Global Policy Forum

By Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez

As the president next sets his sights on Iran and Syria, why doesn't his administration just cut to the chase and attack, invade and occupy Russia and China instead? Are they not the only nations with the actual capacity to obliterate the United States? Or should France, our supposed new enemy, also be placed on this list?

Cognizant of the president's radical new pre-emptive war policies and the continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, is it illogical that our former Cold War adversaries would mortally fear us and begin making preparations to strike at us first?

This is not wild speculation but the logical extension of the president's policy of pre-emptive wars.

Imagine this scenario: A president comes to power, believing that the greatest threat to the United States is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba or North Korea, but Russia and China. Taking a page from President Bush, he sells the nation on the idea that the threat posed by those two nuclear powers is imminent and a great threat to our existence. Thus, he begins plans to liquidate them before they liquidate us.

Meanwhile, alarmed at the series of pre-emptive wars and their subsequent occupations, Russia and China enter into a strategic alliance with the objective of striking at the United States first. Why wait their turn to be annihilated? they reason, invoking memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and President Bush's recent abrogation of the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.

Russia and China know that a joint first strike will destroy most of the United States and its allies, and that it will also trigger a retaliatory full-scale attack by the United States that will result in their own destruction. Yet they also understand that failure to attack will result in their destruction anyway, especially if they wait for the United States to fully develop its own proposed ABM system (Star Wars). In this doomsday game of brinksmanship, all three nations launch their missiles pre-emptively, bringing about the end times -- the end of civilization as we know it.

Far from fantasy, this is in line with, and the logical conclusion of, the "Bush doctrine," which explicitly states that it reserves the right to war upon any nation that seeks to challenge its domination. Unlike a game of tic-tac-toe, which can produce a stalemate every time, this one produces mutually assured destruction (MAD).

It can be argued that the only thing that prevents this doomsday scenario is this MAD Cold War policy. Yet the U.S. administration has scrapped it by adopting president Bush's new policy of waging pre-emptive wars. Perhaps the only reason we have not yet reached that threshold of confrontation with Russia and China is that their leaders perhaps still have relatively level heads.

How did we come to this juncture where we are relying upon the leaders of Russia and China to maintain their sanity to prevent the end of the world? How did we get to the point where the world now considers the president of the United States the most dangerous man in the world?

The easy answer is that no nation comes even close to possessing our weapons to obliterate the world -- and the penchant for using them -- and to impose its military will upon the rest of the planet. Imagine an unstable leader possessing the same weapons capability as the United States.

It is as though the goal of the president is not the control of the world's oil supply, but global domination itself. Yet if that indeed is the goal, then a pre-emptive war against Russia and China makes no sense because of MAD. That, of course, assumes that all three leaders from these nations are sane and equally level-headed.

But what if global domination is not the goal of this administration? And what if future president No. 44 is deranged, delusional or a religious fanatic, bent not on world domination but obsessed with spreading our "enlightenment," obsessed with fulfilling Biblical prophecy -- with bringing about the rapture -- thus paving the way for the Second Coming of the Lord? (The president purportedly told the new Palestinian prime minister that God had instructed him to attack Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and to bring about peace to the Middle East.)

If that were the case, perhaps we should all be preparing for Armageddon. Either that, or ensuring that whoever becomes No. 44 is not deranged, delusional or a religious fanatic. We hope the same thing will be true for the leaders of China and Russia.

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