War

Russian troops have taken over or blockaded all military bases on Crimea.

On Russia's moves.

"Putin swiftly moved his knight into the empty chess square of Crimea, thereby regaining full control of one of Russia’s four strategic port regions: Sevastopol, Murmansk, St Petersburg and Vladivostok.
Sevastopol, now firmly in Moscow’s hands, is Russia’s sole gateway to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and Mideast.  The vast,  co-shared Russian-Ukrainian Sevastopol naval base was a shaky, awkward arrangement doomed to eventual failure."

It's probably a winning issue for Putin.

"Ukraine has been a corruption-ridden failed state since it separated from Russia in 1991.  This writer has long suggested that partition of Ukraine into Western and Russian-oriented halves is the sensible solution, with Crimea returning to Russia."

We know how well secession worked in the US.

"Russia, which used to be adept at subversion, has lagged in recent years but it still knows the signs.  The Kremlin is convinced that Ukraine’s latest revolution was engineered by Washington.  The US Undersecretary of State for Europe admitted Washington has spent $5 billion over recent years in Ukraine to bring it into the West’s orbit – aka “building democracy.”
Two points to note.  Did Washington think that  tough Vlad Putin would just take its coup lying down?"

I doubt it.

"America has a bad habit of personalizing foreign affairs and demonizing uncooperative leaders."

America's rulers have that bad habit.

If Russia dumps dollars, it could start a race leading to hyperinflation.

The Cold War was won long before Reagan took office, and the same warmongers who failed to understand that then, fail to understand it now.

"Indeed, by 1981 it would have been strikingly clear to observers acquainted with the essentials of free markets and political liberty that the Soviet system would collapse under the dead weight of its own statist regime— and long before its vast, parasitic conventional military forces would be called upon to repel yet another (presumptive) German invasion.
The neo-cons are thorough-going statists, however, and did not see the truth that the laws of a free society would bring down the decrepit Soviet Empire. Nor could they acknowledge that the bumbling Soviet dictatorship would be held at bay by the triad nuclear deterrent put in place by the great Dwight Eisenhower; and that the triad’s 10,000 plus warheads had already been bought, paid for,tested and stood to the ready by 1980—meaning that there was no need for a Reagan defense buildup at all. It was just a matter of waiting out the eventual meltdown of the iron curtain and the societal penitentiary inside."

But...

"But the history-warping impact of the neo-con lie went beyond policy error or a few needlessly tense moments with the Soviets in the 1980s. Once Reagan signed on to what became a five-year $1.5 trillion defense plan, the Pentagon was able to come up with less than $150 billion of programs that were even ostensibly related to countering the threat of the mythical First Strike. Instead, this huge “top-line” gift to the military-industrial complex was back-filled with a massive armada of tanks, ships, aircraft, munitions and electronics designed for conventional warfare—that is, for what was known then as “power projection” and is evident now as the American Imperium’s wars of invasion and occupation.
This great conventional war machine would not have changed the strategic balance, nor would it have been of much use on the Eurasian continent had the Soviets actually saved up enough fuel to move their tank columns west. But in any event, the Reagan Armada was not demobilized when the Cold War ended because by the early 1990s it already had taken on its own raison d’etret: it was now a massive national public jobs program and the center of a sweeping bi-partisan system of crony capitalist dirigisme. In effect, Ronald Reagan’s conventional war machine has become embedded in the very warp and woof of the nation’s economy and governance."

That happens with every big, government program. It will happen with Obamcare.

"The 2014 budget was supposed to be hit with a $55 billion “sequester” reduction that came out of the 2011 Budget Super-Committee. They former had always been intended as a fiscal bluff to keep the game going through a few more debt ceiling crises and fiscal showdowns. But when it inadvertently ended up as the default budget law for 2014, the system reversed the cuts faster than green grass passes through a goose. Owing to one device of budgetary legerdemain after another, the “cut” now stands at $3.4 billion—-a sum so preposterously small that it amounts to about 30 hours of annual spending by our massively corpulent Warfare State–including DOD, the spy agencies, foreign and security aid, homeland security and the VA.
And the phony cries that the military is being “hollowed-out” deserve a special place in the annals of Propaganda and Lies. Had every dime of the $55 billon sequester been implemented, this year’s DOD budget including the so-called war contingency would have been roughly $600 billion. By contrast, when the Gipper rode out of town saluting the military branch of Big Government in 1989, the DOD budget was about $475 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars."

Phony budget cuts.