It goes on to describe the US deployment including:

"The administration last year announced plans to develop a low-yield warhead for the Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile and a nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile, calling those options “important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression."

It also covers Russian domestic issues such as poverty, the pension reform plan, the closure of rural medical clinics and a lack of social services.



"God willing, we will prevail, in peace and freedom from fear, and in true health, through the purity and essence of our natural... fluids. God bless you all." - Base Commander Jack D. Ripper

haha, i've been thinking exactly this so many times.
otherwise intelligent people of all callings (goverment, science, economy...) seem to be completely blind on that spot.

but i'm not preaching collapse and pessimism; i still hope that little by little these things will sort themselves out.
the people running countries & economies have all been kids, many of them when i was an adult already.
so let's give them better education - not only schooling but actual ethics. we are social beings.

You can repeat it as many times as you like.

A global economy exists in the global sense, in a world where at least half the world had not discovered the other half, you are only retroactively applying a modern term to historical trade routes.

It's like digging up an abacus and claiming that there was a WWW 2 millenia ago.

Seriously, several times China experienced economic downturns (from Emperors overspending) and it caused/contributed to economic downturns in Rome and Egypt. It is true, however, that given the dominance of China for most of world history the downturns in Roman and Egyptian economies had little effect on China. To think that a tightly integrated world is a new invention is to negate historical facts. Now if you are speaking of countries without borders....then that is a fairly new creation.

No the corollary would be that the Silk Road/Routes, were an ancient equivalent of the WWW. The abacus would be equivalent to a counting machine/calculator, and yes, in the proper hands it is still superior for many calculations.

I think we're picking over details here and going off on a tangent, based on us both having different understandings of what a "global economy" is. For example, 2000 years ago you could not have a "credit crunch" as we had back in 2008 - i.e. a very fast global economic downturn, mainly due to banking.

For me at least a "global economy" has global impacts which are felt instantly... perhaps that's where my perception differs from others.

I don't know about you guys but here's how I view Global Economy. In the last two years I have made more than a dozen purchases from companies in the UK, Russia, and China and that's not including US companies that sell products from those and other nations. Surely the trend goes back a long way. One of the only good things Richard Nixon did during his his time as Chief Executive was open trade with China, but it has been the Internet and online banking that has "shrunk the Earth" to present standards. Roman roads still exist and are used today either as is or as foundations. They are the reason that the width of automobiles are what they are. Countries that had lots of Roman roads and who maintained them well all prospered. While it is not exactly a direct analogy in the area of resilience, I think the analogy works. Nations and people who don't use the internet wither on the vine compared to those who do. It is highly unlikely any nation will abanon it entirely. They will just attempt to wall it off which is almost impossible to maintain. One only has to look at the external servers set up that changed the course of Egypt when they attempted to wall it off. Those that did are now gone.

Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I recall the military dictatorship in Egytp reinstated itself; just the guy at the top was replaced.