Glad to see you are still fighting the Cold War when China, more than any other country, should be considered the current "big bad." Just sayin'.
I didn't see that I downplayed China. Although I think you underestimate Russia.
I posted an article a
few months ago from one of the London newspapers, that it was Russia who approached China about dumping their bonds in a deliberate attempt to collapse the U.S. financial system.China declined (probably only because they are so intertwined and dependent on our economy, although they have since begun to insulate themselves, quietly getting out of U.S. assets) to help collapse us, and the Chinese warned Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson when he came to visit for the July 2008 Olympics in Beijing. It was at that point there was a scramble to put together a bailout package to prevent a meltdown of the system. Russian orchestrated.
It's no secret that Russia would like to reconquer their so-called "near abroad", the former Soviet states, such as Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Khazakstan and so forth. And a collapsed United States would allow them to do that unopposed. Russia also (with some justification) sees the United States as encirling them with either military advisors or troops in Poland, Rumania, Bosnia, Armenia, Uzbekistan (we pulled out of this one), Afghanistan, Pakistan, and many Persian Gulf states. The proper thing to do after the Soviet collapse would have been to respect that as Russian turf, and not have military presence there, and even expand NATO into former soviet territories. While I see our objectives in these places as benign and not imperial, I can see where this would be threatening to the Russian leadership.
But despite your saying I'm living in the past, I think I've made a good case for the fact that Russia is still an enemy, and very hostile to the U.S.
And Russia, by the way, is a major supplier of oil to the rest of Europe. They've already shown their willingness to use oil supply as a leveraging weapon on the rest of Europe, as shown with Ukraine.
Likewise, China resents us for our protection of Taiwan and other exploitable nations in China's back yard. And likewise, China (as I detailed discussing China's first-, second- and third-island-chain defensive borders) is likewise aggressively planning a takedown of U.S. supremacy in the Pacific.
In addition, China has conducted a number of cyber attacks on U.S. defenses and technological information. Often just a test of their capability, but also very destructive and compromising.
I don't even need to detail the Islamic threat to the U.S., or the threat from the so-called "friendly" islamic states, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
But the point is, Russia is demonstrably not the obsolete threat you seem to believe it is.
