Nuclear World

This took no great thinking to foresee:

Work is under way to make all men in Poland undergo military training, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said.
...
Tusk pointed out Ukraine was invaded after it got rid of its own nuclear arsenal, adding Warsaw would like to acquire its own nuclear weapons, however remote a possibility that may be.

"Today, it is clear that we would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal, that is beyond doubt. In any case the road to that would be very long and there would have to be a consensus too," he said.

Poland is already planning to spend 4.7% of its economic output on defence this year, the highest proportion in the Nato alliance.

Tusk told parliament that spending should increase to 5% of GDP.

Our long national nightmare of there being peace and prosperity seems to be over. {/sarc}

More to the point, we in the West spent something like 45 years in a cold war with the USSR. We won, as the republicans are often wont to say, because of Reagan. (I disagree, but that's for historians to debate.) The West watched, with some dismay, as Russia fell apart and then began to knit itself back together under a dictator using a democratic system as a fig leaf. Russia began, more and more, to interfere with other European nations, including backing coup attempts in a few.

But the Cold War alliances held. Until this year.

45 years to wage and win the Cold War and now, that Fat Old Demented Bastard has thrown it all away in six weeks. European nations are seriously pursuing rearmament, not just in a token amount, not to support NATO, but to protect their own security because they can no longer count on the United States.

Hell, six weeks and this treasonous ancient sex pest of a president is doing what he can to join a new Warsaw Pact, a new Axis of Evil with Russia.

And the very same Republicans who cheered Reagan for winning the Cold War are siding with country that he knew to be our principal adversary. Because they are, in their hearts, the same pro-fascist political movement that was around in the 1930s.

And then there is this bit of betrayal: