From Russia With Love... A New Enemy For US Movies

Nothing fascinated me more growing up than the possibility of defending my country from Russian invaders. My family knew that all they had to do was turn to me for protection. Clearly, my credentials were up to par: copious analysis of Red Dawn, two pellet guns and more camo than Catholic school khakis (priorities first). The threat was real then, which made me all the more sensitive to other movies that portrayed the Russian threat as eminent and very real. I'm talking about Hunt for Red October, Rocky IV, Top Gun and of course, Red Dawn. Lately, our movie enemies have been unorganized terrorists with British accents. Or some third world enemy that only has small chance in hell of impacting a small section of the US. But, with the recent news, Russia is back!

Will Russia's re-emerging "take over the world and regain our dominance" thinking bring our favorite enemy back to the silver screen? God, I hope so. Terrorists are so, well, lame. In real life they can't do much to impact us. We can recover, but a super red race bent on domination - that's good stuff.

Naturally, I'm kidding. I really don't want to see the media turn Russia into enemy #1 again. To me, the world is more complicated and bigger than that. However, I'm sensing a shift to Cold War thinking. When I hear John McCain react so violently to Russia's maneuvering, I'm concerned. Listen McCain, Russia is not our enemy. Sure, they have their issues and could use more grace when involved in the world stage, but we can't go off every time they do something stupid - because that's what Russia does. Furthermore, when you look at the circumstances this is more of a Georgian problem. Again, the Georgian/Ossetian conflict happened only because Georgia invaded what they consider theirs. Yes, Russia overreacted, but in the end it will be negotiations and TALKING TO OUR ENEMIES that solves problems.

There is proof of this. According to a new book by J. Peter Scoblic title "U.S. Versus Them" How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security, the only method capable of reducing fissile material (a case study) is by dialog, not damning and threats of total destruction. The NPR report on Scoblic's book is fascinating, try listening to it here... Here are few quick quotes from the book:

In foreign policy, "conservative" describes a distinct attitude in which the world is conceived in terms of "us versus them" or "good versus evil," with the United States assuming the role of a righteous protagonist facing a monolithic enemy.

Instead, international security required reaching some sort of modus vivendi with the enemy so that the world did not suddenly end in nuclear holocaust. Conservatives were not only ill suited to this task; they rejected its very premise.

The Cold War ended peacefully not because Ronald Reagan "won" it, but because Reagan, having taken the superpowers to the brink of nuclear war in his first term, stepped back in his second and reopened arms control negotiations, cooperating with a Soviet leader who, fortunately, had decided the USSR needed fundamental reform.

For better or worse, American security has only become more dependent on cooperation since the September 11 attacks. Although today a global thermonuclear war is unlikely, staying the threat of nuclear terrorism will require an intense degree of international coordination and, yes, negotiation with the evil empires of the post–Cold War world—states like Iran and North Korea. We simply cannot adequately protect ourselves by ourselves.

The Bush administration has rejected this conclusion precisely because it is conservative. Its insistence on seeing the world in Manichaean terms has led it, like its Cold War forebears, to refuse coexistence with evil regimes, to emphasize military solutions to problems, to shun diplomacy as "appeasement," to scorn international institutions as unwelcome checks on American power, and even to view truth as relative.