There are echoes of history in all this. Echoes that remind us in one way or the other of Berlin. China’s Olympic extravaganza — and its suppression of dissent — inevitably remind us of Adolf Hitler’s Berlin Olympics in 1936. Russia’s torrent of lies — its claims that democratic Georgia has been engaged in ethnic [...]

read more....

But Russia’s own state-run defense industries, experts say, face a crumbling manufacturing base and pervasive corruption; they have produced little in the way of advanced armaments in the Putin era.
The Victory Day parade in Red Square in May was intended to showcase the nation’s military might. Instead, Russia’s arsenal showed its age. Most of the [...]

read more....

A new buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a U.S. attack on Iran: “national suicide” The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly launched ruinous wars they could [...]

read more....

This is a fictional account of what could have happened.
The rapid advance of the German army through Belgium and France in May 1940 left hundreds of thousands of British, French and Belgian troops encircled at the port of Dunkirk in northern France.
But then Hitler ordered a halt to the attack. This gave the British [...]

read more....

I don’t know about you, but the sight of Russian missiles rolling across Red Square made me a little nervous. It’s the Russian way of subtle intimidation.
From the article:
If anyone was having trouble grasping the fact that Russia has an image problem, the sight of intercontinental ballistic missiles rolling across Red Square on Victory Day [...]

read more....

Dmitry Oreshkin, a Russian political analyst, says beefing up the Victory Day parade is just one of many steps that Putin has taken toward resurrecting the hallmarks of the Soviet empire and the country’s former glory.
“He gives free rein to the Soviet dream,” Oreshkin says. “The huge number of people who were brought up in [...]

read more....

Recent events serve as a reminder of how menacing behavior from Iran and Syria keeps the Middle East on a hair trigger. On Tuesday, Israel learned that Hezbollah was rapidly rebuilding its military capabilities and preparing for renewed conflict with Israel. The next morning, a London-based Arab newspaper reported that Syria was concentrating troops and [...]

read more....

“Moscow’s developing bilateral security relations with Latin American governments have become a matter of some concern for Washington,” the study says. It contains both official reports and information leaks about Russia’s contacts with Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico on past and future deliveries of Russian weapons, including fighter and transport planes, helicopters, [...]

read more....