Sometimes I find that I miss the Cold War. The Soviet Union was an evil, intractable adversary. The stakes on every confrontation were high. That all ended starting in the mid- to late-80s, with Solidarity in Poland, Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the 1991 coup by Dmitri Yazov, et al, the rise of Boris Yeltsin in that near-conflagration, and finally with the political collapse of the USSR itself. The days of The Hunt for Red October were gone and the nature of most of 007’s adversaries had to change in what now seems like a brief instant.
Then I come across things like this. The more some things change, the more they stay the same. Just on different levels.
On the other hand, I’m enjoying this hyperpower gig. We can broadcast to the bad guys exactly what we’re going to do to them, and they can’t stop us. It’s rather unbelievable sometimes that so many rogue countries even bother to try.