Hi CobaltBlue; Re the Moscow theater audience hostages...
When you're a world power with a huge conventional army, it seems like that army is a good solution for various foreign policy problems. Asymmetric warfare, however, makes that conventional army a lot weaker than it looks, at what really counts: protecting the nation's citizens.
Terror is, unfortunately, the great equalizer.
You're being terrorized in the Washington DC area by just one or two guys. If that's not a lesson plan for terrorists I don't know how they could make it more clear.
Russia is adjacent to Moslem countries, so it would be very difficult for them to avoid conflict. But we're thousands of miles away. If we simply dump the Israelis, we, like the Europeans, will reduce our importance as a terror target. We'll still have the occasional terrorism incident, (we've been having them since 1895 so they're not going to completely disappear no matter what we do), but the fact is that citizens of Canada, for example, aren't afraid to travel around the world wearing backpacks with their national flag.
If we emulate Canada (or Switzerland's) foreign policy we'll eventually end up with the relative safety of that country. If we emulate Israel's foreign policy, we'll end up with the problems that country has.
-- Carl |
