But more fundamentally, the russophobic group-think is nurtured by careerism, the profit motive, and audience size -- by senior military officers who want to add more stars to their shoulders, by military contractors who want to glom on to still more of the federal budget, and by media moguls who have discovered that peace is a bore and that war-talk is boffo box office.
This is the "military-industrial complex" about which President Eisenhower warned us in 1961, now metastasized into the "military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media complex," aka "the deep state."
In a 1987 letter to The New York Times, Soviet scholar Georgi Arbatov asked; "We have a secret weapon ... we will deprive America of The Enemy. And how [then will] you justify ... the military expenditures that bleed America white?"
Perhaps we have an answer: if we don't have an enemy, then we may have to invent one.
Goals aside, where is this russophobia leading us?
The lesson of history is clear: escalating war-talk, unchallenged, often leads to war.
One might assess the state of "Russia-fever" today with a present-time snap-shot. Far better to assess it as a "moving picture" -- a trend-line. If so, we find that Vladimir Putin has evolved from "rival" to "adversary" to "enemy" to "demon." What's ahead? "A new Hitler?" "Another Stalin?" "Devil incarnate?" Uncontested propaganda is like a narcotic: the addict needs more and more of it to get the same "kick.
Congressional and media group-think have put us on a one-way road to catastrophe -- a road with no recognized exits and no prospect of a reversal of direction. But there are exits: Negotiation and de-escalation, following a mutual acknowledgment of the common nuclear peril. If not these, then what?
That's a question that you are unlikely to hear from the pundits and politicians.
I hasten to add that I am no admirer of Vladimir Putin If I were a Russian, I would not vote for him, as more than a third of the Russians in the 2012 election did not. But he is the legally elected President of the Russian Federation, and he is supported by a large majority of Russians. So, like him or not, we must deal with him.
What goals, what "trends" are remotely worth the perils of Cold War II?
In a word: none!
Even so, this is another existential question rarely if ever posed in Congress or the mainstream Ministry of Truth.
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