START Treaty

The Obama Administration has hailed the recent Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty or “START Treaty” - with Russia as a giant step toward nuclear supervision and disarmament. And perhaps it is. History will eventually decide whether START was truly a diplomacy coup for the Obama Administration… or just a much needed public relations boost for an administration not having much success in international affairs. Of course, history has already assessed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is just a mobster with a title.

The nuclear arms race of the Cold War Era was an ideological battle to determine which system would ultimately rule the world democracy or communism.

Today, Russia’s leaders have no real desire to rule the world. Russia is now just a milk cow for a political mafia that rules through intimidation, extortion, and rigged elections. Today’s Russian leaders are more interested in bringing in petro-dollars, than in laying out dollars building up their intercontinental ballistic missile systems.

This Russian gang of mobsters led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin does not want to spend money on nuclear missile systems because that would just leave less money on their table to divide up amongst this organized crime syndicate.

Sadly, his form of governing, (let’s call it “Putinism”) is catching on in other former Soviet republics, partly because no one, including the United States, speaks out against it. Hungary, once a vanguard against old-style Soviet rule, is now moving away from democracy and becoming more like Putin’s Russia, under the leadership of strongman Viktor Orban. Similarly the Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovich no longer speaks of an “orange revolution” but has instead adopted Putinism and ballot-box stuffing as the preferred method of maintaining power.

Russia no longer exports Communism to the rest of the world. Instead Putinism is a shining example of how controlling government and its resources is much more personally rewarding than nation building. While the West deludes itself into believing that the new Russia is its friend, it chooses to ignore that Putinism is not much of an improvement over the old Soviet system. Not for us in the West and certainly not for the Russian people.

So, while the Obama administration is telling us we’re all a little bit safer, and perhaps we are … the Russian hierarchy is dividing up billions.