetites, and plan accordingly. Will the next president agree with President George W. Bush who in June 2001 thought, after a “good talk” with the Russian leader that he had a good sense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s soul? .....To Read More

My Take - Montenegro is a Balkan country by the way.  The author's facts are compelling but his conclusions are all wrong.  Putin has no desire, no economy and no stable military to become a world power once again.  Everything he's done, and is doing, is what Russia has always done.  Create buffer zones between the ethnic Russian population and everyone else. 

Russia is a harsh low capital generating nation resulting in bad infrastructure, education, market formation. This means low productivity and the effectiveness of the military. Furthermore it's a hordesland nation with seven defensive gaps they need to defend.  They only have the manpower to defend three of them, and two are around the Ukraine. Russia is breeding itself out of existence and suffers from a serious level of alcoholism, “HIV and milti-drug-resistant tuberculosis, and are fast losing the capacity to man a military, maintain a sizable missile fleet and to even keep it's roads and rail system in working order. The ethnic Russians may be a minority in their own nation by 2040.”

“The Russian demographic decline is so steep, so far advanced, and so multi-vectored that for demographic reasons alone Russia is unlikely to survive as a state, and Russians are unlikely to survive as a people over the next couple of generations.”

Putin isn't looking to dominate the world. Russia as a nation is in it's twilight – he knows it, and he just wants to survive.