I don't know about a military weapon to create bloodclots, but we already have medical machines that use soundwaves to kill cancer. Apparently they use three or more different soundwaves, aimed in such a way as to have them cross at the point you want to kill (the cancer), and when they cross they amplify to a lethal degree. Not only non-invasive but also nerd-errific!
A relevant Chomsky quote (which you may again find trite) is "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." It's not just a throwaway sound bite either. It has real meaning. If you look at the history of the US, UK etc, violent repression becomes less and less of an option over time, and has been replaced with a propaganda model of control.
I don't find this one trite, but I do find it essentially incorrect. For example, Mao's one great weapon was the propaganda organs of the PRC, not the PLA or other state security apparatuses. And Mao knew it too--he wasn't a "numbers guy", didn't have economic credibility, didn't have the chops to run the PLA, wasn't a diplomat (in this aspect, Zhou Enlai was indispensable right up until his death). Mao's key tool was propaganda, and what a tool it was.
Mao used the propaganda organs to incite mass uprisings against the state itself, destroying, humiliating, and killing veteran CCP cadres and bureaucrats, and even taking on PLA units. This mass insanity--with students wearing Mao pins and carrying around his Little Red Book as authority/justification for their actions--was the Cultural Revolution. So Chomsky's propaganda:democracy::bludgeon:totalitarian analogy is a false one, because in totalitarian states propaganda is just as, if not more, powerful than traditional state levers of power (the bludgeon).
Popular formulations of Chomsky's like this are either intellectually dishonest or remarkably poorly informed. Either way, they obscure more than they illuminate.
Being nocturnal, underground dwellers we have no need of light other than the soft glow of our displays and diagnostics.
Oh look at meee, I'm silentounce, I only need the glow of my displays and diagnostics. I'm so independent and free, look at meeee!
Well what about those of us who need our blinkenlights as well, huh? Ever think about that, you insensitive clod? Oh, but I suppose in your world, people oughtn't need their blinkenlights, right? right? I know you must look down on the rest of us, smug in the knowledge that you can get by without blinkenlights, but your self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude belies your very obvious, dark, twisted relationship with blinkenlights. Admit it! J'accuse!! You were once addicted to blinkenlighten weren't you? Now that you're "clean" you think you can subtly mock the rest of us, do you? For shame. Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of decency?
I have heard the blinkenlights blinking, each to each
If he makes a habit of ordering dual-use technology, he better be prepared for a rather drawn out series of overly-involved yet useless visits from Mr. Hans Blix.
Can you imagine the terror he will face when he receives a 600 page long, sternly worded, yet entirely vague letter from Mr. Blix? Can you?!
Next thing you know, he'll be banned from buying iPods by the Treasury Department.
Indeed, we may see Mac OS X Server supporting default ZFS before Mac OS X proper. It would make sense to deploy it first in a limited market with technical expert users as your target market.
During the same period you mention--the late 80's arms race--you ought to note that the high oil prices from the 70's had finally fallen. The oil embargo from '73 and the second attempt in '79 had kept prices fairly high throughout the whole decade. So not only did the Soviets have to spend more on an arms race, but they had to do so in the context of falling profits from oil.
The problem is not really the external commitments of Russia or arms acquisitions, but simply that a huge chunk of its economy is solely based on energy. As we all know, energy is a fungible commodity and is subject to wide, hard to predict variations in world price. A sudden oil price shock could do proportionally higher damage to Russia than one might expect, especially because of the consolidation of the energy sector in Russia, and the centrality of companies like Gazprom to Kremlin strategy.
It's pretty widely accepted that a lot of Russian money that ought to be invested is sitting somewhere in Switzerland or the Caymans.
I know Putin is popular, and for good reason, but calling him an intellectual is a joke. That would be like calling George Bush Sr. an intellectual. Neither are--they're both ex-spooks who are good at politics.
Neither is Putin in any way a socialist, but I've addressed that in a post above.
Beyond that, Kasparov hasn't a chance, and there's really no point in discussing him as a viable candidate, except that Slashdotters like the idea of a chessplayer running a country.
As for the Grand Parent post--calling Kerry an intellectual is probably more absurd than calling Putin an intellectual. A conversation with Putin would be far more enlightening than with that dull cipher of a Senator who has never achieved anything, either in private life, or in 20 years as a senator.
In chess and go there are defined rules, and each actor starts with the same amount of pieces and capabilities.
In Russian politics, there are no rules and there is a vast disparity between the capabilities of the head of state and the capabilities of a former chess player.
No one in Russia thinks Kasparov will amount to anything, and the truth is he won't.
There are two highly disputable points in your post: one, that Russia's economy is sustainable and balanced; and two, that Putin is a socialist. Both are quite obviously incorrect.
Russia's economic boom over the past 5-7 years has been principally attributable to the rise in oil and gas prices worldwide. Putin has been consolidating Russia's oil and gas companies into a much tighter oligarchy (cf. the reason why Khodorkovsky is in jail in Siberia). Meanwhile, he has been pressuring neighboring countries to sell their oil and gas pipelines to Russian companies. There has been a lot both in Western and Russian press about Putin's "energy empire." The rest of Russia's economy hasn't done much at all. In fact, fewer and fewer of the young generation even want to go into private business--most want to work for the state bureaucracy. Moreover, most of Russia's growth has been funnelled into Moscow and St. Petersburg (and dachas on the Volga), with the rest of the country experiencing few if any of the benefits from the oil & gas money. Lots of Russian towns in the countryside still look like they did in the 1800s. When oil and gas prices level off or fall (even temporarily so), so too will Russia's economic house of cards.
And in no way can Putin be called a socialist. Not even close. There are two groups within his administration: the siloviki and the St. Petersburg group. Neither are socialist in orientation. The siloviki are the so-called "power" people: they control the defense, internal security, FSB (i.e. KGB successor), military, etc. These are relatively agnostic when it comes to the economy, preferring the centralization of power and stabilization of society. Moves to centralize oil and gas fit well within their worldview. The St. Petersburg group are generally liberal (in the economics sense, not the U.S. sense) reformers who favor free market solutions and getting rid of the welfare state. They have been slowly trying to divest the state of its welfare obligations (with only marginal success, since the Russian people protest when you try to reform their pension benefits). Putin himself is a chekist--a KGB man--not a socialist in ideology or practice.
Congress gives away its power to regulatory agencies and departments. Thus the EPA can pass regulations making certain things legal or illegal without Congress having to get involved. Ditto for other agencies. Congress has been giving away its powers for a long time.
That's not entirely true. Mac users will find Firefox 3 to be light years faster and more beautiful for two reasons:
Uses native interface widgets. Instead of wasting CPU cycles creating custom interface each time you open a damn tab, Firefox 3's native interface is brilliantly fast.
Uses better rendering on fonts, such that the fonts are far more beautiful that on Firefox 2.0, and comparable even to Safari's font rendering.
Those two alone make Firefox 3 alpha attractive to Mac users who like Firefox but can't stand dealing with its slow-as-molasses implementation in the 1.*-2.0 series.
If someone submitted the link to this video a month ago when it first appeared on blogs and Digg etc it wouldn't have been accepted as a story on Slashdot. Funny how the Wall Street Journal's description of the video, spare interview, and short backstory showcasing their world-class investigative journalism (the same that doggedly followed the Enron debacle) makes this YouTube clip a legitimate story to post on Slashdot's front page.
I'm not complaining about it being here, or complaining that the Wall Street Journal submits its own stuff. Just funny how a random link becomes legitimate, that's all.
Where the money is, the military power will follow.
This is a pithy soundbite, but doesn't hold any weight. A common currency and a common central bank has done nothing to unify or even to harmonize fiscal policies. Fiscal policy is still controlled by the national governments, and the Stability Pacts made to try and harmonize spending have failed or been flagrantly violated. There's no indication of a fiscal unification anywhere in the short to medium term. And if there's no fiscal unification, then a military unification is hard to imagine.
I don't discount the possibility of an eventual, full political integration of the EU into a superstate of some fashion. At that time, it may very well balance against the United States in some form or another. But such a superstate is decades down the road, at best.
As it stands, however, European countries remain within the NATO framework, thus they do not balance one another, much less the United States. In fact, the United States has been pushing its European allies to spend *more* on their militaries for the past 30-40 years without much success. It's hard to deduce some kind of balancing behavior from this complete lack of willingness to build up military force. The Europeans know full well they can ride on U.S. military spending, U.S. military R&D, and U.S. military protection, and have been doing so.
The intra-European balancing can and will happen. The integration process begun by the European Coal and Steel Community has not erased security tensions between Europe's great powers. Both France and Britain resisted German reunification at the end of the Cold War for precisely this reason. According to your logic they shouldn't have--they were already friends, what could go wrong? But, the United States had to push its European allies to accept the reunification of Germany over the resistance of France and Britain. It was only because of the United States' position as hegemon via NATO that a conflict free German reunification could occur. The promise that Germany would remain within the NATO structure ameliorated concerns of potential German rearmament. As I stated earlier, the one area almost completely untouched by European integration has been military forces, and it will take a very long time for nations to give up that last redoubt of sovereignty because of the security dilemma.
In the context of a power vacuum, option 3 would not have a chance to obtain before balancing behavior sets in. At the end of the Cold War, the European Union did not yet exist. The European Community was still a loose construction, without a single market, without a unified currency and central bank, without a proper European Parliament, etc etc. Even the EU as it exists today is not politically integrated enough to sublimate national fears and overcome the security dilemma.
The Cold War ended in 1989, but the EU didn't come into force until 1993, and even then the single market and Euro and other truly, institutionally and politically binding aspects didn't come into force until around the turn of the century. That's a decade worth of security dilemma the European states would have been faced with in the absence of NATO--more than enough time for balancing behavior to arise. And lest we forget how hard it was for the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty to establish an only slightly more effective Common Foreign and Security Policy, I'll just leave it to you to figure out how hard it would have been to establish a truly European integrated military force.
At the end of the day, it appears that Europeans rationally preferred a U.S. hegemonic position in order to prevent any one European country from filling the power vacuum as the superpowers left. Everyone remembered quite clearly what happens when a European power attempts to establish hegemony in Europe. Better to have a far off power eliminate European balancing through hegemony than to suffer European balancing once again.
Finally, let's just note that the most intractable of all issues in the European Union's quest to integrate or pool sovereignty is that of military force. Nearly all other areas of competency formerly reserved for the nation-state have in some manner or other been regulated or assumed in part by the supra-national/intergovernmenal EU structures. Except for military. Even formulating common foreign policy is an essentially impossible task.
Your option 3 is an infeasible option, and my original dilemma stands.
I agree that NATO was initially established due to the Soviet threat. But the Soviet threat was not "replaced" with the War on Terror. There was an intervening fifteen years--quite a large, historical lacuna in your analysis--in which the future and raison d'etre of NATO was debated quite publicly.
John Mearsheimer, a leading realist, wrote an article called "Back to the Future" in which he predicted exactly the scenario you paint: sovereign countries re-evaluating their relationship to the U.S. now that the Soviet threat is gone. He thought that NATO would dissolve, the U.S. would leave Europe, and that European states would go back to providing for their own defense. As a realist, this meant that Europe would return to the balance-of-power world that it had for centuries before the Cold War.
Realists couldn't understand why European nations would choose to remain part of a military alliance dominated by an outside "hyperpower" (as Vedrine labeled the U.S.), when the naturally paranoid, security-driven states ought to rely on their own armaments.
But look at the two options open to Europe:
Dissolve NATO, rely on your own national armament capabilities rather than shared capabilities. Arms buildups ensue to ensure that each country had adequate arms production capabilities. Smaller countries ally and bandwagon with certain powers against other powers. In this scenario, the Balkan conflicts from '93-'97 would have been far more dangerous to Europe's security, as varying powers would take varying sides, and the chance of miscalculation would grow as countries jockeyed for influence over the outcome.
Keep NATO, rely on shared armament capabilities and the United States for your security. Arms production is not built up, but instead niche capabilities are developed so that each contributes to the whole. European states do not return to a balance-of-power relationship with one another, and can successfully integrate the EC into the EU and expand into Eastern Europe. When the Balkan Wars break out and threaten European security, they can rely on collectively being able to pull the United States into fighting the war, instead of using their own resources at cross purposes.
The second option, for a rational, security-seeking state is the better option. Even the layman can understand that. European leaders didn't want to have to raise defense expenditures, or go back to a balance-of-power relationship with other European powers, which might threaten the viability of the European Union project. And that is why NATO continues to exist, even though dogmatic realists might think that states ought to prefer security through military autarky.
Up until recently, the DoD still maintained battle plans for a potential war against Britain. The Pentagon games out nearly every scenario they can think of, however, so the fact that they had invasion plans for Britain left-over from WWII and updated once-in-a-while doesn't really mean much. We probably still have invasion plans for Canada left over from 1812--you never know, with those wily Canadians...
Agreed. This is, in fact, the whole premise of NATO. By unifying military command structures and forces, the security of every NATO member is linked to one another, and especially linked to the United States. It's already been that way for 50 years (except for France which withdrew under de Gaulle in the 60's).
One should note that a lot of/.ers are simply making this out to be a U.S. vs. UK thing, but it's more complicated than that. President Bush is fully in favor of giving the UK what it needs in order to certify and fully control the aircraft it purchases. It's principally Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) who has been blocking the source code transfer because of his concerns about "technology transfer." Essentially, this is not a Bush administration problem, but a Congressional problem. Since Hyde is retiring, a will be replaced on January 3rd, at least one roadblock may be cleared up.
According to the Wikipedia page on the subject, nullity*zero=infinity. So, play around with the math a little bit, ignoring obvious divide-by-zero problems, and you arrive at nullity*infinity=2nullity/zero. But since a*nullity=nullity, we can simplify to nullity*infinity=nullity/zero. Since 1/0=infinity, we can pull it out such that nullity*infinity=nullity*1/0=nullity*infinity. So, it basically just equals itself by definition.
You are correct about China. In fact, the idea that China was "feudal" came about because of the Chinese Communist Party. No one at the time, nor historians since then, seriously considered pre-1911 China a feudal system, as it lacks all of the basic characteristics that defined feudalism elsewhere. the CPC writers called China feudal simply because they had to find a justification for China to fit into the Marxist teleology, and therefore justify Communist revolutionary leadership.
Slashdot Mirror
No BLINK for OIL!!!!
Stop HTMLburton!!!
Yes, it's clear that the spam phenomenon is in its last throes.
I don't know about a military weapon to create bloodclots, but we already have medical machines that use soundwaves to kill cancer. Apparently they use three or more different soundwaves, aimed in such a way as to have them cross at the point you want to kill (the cancer), and when they cross they amplify to a lethal degree. Not only non-invasive but also nerd-errific!
Linky: High Intensity Focussed Ultrasound
I don't find this one trite, but I do find it essentially incorrect. For example, Mao's one great weapon was the propaganda organs of the PRC, not the PLA or other state security apparatuses. And Mao knew it too--he wasn't a "numbers guy", didn't have economic credibility, didn't have the chops to run the PLA, wasn't a diplomat (in this aspect, Zhou Enlai was indispensable right up until his death). Mao's key tool was propaganda, and what a tool it was.
Mao used the propaganda organs to incite mass uprisings against the state itself, destroying, humiliating, and killing veteran CCP cadres and bureaucrats, and even taking on PLA units. This mass insanity--with students wearing Mao pins and carrying around his Little Red Book as authority/justification for their actions--was the Cultural Revolution. So Chomsky's propaganda:democracy::bludgeon:totalitarian analogy is a false one, because in totalitarian states propaganda is just as, if not more, powerful than traditional state levers of power (the bludgeon).
Popular formulations of Chomsky's like this are either intellectually dishonest or remarkably poorly informed. Either way, they obscure more than they illuminate.
I believe they did, in fact, do this. It was called the 1979 Iranian Revolution, if I recall correctly.
Leave it to a Chomskyite to glorify an otherwise utterly trite observation, made countless times before, and by more insightful individuals at that.
Oh look at meee, I'm silentounce, I only need the glow of my displays and diagnostics. I'm so independent and free, look at meeee!
Well what about those of us who need our blinkenlights as well, huh? Ever think about that, you insensitive clod? Oh, but I suppose in your world, people oughtn't need their blinkenlights, right? right? I know you must look down on the rest of us, smug in the knowledge that you can get by without blinkenlights, but your self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude belies your very obvious, dark, twisted relationship with blinkenlights. Admit it! J'accuse!! You were once addicted to blinkenlighten weren't you? Now that you're "clean" you think you can subtly mock the rest of us, do you? For shame. Have you no sense of decency? At long last, have you no sense of decency?
I have heard the blinkenlights blinking, each to each
I do not think that they will blink for me
If he makes a habit of ordering dual-use technology, he better be prepared for a rather drawn out series of overly-involved yet useless visits from Mr. Hans Blix.
Can you imagine the terror he will face when he receives a 600 page long, sternly worded, yet entirely vague letter from Mr. Blix? Can you?!
Next thing you know, he'll be banned from buying iPods by the Treasury Department.
Indeed, we may see Mac OS X Server supporting default ZFS before Mac OS X proper. It would make sense to deploy it first in a limited market with technical expert users as your target market.
During the same period you mention--the late 80's arms race--you ought to note that the high oil prices from the 70's had finally fallen. The oil embargo from '73 and the second attempt in '79 had kept prices fairly high throughout the whole decade. So not only did the Soviets have to spend more on an arms race, but they had to do so in the context of falling profits from oil.
Today, the Russian economy is quite small, even when compared to the gaunt economy of the late Soviet period. In 2005 dollars, Mexico has a slightly higher GDP. It shrank a great deal in the early 1990s during "shock therapy" and the Asian Financial Crisis which forced a massive ruble devaluation and IMF bailout (notably, Russia's quick recovery from devaluation coincided with a world rise in oil prices). Military expenditures are less than 1/25th of the United States' (but about 3x as much as Mexico--so still a bit high relative to its GDP rank).
The problem is not really the external commitments of Russia or arms acquisitions, but simply that a huge chunk of its economy is solely based on energy. As we all know, energy is a fungible commodity and is subject to wide, hard to predict variations in world price. A sudden oil price shock could do proportionally higher damage to Russia than one might expect, especially because of the consolidation of the energy sector in Russia, and the centrality of companies like Gazprom to Kremlin strategy.
It's pretty widely accepted that a lot of Russian money that ought to be invested is sitting somewhere in Switzerland or the Caymans.
Godwin conditions reached, abort thread.
Seriously, Putin != Hitler, quite obviously. Don't troll.
I know Putin is popular, and for good reason, but calling him an intellectual is a joke. That would be like calling George Bush Sr. an intellectual. Neither are--they're both ex-spooks who are good at politics.
Neither is Putin in any way a socialist, but I've addressed that in a post above.
Beyond that, Kasparov hasn't a chance, and there's really no point in discussing him as a viable candidate, except that Slashdotters like the idea of a chessplayer running a country.
As for the Grand Parent post--calling Kerry an intellectual is probably more absurd than calling Putin an intellectual. A conversation with Putin would be far more enlightening than with that dull cipher of a Senator who has never achieved anything, either in private life, or in 20 years as a senator.
The Russian KGB ceased to exist, but the Belarussian KGB is still around.
In chess and go there are defined rules, and each actor starts with the same amount of pieces and capabilities.
In Russian politics, there are no rules and there is a vast disparity between the capabilities of the head of state and the capabilities of a former chess player.
No one in Russia thinks Kasparov will amount to anything, and the truth is he won't.
There are two highly disputable points in your post: one, that Russia's economy is sustainable and balanced; and two, that Putin is a socialist. Both are quite obviously incorrect.
Russia's economic boom over the past 5-7 years has been principally attributable to the rise in oil and gas prices worldwide. Putin has been consolidating Russia's oil and gas companies into a much tighter oligarchy (cf. the reason why Khodorkovsky is in jail in Siberia). Meanwhile, he has been pressuring neighboring countries to sell their oil and gas pipelines to Russian companies. There has been a lot both in Western and Russian press about Putin's "energy empire." The rest of Russia's economy hasn't done much at all. In fact, fewer and fewer of the young generation even want to go into private business--most want to work for the state bureaucracy. Moreover, most of Russia's growth has been funnelled into Moscow and St. Petersburg (and dachas on the Volga), with the rest of the country experiencing few if any of the benefits from the oil & gas money. Lots of Russian towns in the countryside still look like they did in the 1800s. When oil and gas prices level off or fall (even temporarily so), so too will Russia's economic house of cards.
And in no way can Putin be called a socialist. Not even close. There are two groups within his administration: the siloviki and the St. Petersburg group. Neither are socialist in orientation. The siloviki are the so-called "power" people: they control the defense, internal security, FSB (i.e. KGB successor), military, etc. These are relatively agnostic when it comes to the economy, preferring the centralization of power and stabilization of society. Moves to centralize oil and gas fit well within their worldview. The St. Petersburg group are generally liberal (in the economics sense, not the U.S. sense) reformers who favor free market solutions and getting rid of the welfare state. They have been slowly trying to divest the state of its welfare obligations (with only marginal success, since the Russian people protest when you try to reform their pension benefits). Putin himself is a chekist--a KGB man--not a socialist in ideology or practice.
Congress gives away its power to regulatory agencies and departments. Thus the EPA can pass regulations making certain things legal or illegal without Congress having to get involved. Ditto for other agencies. Congress has been giving away its powers for a long time.
That's not entirely true. Mac users will find Firefox 3 to be light years faster and more beautiful for two reasons:
Those two alone make Firefox 3 alpha attractive to Mac users who like Firefox but can't stand dealing with its slow-as-molasses implementation in the 1.*-2.0 series.
If someone submitted the link to this video a month ago when it first appeared on blogs and Digg etc it wouldn't have been accepted as a story on Slashdot. Funny how the Wall Street Journal's description of the video, spare interview, and short backstory showcasing their world-class investigative journalism (the same that doggedly followed the Enron debacle) makes this YouTube clip a legitimate story to post on Slashdot's front page.
I'm not complaining about it being here, or complaining that the Wall Street Journal submits its own stuff. Just funny how a random link becomes legitimate, that's all.
This is a pithy soundbite, but doesn't hold any weight. A common currency and a common central bank has done nothing to unify or even to harmonize fiscal policies. Fiscal policy is still controlled by the national governments, and the Stability Pacts made to try and harmonize spending have failed or been flagrantly violated. There's no indication of a fiscal unification anywhere in the short to medium term. And if there's no fiscal unification, then a military unification is hard to imagine.
I don't discount the possibility of an eventual, full political integration of the EU into a superstate of some fashion. At that time, it may very well balance against the United States in some form or another. But such a superstate is decades down the road, at best.
As it stands, however, European countries remain within the NATO framework, thus they do not balance one another, much less the United States. In fact, the United States has been pushing its European allies to spend *more* on their militaries for the past 30-40 years without much success. It's hard to deduce some kind of balancing behavior from this complete lack of willingness to build up military force. The Europeans know full well they can ride on U.S. military spending, U.S. military R&D, and U.S. military protection, and have been doing so.
The intra-European balancing can and will happen. The integration process begun by the European Coal and Steel Community has not erased security tensions between Europe's great powers. Both France and Britain resisted German reunification at the end of the Cold War for precisely this reason. According to your logic they shouldn't have--they were already friends, what could go wrong? But, the United States had to push its European allies to accept the reunification of Germany over the resistance of France and Britain. It was only because of the United States' position as hegemon via NATO that a conflict free German reunification could occur. The promise that Germany would remain within the NATO structure ameliorated concerns of potential German rearmament. As I stated earlier, the one area almost completely untouched by European integration has been military forces, and it will take a very long time for nations to give up that last redoubt of sovereignty because of the security dilemma.
In the context of a power vacuum, option 3 would not have a chance to obtain before balancing behavior sets in. At the end of the Cold War, the European Union did not yet exist. The European Community was still a loose construction, without a single market, without a unified currency and central bank, without a proper European Parliament, etc etc. Even the EU as it exists today is not politically integrated enough to sublimate national fears and overcome the security dilemma.
The Cold War ended in 1989, but the EU didn't come into force until 1993, and even then the single market and Euro and other truly, institutionally and politically binding aspects didn't come into force until around the turn of the century. That's a decade worth of security dilemma the European states would have been faced with in the absence of NATO--more than enough time for balancing behavior to arise. And lest we forget how hard it was for the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty to establish an only slightly more effective Common Foreign and Security Policy, I'll just leave it to you to figure out how hard it would have been to establish a truly European integrated military force.
At the end of the day, it appears that Europeans rationally preferred a U.S. hegemonic position in order to prevent any one European country from filling the power vacuum as the superpowers left. Everyone remembered quite clearly what happens when a European power attempts to establish hegemony in Europe. Better to have a far off power eliminate European balancing through hegemony than to suffer European balancing once again.
Finally, let's just note that the most intractable of all issues in the European Union's quest to integrate or pool sovereignty is that of military force. Nearly all other areas of competency formerly reserved for the nation-state have in some manner or other been regulated or assumed in part by the supra-national/intergovernmenal EU structures. Except for military. Even formulating common foreign policy is an essentially impossible task.
Your option 3 is an infeasible option, and my original dilemma stands.
I agree that NATO was initially established due to the Soviet threat. But the Soviet threat was not "replaced" with the War on Terror. There was an intervening fifteen years--quite a large, historical lacuna in your analysis--in which the future and raison d'etre of NATO was debated quite publicly.
John Mearsheimer, a leading realist, wrote an article called "Back to the Future" in which he predicted exactly the scenario you paint: sovereign countries re-evaluating their relationship to the U.S. now that the Soviet threat is gone. He thought that NATO would dissolve, the U.S. would leave Europe, and that European states would go back to providing for their own defense. As a realist, this meant that Europe would return to the balance-of-power world that it had for centuries before the Cold War.
Realists couldn't understand why European nations would choose to remain part of a military alliance dominated by an outside "hyperpower" (as Vedrine labeled the U.S.), when the naturally paranoid, security-driven states ought to rely on their own armaments.
But look at the two options open to Europe:
The second option, for a rational, security-seeking state is the better option. Even the layman can understand that. European leaders didn't want to have to raise defense expenditures, or go back to a balance-of-power relationship with other European powers, which might threaten the viability of the European Union project. And that is why NATO continues to exist, even though dogmatic realists might think that states ought to prefer security through military autarky.
Up until recently, the DoD still maintained battle plans for a potential war against Britain. The Pentagon games out nearly every scenario they can think of, however, so the fact that they had invasion plans for Britain left-over from WWII and updated once-in-a-while doesn't really mean much. We probably still have invasion plans for Canada left over from 1812--you never know, with those wily Canadians...
Agreed. This is, in fact, the whole premise of NATO. By unifying military command structures and forces, the security of every NATO member is linked to one another, and especially linked to the United States. It's already been that way for 50 years (except for France which withdrew under de Gaulle in the 60's).
One should note that a lot of /.ers are simply making this out to be a U.S. vs. UK thing, but it's more complicated than that. President Bush is fully in favor of giving the UK what it needs in order to certify and fully control the aircraft it purchases. It's principally Rep. Henry Hyde (R-IL) who has been blocking the source code transfer because of his concerns about "technology transfer." Essentially, this is not a Bush administration problem, but a Congressional problem. Since Hyde is retiring, a will be replaced on January 3rd, at least one roadblock may be cleared up.
According to the Wikipedia page on the subject, nullity*zero=infinity. So, play around with the math a little bit, ignoring obvious divide-by-zero problems, and you arrive at nullity*infinity=2nullity/zero. But since a*nullity=nullity, we can simplify to nullity*infinity=nullity/zero. Since 1/0=infinity, we can pull it out such that nullity*infinity=nullity*1/0=nullity*infinity. So, it basically just equals itself by definition.
You are correct about China. In fact, the idea that China was "feudal" came about because of the Chinese Communist Party. No one at the time, nor historians since then, seriously considered pre-1911 China a feudal system, as it lacks all of the basic characteristics that defined feudalism elsewhere. the CPC writers called China feudal simply because they had to find a justification for China to fit into the Marxist teleology, and therefore justify Communist revolutionary leadership.