Permit me to expand briefly on why I think gratuitously angering Russia is kind of a bad idea.
We all know China is about to dominate the world, right? If you asked your average person in the street in either America or Britain to name the world's top three powers, you'd probably get: the United States; China; and third, I think most people would say Russia, but you'd likely hear a few Indias and maybe some other choices.
Now consider power in terms of nuclear arsenals. Assuming you haven't checked lately, you may think that by now, China may have about as many nukes as the other great powers.
Ahem. Check this out. China has about 400 suspected nuclear warheads. Russia has at least 12,000 (as does the US).
Granted, 400 is plenty enough, but the point is that we don't want another situation where the world's two greatest nuclear powers are at each other's throats. That wasn't good for either society, let alone for the Cubans and Congolese and Angolans and Guatemalans and lots of other folks.
What we want, instead, is reduction and even, eventually, elimination of all nuclear arsenals. Radical and crazy? It's the official position of well-known Chomsky acolytes Henry Kissinger and George Schultz and Sam Nunn.
If the Bush administration leaves office having ratcheted up US-Russia tension, among its other signal triumphs...well, it'll be par for the course, but yet another disaster.
