10-12-2012, 01:39 PM
Al Queda-esque people are all over the place. Yes, with hindsight, Bengazi was the weakest link but when you cut budgets, weakest links will be exposed (that was the essence of my "Japanese supply line" argument). It's easier to point them out after the fact, but quite a bit more difficult to predict them in advance..
Russia and strength in the same sentence? We've been there before, when it was the Soviet Union, until it imploded under it's own weight. I don't see Russia as strong at all. It's weak and paranoid. More than anything, it's afraid of its own population, like the Chinese.
It's a handful of oligarchs in resources without much value added and dreams of former glory that were mostly illusions anyway.
We had arguments about Soros funding anti-fracking and I always thought there was no evidence in support of that claim. But if you mention Gazprom, well..
Russia and strength in the same sentence? We've been there before, when it was the Soviet Union, until it imploded under it's own weight. I don't see Russia as strong at all. It's weak and paranoid. More than anything, it's afraid of its own population, like the Chinese.
It's a handful of oligarchs in resources without much value added and dreams of former glory that were mostly illusions anyway.
We had arguments about Soros funding anti-fracking and I always thought there was no evidence in support of that claim. But if you mention Gazprom, well..