Ever since the end of World War II, Russia has been the big bad for the United States,

the end boss of the 16-bit side-scrolling thermonuclear clown fight that has been our time as a world power.

We've been locked in a clash to determine which of our dumb civilizations will call the shots on a global basis, I guess after the other one is gone?

The conflict has ebbed and flowed as the contours of the Cold War evolved.

There were times when it even seemed like it might be behind us.

The commentary had laughed at Mid-Romny in his 2012 campaign for president when he

suggested that Russia was our biggest geopolitical adversary, but that seems like a quaint and

distant time now.

Just recently, Alabama elected a senator who has been quoted bragging about how his dad

fought communism in World War II.

Somehow, in his mind, the USSR seems to have replaced Nasy Germany as the bad guys we went

to fight in the 40s.

It seems strange that a country as far away as culturally and

economically distinct as Russia would be such a persistent counterpoint to the

United States on the world stage. There is a theory dating back to Salist, the Roman historian,

that empires need adversaries.

If that is true of the United States,

then when the Nazis fell, the USSR rushed in to fill the vacuum.

The nature of our adversary has changed in those years, as we have seen them reform their

government from Stalinist communism to Putinist

kleptocracy with a brief stopover in Yeltsinist quasi-capitalism.

But what made them our adversary in the first place is the conceptual threat the Russian Revolution posed to American

...