Dally wrote:
I preferred the Reagan and Thatcher era when strong Western leadership prevailed over weak Russian leadership and led to the emancipation on tens of millions of people. Putin has learned the lesson of history but we haven't. Freedom needs fighting for and constant vigilance.
With hindsight most intelligent commentators, even the American ones, can look back at the era from the late 1950s to the start of Glasnost and realise just how close the world came to conventional and nuclear conflict on several occasions during those 30 or so years, close enough to look back and think "Actually, that was all a bit stupid" close enough to understand, with hindsight, that talking and economic sanctions should ALWAYS, without fail or question, precede even threats of military action.
Sixteen years ago I stayed for a couple of nights on a British Army base in Northern Germany which was still used by a tank regiment of some description, it was the size of a small town, in fact it dwarfed the small German town next to it but it was apparently randomly located hundreds of miles from the Soviet border, except that it wasn't really for in the bad old days it was only one or two miles away from the East German border and the size of the military on call on that base gives you an indication of how seriously the NATO forces took the threat from the USSR, if an invasion had started at any point that would have been the front line and that base would have defended all of Northern West Germany and the Baltic coast.
If you're happy to spend billions every year to appear to have big balls then fine, throw some more voluntary tax into a big pot, or ask Cameron to strip off his shirt and be photographed on a boar hunt in a slightly homo-erotic publicity campaign...
