What went wrong? It is clear, it was not the Russians

What went wrong?

Heidi M. Przybyla

The Democratic National Committee is throwing the doors open for a frank discussion of what went wrong in the 2016 election — and how to retool for the future.

As the party searches for a new chair and vice chair, the DNC has decided to hold four regional forums, moderated by journalists instead of party insiders. It’s the first-time Democrats have held regional forums for party elections in more than 10 years.

The idea is to expose the candidates to the tough questioning as the party seeks to rebuild after Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss on Nov. 8.

The party faces significant challenges in the effort to revamp its leadership and re-energize its base. In addition to taking the White House, Republicans now control a record 67 of the 98 state legislative chambers, more than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

One important topic will be the Rust Belt states that Democrats lost for the first time since 1988.

No one from the intelligence community is invited.

The DNC’s 447 voting members will choose their next leader during the weekend of Feb. 23-26 in Atlanta.

NATO Then and Now

NATO Then and Now

by Norma Brown

I get many comments from US military who take offense at my views of NATO and its modern-day behavior. I regret that, as my comments are directed against the civilian masters who send out the fighting man to do their bidding. I wouldn’t want a US without a strong military (which is where we are heading under the Democrats), but I don’t want to see our military men and women being used to carry out political decisions that are just plain wrong and dangerous to the longer-term interests of the US.

We are at the fifteenth anniversary of NATO’s war of aggression against Serbia. The bombing went on 24 hours a day for almost three straight months, during which ordinary Serb civilians went into the streets wearing targets on their heads to help NATO do its job. This was NATO’s first foray (outside of the Bosnian conflict) into the “bombing for peace” routine it has come to rely on to prove its continued relevance in an altered world. The war against Serbia was totally unnecessary except in the context of certain NATO countries’ short-term interests – the end to expensive refugee inflows of “ragheads” (as one German official privately called Yugoslavia’s Moslems) and the forced removal of Yugoslavia’s legally-elected head of state, Slobodan Milosevic. From the moment NATO began its war against Serbia, the Alliance was firmly on the road to making “regime change” a centerpiece of its policy. And NATO members were not averse to stirring up trouble in other countries to make NATO intervention (and regime change) possible. We saw this most recently in Kiev.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union, I was an ardent supporter of NATO. Its fifteen members were protecting against a real threat from the Soviet Union, which had an expansionist and aggressive philosophy (Communism) that called for the take-over of the entire globe. It was a valiant and successful effort to make sure that no other country would be able to wage war against the Alliance without paying a deadly price. What made NATO so worthy of support was that its own philosophy and guiding doctrines were purely defensive. NATO explicitly foreswore the first use of force against another country not at war with NATO. It didn’t feel a compelling need to go to bat for countries that were not Alliance members.

Then came 1989 and the uprisings in East Berlin that led Mikhail Gorbachev to agree to the reunification of East and West Germany and to the membership of the united country in NATO.  In order to secure this historic change in Europe, the heads of state of the US, Germany, France, and the UK all gave their solemn word to Gorbachev that NATO would never threaten Russia’s fundamental security by expanding eastward. And Gorbachev fell for it.

Fast forward a couple of years to 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. All of the fifteen republics that constituted the USSR declared their independence and were recognized internationally. However, all the fifteen were patched together with bits of land and ethnic groups that were not historic or natural parts of the countries concerned. The territorial delineation and demographic composition of the various republics had been distorted under Stalin (a Georgian), who planted time bombs in all of the republics. If any republic became troublesome, Moscow could unleash the ethnic minorities against the trouble-makers. Thus the countries that were recognized internationally in 1991 were in fact highly vulnerable to territorial and ethnic claims in the longer term.

Unfortunately, as soon as the unified power of the USSR was a thing of the past, so was NATO’s vow never to expand eastward or threaten Russian security. Almost immediately, NATO began its “Partnership for Peace Program” (PPP) that was ostensibly a good-neighbor gesture but became a training program for new NATO members. The program allowed NATO to develop close relations with former Warsaw Pact (and more gradually former USSR) national military forces, beginning with innocent joint exercises in humanitarian response and ending with an eastwardly expanding NATO.

Despite the broken promises to Russia, NATO continued to function under its original purely defensive doctrine that applied only to attacks on Alliance members — until the wars in the former Yugoslavia. This was the point at which NATO began rewriting its strategic doctrine to transform it from a defensive to an aggressive military organization. NATO in effect wrote a document that gave it undefined and virtually unlimited authority to take unilateral action against countries in an undefined and virtually unlimited geographical range for an extraordinary  range of reasons that might be a real threat, or just one that could somewhere down the line develop into a threat, or maybe not. It was the age of the Sole Superpower, and it had its own military bloc open to everybody but Russia. Each entry into NATO of a former Warsaw Pact country made Germany and France feel safer (buffer zone!) but made Russia feel less so.

NATO justifies its expansionist policy by insisting that the petitioners want to join. But consider this: there are millions of people who want to be part of the US, but the decision to allow them in rests with the US. In the same way, it is the responsibility of the existing Alliance members to decide whether the continued expansion of NATO is in their security interests, or if those incremental increases in “security” for the nations farther west are bought at ever greater risk of a major armed conflict with Russia to the east. And remember this, too: every time NATO moves east, the newest members want to add another country to put between them and Russia. And that gets us directly on Russia’s doorstep, not a good place for NATO to be.

Gorbachev proposed in 1989 the dissolution of the Warsaw Pac and NATO and the creation of a true trans-European security system that included all of Europe (and Russia, too). NATO wasn’t interested. And today we have the result. Russia sees NATO as an enemy bloc trying to surround it and it is taking its own unilateral actions, the same way NATO has done. I know it isn’t going to happen, but it strikes me that there was never a better time to sit down at the negotiating table and figure out with Russia (and China, too) a way to extend security to everybody, rather than engaging in the kind of zero-sum game NATO has played for twenty years.

The impulse of liberals is to run things

Today's News

The impulse of liberals is to run things

By Walter E. Williams
Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you’d have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they’re waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions’ bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don’t mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor’s trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York’s black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I’ve heard not one peep from the Big Apple’s civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, three-fourths of America’s convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there’s a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America’s worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots’ agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

Seeing as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our lives – such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster said: “Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods.” The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in virtually all outdoor areas. The stated justification is not the desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children from bad influences – seeing adults smoking.

The late H.L. Mencken’s description of health care professionals in his day is just as appropriate today: “A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things.”

Hobby Lobby case creates unusual allies

By Kathleen Parker

When it comes to tackling complicated legal issues, one would be hard pressed to conjure a less likely partnership than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Baylor University President Ken Starr.
Well, okay, there was the David Boies and Ted Olson confederacy fighting for gay marriage rights after they took opposite sides during the 2000 Bush-Gore election dispute. Still, witnessing Dershowitz and Starr discuss and largely agree on religious liberty issues raised by the case popularly known as Hobby Lobby was pleasantly jarring.

The two convened at the Willard Hotel on Monday, the day before oral arguments in the case were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a delightful back-and-forth punctuated by yarns and anecdotes, the two legal luminaries affirmed at least two points of agreement: (1) separation of church and state is good for religion; (2) corporations are people and people are corporations (echo Mitt Romney?) and, therefore, Hobby Lobby should be permitted an exemption from the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
To back and fill a bit: Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a family-owned arts and crafts chain of more than 500 stores and 13,000 employees, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government. Hobby Lobby President Steve Green, who told a dinner crowd Monday night that he has distributed Bibles to a billion people worldwide through his personal ministry, claims that he shouldn’t be forced to participate in what he views as life-terminating contraception, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill.
The core of the argument is that Green’s business is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The RFRA basically requires that the government prove “compelling interest” when someone’s religious rights are “substantially burdened” by what the state wishes to do. Although individuals and religious groups are clearly covered by the RFRA, it isn’t clear whether the act’s protections also extend to companies.

Dershowitz and Starr kicked off an afternoon of discussions as part of a symposium co-sponsored by Baylor University and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. Starr, a former U.S. solicitor general, described the lawsuit as a “conflict of vision” – big government vs. a family that has devoted itself to Christian mission work. While Starr’s stewardship of a Baptist university might make his favorable view of the plaintiffs’ position unsurprising, Dershowitz’s sympathy for Hobby Lobby may come as a surprise to many.
Proclaiming his love both for religion and the separation of church and state, he called the government’s brief “silly and trivial.” And though he thinks birth control is good for society – and he approves of the ACA – neither of those considerations matter.

It’s the principle.
Contrary to protestations from certain entities that subvert all issues for political gain, the Hobby Lobby case is not about birth control or women’s rights or even universal health care. It is, in Dershowitz’s summation, about “whether or not the statutes in the penumbra of the Constitution require a religious exemption.”
Period.
As a final note of clarification, the Green family did not pick this battle.
The federal government did when it imposed what could be considered a secular belief system on people who happen to be business owners with strong religious convictions about abortion.
In a brief sidebar: Don’t you find it curious that the biological fact of life at conception is characterized as an article of faith (religious), while denial of that life vis-a-vis its involuntary termination is viewed as ultimately sacred? One of life’s little mysteries.

Whatever one’s views on these matters, they are of no consequence.
The fact that I personally favor birth control doesn’t alter the logic of what I’ve just written.
It merely suits me to believe as I do in order to get through life as I find most convenient.
It doesn’t make me right, except under secular law, which a great many people find less compelling than the higher laws of nature – or of God. Your choice.
In any case, the first principle of religious freedom should be treated as paramount, as often and at every stage possible, agreed both Starr and Dershowitz. And both hope that the Supreme Court will find a way to accommodate Hobby Lobby.

The court’s ruling is expected sometime in June.

Seeing Past the Obama Meme

The Daily Bell

Chickens come home to roost for Obama ... Today's quiz: What do Vladimir Putin's aggression and ObamaCare's troubles have in common? OK, that was too easy. It is impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence the Russian Bear's invasion of Ukraine and the continuing mayhem of the Affordable Care Act. In their own ways, each reflects the full flowering of the policies of Barack Obama. His chickens are coming home to roost, and what a mess they are making. – New York Post

Seldom do we see an article that incorporates so many dominant and sub-dominant social themes so seamlessly. Obama is attacked in this article for a variety of reasons and is portrayed as a weak president whose behavior is making the world a more dangerous place. He is painted as an ideologue who wants to create socialism at home and peace via palliation abroad. His inability to "move" Europe and Russia in the directions he seeks is further evidence of his lack of gravitas and his dangerous disengagement from the world as it really is.

The article compares Obama's handling of his country to Putin's regime in Russia and makes the case that Putin is a far better leader and a more competent administrator. "America's standing and influence have declined," and this is a direct result of Obama's worldview and subsequent flawed decision making.

Here's more:

Obama's sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that's saying something. He's been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

... Ideologues love to dream, and some do it eloquently. Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" Mario Cuomo, no slouch at dreaming, nonetheless offered a caveat, saying, "You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose."

Obama hasn't figured out the difference. Even more alarming, he shows no signs of trying to learn. In the ways of the world, he remains a know-it-all rookie. The view from his faculty lounge has no space for reality. Anything that doesn't fit the grand plan is dismissed as illegitimate.

So while global hot spots multiply and the world grows dangerously unstable, the president still plans to slash the military. His trip abroad last week further secured his reputation for historic ineptitude. It wasn't that the trip was a disaster — it never rose to that level. His presence and his promises simply made no difference.

He failed to move the European Union toward a firmer stance on Russia, created bizarre headlines by differing with the Vatican over what he and the pope discussed, and got not-so-veiled threats from the Saudis about Syria and Iran. He could have stayed home and not done worse.

... ObamaCare is the domestic expression of the president's ineptitude. The law that was supposed to fix health care has become a problem for millions, and now enjoys mere 26 percent approval, a poll finds. It is proving so unworkable that the White House has given up defending it as written and instead simply changes key provisions when they prove impossible to implement or politically inconvenient.

... A Caesar at home and a Chamberlain abroad, Obama manages to simultaneously provoke fury and ridicule. He bullies critics here while shrinking from adversaries there. He divides the country and unites the world against us, ­diminishing the nation in both ways. His reign of error can't end soon enough, nor can it end well.

Damning, eh? Yet one could equally argue exactly the opposite points.

It is not Russia, apparently, that destabilized Ukraine but the US and Britain. There is plenty of evidence of this beginning with Victoria Nuland's assertion that the US funded "democracy" – and thus contributed to the Ukraine's destabilization over decades – with some US$5 billion.

To maintain as this article does that those who engineered the Ukraine's regime change did not foresee that Putin would seek immediately to annex Crimea is ludicrous. Obama is castigated as "weak" but Putin's behavior was surely part of a larger, predictable strategy that the West expected and the Pentagon, in particular, expected. Putin certainly played his part.

There is plenty of evidence as well that the US State Department helped to lay the groundwork for "color revolutions" in such disparate places as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali and Syria.

Iraq and Afghanistan were outright wars in which the US and Britain – along with NATO – made significant military commitments. It remains to be seen if Iran will suffer a similar fate. Chaos is ever the friend of globalism, after all, and there are significant globalist forces at work in the West.

And then there is Obamacare. The incompetence is extraordinary and the implementation is breathtakingly inept. But are we to conclude from this that the Obama administration has simply failed to do things properly? Or perhaps there are other reasons why the rollout has been plagued with a variety of failures.

Those behind Obamacare surely see the current system as merely a stopgap measure on the way to a single payer system – a national healthcare program that backers would have tried to implement if they could. Seen from this perspective, the incredibly flawed rollout of the new system actually creates the conditions for further reform.

It would seem that Obama's reputation is being sacrificed to achieve certain results. His apparent incompetence at home sets the stage for further health care reforms and an additional consolidation of medical services.

Abroad, Obama's perceived "weakness" lays the groundwork for further provocations by Russia and perhaps China as well. In an era where people are better informed about larger globalist manipulations, the ability to re-engineer certain Cold War tensions is surely useful.

It is "directed history" that is at work here. The catastrophe of Obamacare will lead to further nationalizations of health care. The apparent weakness of the US response to Russian provocations will lead to an even more energetic security state in the US along with a resurgent military-industrial complex.

The article castigates Obama as authoritarian at home and submissive abroad. But perhaps Obama is merely playing the role that is demanded of him.

As we peer behind the curtain, we can actually see these manipulations being played out. They remind us that in the 21st century, as in previous centuries, nothing is as it seems and both government and economic policies are subject to secret forces that operate with agendas that are never fully explained.

We are fortunate, however, in this Internet Era that we can actually see these promotions being initiated and pursued. This knowledge gives us important insights into how the world is organized and what might be coming next. And these insights can be used to anticipate a variety of sociopolitical, economic and investment trends.

Here at The Daily Bell, we try to point them out on a regular basis. We try to analyze the reality "behind the memes," along with other elements of the alternative media.

Ukraine and the 'Little Cold War'

Ukraine and the 'Little Cold War'

 By George Friedman

We must consider the future of Eurasia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since 1991, the region has fragmented and decayed. The successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia, is emerging from this period with renewed self-confidence. Yet Russia is also in an untenable geopolitical position. Unless Russia exerts itself to create a sphere of influence, the Russian Federation could itself fragment.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union controlled Eurasia -- from central Germany to the Pacific, as far south as the Caucasus and the Hindu Kush. When the Soviet Union collapsed, its western frontier moved east nearly 1,000 miles, from the West German border to the Russian border with Belarus. Russian power has now retreated farther east than it has been in centuries. During the Cold War it had moved farther west than ever before. In the coming decades, Russian power will settle somewhere between those two lines.

After the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of the 20th century, foreign powers moved in to take advantage of Russia's economy, creating an era of chaos and poverty. Most significantly, Ukraine moved into an alignment with the United States and away from Russia -- this was a breaking point in Russian history.

The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, from December 2004 to January 2005, was the moment when the post-Cold War world genuinely ended for Russia. The Russians saw the events in Ukraine as an attempt by the United States to draw Ukraine into NATO and thereby set the stage for Russian disintegration. Quite frankly, there was some truth to the Russian perception.

If the West had succeeded in dominating Ukraine, Russia would have become indefensible. The southern border with Belarus, as well as the southwestern frontier of Russia, would have been wide open.

Russia's Resurgence

After what Russia regarded as an American attempt to further damage it, Moscow reverted to a strategy of reasserting its sphere of influence in the areas of the former Soviet Union. The great retreat of Russian power ended in Ukraine. For the next generation, until roughly 2020, Russia's primary concern will be reconstructing the Russian state and reasserting Russian power in the region.

Interestingly, the geopolitical shift is aligning with an economic shift. Vladimir Putin sees Russia less as an industrial power than as an exporter of raw materials, the most important of which is energy (particularly natural gas). He is transforming Russia from an impoverished disaster into a poor but more productive country. Putin also is giving Russia the tool with which to intimidate Europe: the valve on a natural gas pipeline.

But the real flash point, in all likelihood, will be on Russia's western frontier. Belarus will align itself with Russia. Of all the countries in the former Soviet Union, Belarus has had the fewest economic and political reforms and has been the most interested in recreating some successor to the Soviet Union. Linked in some way to Russia, Belarus will bring Russian power back to the borders of the former Soviet Union.

From the Baltics south to the Romanian border there is a region where borders have historically been uncertain and conflict frequent. In the north, there is a long, narrow plain, stretching from the Pyrenees to St. Petersburg. This is where Europe's greatest wars were fought. This is the path that Napoleon and Hitler took to invade Russia. There are few natural barriers. Therefore, the Russians must push their border west as far as possible to create a buffer. After World War II, they drove into the center of Germany on this plain. Today, they have retreated to the east. They have to return, and move as far west as possible. That means the Baltic states and Poland are, as before, problems Russia has to solve.

Defining the limits of Russian influence will be controversial. The United States -- and the countries within the old Soviet sphere -- will not want Russia to go too far.

Russia will not become a global power in the next decade, but it has no choice but to become a major regional power. And that means it will clash with Europe. The Russian-European frontier remains a fault line.

It is unreasonable to talk of Europe as if it were one entity. It is not, in spite of the existence of the European Union. Europe consists of a series of sovereign and contentious nation-states.

In short, post-Cold War Europe is in benign chaos. Russia is the immediate strategic threat to Europe. Russia is interested not in conquering Europe, but in reasserting its control over the former Soviet Union. From the Russian point of view, this is both a reasonable attempt to establish some minimal sphere of influence and essentially a defensive measure.

Obviously the Eastern Europeans want to prevent a Russian resurgence. The real question is what the rest of Europe might do -- and especially, what Germany might do. The Germans are now in a comfortable position with a buffer between them and the Russians, free to focus on their internal economic and social problems. In addition, the heritage of World War II weighs heavily on the Germans. They will not want to act alone, but as part of a unified Europe.

Russia is the eastern portion of Europe and has clashed with the rest of Europe on multiple occasions. Historically, though, Europeans who have invaded Russia have come to a disastrous end. If they are not beaten by the Russians, they are so exhausted from fighting them that someone else defeats them. Russia occasionally pushes its power westward, threatening Europe with the Russian masses. At other times passive and ignored, Russia is often taken advantage of. But, in due course, others pay for underestimating it.

Geographic Handicaps, Energy Assets

If we are going to understand Russia's behavior and intentions, we have to begin with Russia's fundamental weakness -- its borders, particularly in the northwest. On the North European Plain, no matter where Russia's borders are drawn, it is open to attack. There are few significant natural barriers anywhere on this plain. Pushing its western border all the way into Germany, as it did in 1945, still leaves Russia's frontiers without a physical anchor. The only physical advantage Russia can have is depth. The farther west into Europe its borders extend, the farther conquerors have to travel to reach Moscow. Therefore, Russia is always pressing westward on the North European Plain and Europe is always pressing eastward.

Europe is hungry for energy. Russia, constructing pipelines to feed natural gas to Europe, takes care of Europe's energy needs and its own economic problems, and puts Europe in a position of dependency on Russia. In an energy-hungry world, Russia's energy exports are like heroin. It addicts countries once they start using it. Russia has already used its natural gas resources to force neighboring countries to bend to its will. That power reaches into the heart of Europe, where the Germans and the former Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe all depend on Russian natural gas. Add to this its other resources, and Russia can apply significant pressure on Europe.

Dependency can be a double-edged sword. A militarily weak Russia cannot pressure its neighbors, because its neighbors might decide to make a grab for its wealth. So Russia must recover its military strength. Rich and weak is a bad position for nations to be in. If Russia is to be rich in natural resources and export them to Europe, it must be in a position to protect what it has and to shape the international environment in which it lives.

In the next decade, Russia will become increasingly wealthy (relative to its past, at least) but geographically insecure. It will therefore use some of its wealth to create a military force appropriate to protect its interests, buffer zones to protect it from the rest of the world -- and then buffer zones for the buffer zones. Russia's grand strategy involves the creation of deep buffers along the North European Plain, while it divides and manipulates its neighbors, creating a new regional balance of power in Europe. What Russia cannot tolerate are tight borders without buffer zones, and its neighbors united against it. This is why Russia's future actions will appear to be aggressive but will actually be defensive.

Russia's actions will unfold in three phases. In the first phase, Russia will be concerned with recovering influence and effective control in the former Soviet Union, re-creating the system of buffers that the Soviet Union provided it. In the second phase, Russia will seek to create a second tier of buffers beyond the boundaries of the former Soviet Union. It will try to do this without creating a solid wall of opposition, of the kind that choked it during the Cold War. In the third phase -- really something that will have been going on from the beginning -- Russia will try to prevent anti-Russian coalitions from forming.

If we think of the Soviet Union as a natural grouping of geographically isolated and economically handicapped countries, we can see what held it together. The countries that made up the Soviet Union were bound together of necessity. The former Soviet Union consisted of members who really had nowhere else to go. These old economic ties still dominate the region, except that Russia's new model, exporting energy, has made these countries even more dependent than they were previously. Attracted as Ukraine was to the rest of Europe, it could not compete or participate with Europe. Its natural economic relationship is with Russia; it relies on Russia for energy, and ultimately it tends to be militarily dominated by Russia as well.

These are the dynamics that Russia will take advantage of in order to reassert its sphere of influence. It will not necessarily recreate a formal political structure run from Moscow -- although that is not inconceivable. Far more important will be Russian influence in the region over the next five to 10 years.

The Russians will pull the Ukrainians into their alliance with Belarus and will have Russian forces all along the Polish border, and as far south as the Black Sea. This, I believe, will all take place by the mid-2010s.

There has been a great deal of talk in recent years about the weakness of the Russian army, talk that in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union was accurate. But here is the new reality -- that weakness started to reverse itself in 2000, and by 2015 it will be a thing of the past. The coming confrontation in northeastern Europe will not take place suddenly, but will be an extended confrontation. Russian military strength will have time to develop. The one area in which Russia continued research and development in the 1990s was in advanced military technologies. By 2010, it will certainly have the most effective army in the region. By 2015-2020, it will have a military that will pose a challenge to any power trying to project force into the region, even the United States.

"Ukraine and the 'Little Cold War' is republished with permission of Stratfor."