In today's Fox News People's Weekly Brief, 15 year CIA veteran Mike Baker provided a list of the top threats facing the U.S. as submitted by PWB readers. Although the list contains some "threats" that I certainly do not rate as imminent (such as Global Warming or the Democratic Party), it is instructive to compare this list with the Spy The News! list of the top 5 threats facing the U.S. in 2007.
Mike's PWB readers and Spy The News! readers certainly share a healthy mistrust of Russia, and especially Mr. Putin, who continues his sabre rattling with new threats against Czechoslavakia and Poland if those nations agree to house components of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense system designed to detect and intercept missiles launched from rogue Middle Eastern nations like Iran. PWB readers ranked Russia #7, while Spy the News! had Russia at #2. It is becoming more obvious with each public exchange of Cold War barbs that whatever friendship President Bush developed with Mr. Putin over the years has been replaced with Putin's increasing nostalgia for the time when Russia was taken seriously because of its threats to "bury" any nation foolish enough to oppose it.
The PWB and Spy The News! lists also include, of course, Iran. PWB readers chose Iran as the #1 threat, but I maintain that because there are still options and opportunities for preventing Iran from fully developing a deployable nuclear weapon, the threat from Iran remains, at least for now, a terrorist threat only. Dollar for dollar, Russia is providing more weapons systems, equipment, and replacement parts to terrorist organizations and terror sponsors than any other nation in the world. While it is true that Iran is shipping those weapons into Iraq and other terrorist operational venues, the weapons are being produced in and sold by Russia or other former Soviet states looking to profit from their proxy war with America and its allies.
China, also standing to benefit greatly in world esteem and profit immensely from the decline of America's wealth and power, not surprisingly also made both lists and is a major supplier of technology to North Korea and Iran. This is not to downplay the threats posed by Iran. Clearly Iran is the most imminent threat in the Middle East. But in the long run, who poses a greater risk to America and its allies, the terrorists themselves or the nation-states that arm, equip, and maintain them? We wage war on one, while granting most favored nation trade status to the other.
Some argue that Putin faces his own Islamic terrorist threat in Chechnya and thus is a natural ally in the War on Terror. This view is too simplistic. Under the former Soviet regime, which produced Putin and the iron fist ideology he yearns for, Islamic terrorism was ruthlessly suppressed. Putin is a Cold War product and views the U.S., not Islamic terrorists, as the single obstacle preventing Russia from achieving global dominance. How long will Russians tolerate the loud and arrogant claims that America won the Cold War and that communism was defeated? National pride is a dangerous force that, once unleashed, typically propels a nation toward cataclysmic war. Hitler tapped into just such feelings of wounded pride and anger stemming from defeat in previous wars.
Putin is centralizing businesses and natural resource industries, threatening Poland and Czechoslovakia, and publicly condemns the U.S. far more than any terrorist groups. Only those unwilling to see the signs will fail to recognize that the path Russia is taking bears ominous similarities to Germany in the 1930's. A global recession that forces Russians to beg their government to take further control, and a scapegoat upon which to blame their economic misfortunes, are the sole ingredients needed for Putin (or another like him) to turn a flickering flame of nationalist pride into a raging wildfire. For Hitler, the Jews were the economic and cultural scapegoats. For Russia, the scapegoat will be the Americans and post Cold War "capitalism."
I invite you to compare the two lists and form your own conclusions. Spy The News! maintains that "Internal Strife" poses the single greatest threat we face in 2007, for the reasons detailed in the original post.
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