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What is it about humans - we just never learn. We truly are destined to err time and again, yet never learn from our errors. One generation insists on recreating ill-starred situations that diminish our capabilities to live together in harmony. We ill realize that every turn we take that is of retrograde value is turning to an already-tried and failed coping mechanism.

One side takes umbrage and pulls away from meaningful dialogue leading to mutual acceptance. Occasionally, it is true, pushed by the other side.

We well recall the Iron Curtain that descended after World War II when Russia, Britain and the United States reached a post-war agreement, dividing Germany. That was the era of the United Soviet Socialist Republics, a grand sweeping experiment in human behaviour that went awry because a new experiment in social convention simply could not trump biological imperatives.

At that time it was the "free world" comprised of social democracies, denying the workability of social communalism. A corrupt vision of unification of human needs to human deeds, stifling freedom and accommodating only of a single ideology dominating a dominion cleansed of opposition, ending in a totalitarian rule that celebrated itself as a fair and just utopia.

The communal farms and factories asked too much of the human creatures that derived too little of their own for their labours, and the country was unable to feed itself. The trouble being of course that sacrifice was expected from the lower classes, not the political elite, who knew that the great unwashed public was expendable to the interests of the target principle.

Now the USSR is no more, and proud-but-aggrieved Russia newly ascendant is determined to take her place side-by-side with that other world political colossus.

Enter mutually assured destruction. "Military potential, to say nothing of nuclear potential, must be at the proper level if we want ... to just stay independent" according to First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov. Russia is determined to achieve nuclear arms parity with the United States. Restore the uneasy years of stand-offs and the potential that slumbered in the red button.

"The weak are not loved and not heard, they are insulted, and when we have parity they will talk to us in a different way." Assertiveness, bold steps to build up once again what once was, now under a different, yet still nostalgic regime. This one an authoritarian capitalist democracy with an astute, self-assured politician at the helm, the very prototype of the successful Russian strong-man so beloved of its people.

The task at hand, according to a spokesman for the country's military-industrial commission was "to revive and adapt this (Cold War-era) system to the realities of a market economy". And, said the First Deputy Prime Minister Mr. Ivanov, quoting none other than former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "They listen better to your arguments if you don't just smile, but also hide a gun in your bosom."

Let us sing a hymn of praise for friends who would be enemies and enemies who would be friends, and who cannot tell the difference and don't much care in any event.