According to four-star Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., President Barack Obama’s nominee for Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Russia presents “the greatest threat to our national security.”
Yes, Russia has military heft and it has Vladimir Putin, who continues to wax nostalgic for Josef Stalin. And Putin, still a KGB punk at his core, has been able to play the nationalism and NATO-encroachment cards that Russia is so susceptible to. But, no, Putin’s Russia is not our “greatest threat.”
That would be jihadist Islam, the ever-mutating, religious-cherry picking fanaticism that doesn’t see self-interest the way nation-states, even Cold War communist ones, do.
Recall the Cuban-missile crisis, an “existential threat” if there ever was one, and why it was ultimately defused.
Sure, there were compromises; i.e., an American no-invasion (of Cuba) pledge and a removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev then had face-saving and geopolitical cover to pull out Cuban missiles and turn around missile-carrying ships. The world, not just the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., exhaled.
But the bottom line was this. The leadership of both America and the Soviet Union knew the possible, more like probable, consequences of the status quo: a nuclear exchange, untold millions of lives lost and a planet imperiled. Put more bluntly: Nobody wanted to die.
We weren’t dealing with an enemy with a suicide complex, after-life priorities and rationales for everything–no matter how horrifically monstrous–when it involves “infidels.” And we’re the cross-haired infidels.
With Putin, we still have the ultimate leverage. He doesn’t want to die either.
Moreover, for all his bluster, dismissive body language and perverse nationalism, he also knows who Russia’s most threatening enemy is. Frankly, it’s the same as ours.
The enemy of my enemy is, well, not my “greatest threat.”