Hey Russia, the Cold War is supposed to be over!

20 years after the official end of the Cold War, Russia is still an asshole. There was real hope that they had democracy and were embracing our form of capitalism. But over the past 5 years they have shown repeatedly that they haven't changed all that much, besides controlling a hell of a lot less land.

The current problem is that they are one of the primary providers of natural gas to Europe, especially Eastern Europe. But their "state run monopoly" Gasprom had turned off the spigots. They claim that Ukraine is stealing gas from the pipeline that goes through their territory. In order to force Ukraine to pay up, they stopped sending any gas at all. The problem with this is that it fucks Europe. It is below freezing and they can't get enough gas to heat their homes.

This is a classic example of shitting where you eat. Now Europe is making an all out search to get their energy from someone other than Russia. They will go to Greece and the Middle East pipelines over Russia. Though they have enormous amounts of gas reserves, Russia is in the process of making itself the country that everyone avoids. Unless countries get real desperate, all of that energy revenue rolling into Russia is going to dry up.

Ukraine claims that they never took any gas, and that Russia is trying to punish them for trying to join the European Union and NATO, and generally embracing Western ideas. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it would be consistent with their current attitudes/actions globally.

As it is, Russia has no problem with Iran having nukes, North Korea having nukes, and anyone else that is an enemy of the West having nukes. They don't even know where all of their nukes are! There were international incidents of poisoning critics of the government, censoring newspapers and television, Chechnyan violence, and basically the election of Putin as leader for as long as he feels like. Last time I checked, in democracies the leader doesn't stay in power indefinitely. This doesn't seem like a new Russia. It is very much the same thing, just with a capitalist twist (so that they can rake in the profits from Gasprom).

It is hard for me to blame the Russian government for being anti-Western, as the Bush administration has done everything it can to alienate as many countries as possible. But at the same time, we're the country that is most involved on a global level. We're rapidly descending from super-power status (which I think is a good thing. Time for the rest of the world to ask China to help clean up their messes, not just us.) and therefore, we don't control the Western world like we once did. Anti-Western means more than anti-U.S. at this point, and it seems like Russia is stuck in 1960s-70s thinking. So let them keep killing off critics of their government, let them keep shitting where they eat, let's see them keep fucking with the Western world, and let's see what type of shithole country they end up with.