From Russia With Not So Much Love
Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s current ambassador to the US, and holder of the post for nine years, has now been accused of being a formidable spy of near legendary status who specialises in tinkering with the morals of honest Americans and tailoring them into hardworking Russian spies. Forget Isis, forget the Taliban, Russia is back to being the sum of all evil. Would you George and Smiley it?
Russia - in the form of the diamond tough, "Don't try to take the piss out of me on camera, comrade," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova - has forcefully objected to America’s unseemly public trash talking. Russia believes Russia and America should spend trillions fighting over other country’s resources, recklessly destroy the infrastructure and cultures of entire nations, mercilessly displace millions of innocent people while pretending they are the best of Security Council friends.
America isn’t prepared to play this farce anymore. Russia is bad. Russia doesn’t know its place. Russia should accept its place as number two in the world – or number twoish along with China – and be content with its spoils.
This is all very confusing. Didn’t the Berlin Wall fall? Wasn’t the end of the Cold War declared and a new era of American led western dominance assured? America had the upper hand economically, culturally and technologically, and would now be free to push on exporting its values, culture and global business model without any hindrance from those nasty commies. Everything was going to be perfect.
What happened?
For the past few years it’s all been Putin, Putin, Putin.
No more. Putin is bad and has to be stopped.
How bad?
Putin runs Russia like his own personal fiefdom, invades American strategic partners at will, sends hi-tech submarines beneath the Antarctic to discover and claim huge untapped oil fields that should be owned by American companies, wards off American backed forces in Syria for as long as he likes, hacks into Washington servers with ease, subverts the American election to fit his will and is building up his army to a level where it can take on American forces in an open fight – this has to stop!
We get it – Putin isn’t just bad he’s Dracula!
Putin is so unspeakably terrifyingly bad the American army desperately needs fifty-four billion dollars to stake him. Fifty four billion dollars! That’s a huge amounts of money to be made if you have the right friends and contacts, and let’s not forget how easy it is to lose track of thirty million or sixty million there when billions are being tossed about in the new slush fund of choice.
How much money was spent bringing down Osama Bin Laden? How much money has been spent defeating the mighty ISIS? Obviously not enough.
After all this time spent pushing back against the world-conquering forces of radical Islam, who would have thought the world-conquering forces of radical imperial Russia would have been pushed forward to fill the post Osama, post ISIS cash-cow void?
This is bad news for Russia but who cares? This is all great for the still profitable but increasingly repetitive and aimless Bond franchise. Daniel Craig ‘s tenure has been spent fighting nasty but bland CEO-type global capitalists who are chiefly concerned with manipulating and profiting from errant stock markets and gaining control of major resources. The franchise has always moved with the times. No doubt we’ll soon see a younger Bond fighting happily with his old American pal Felix Leiter against thuggish, one-eyed, limp wristed, lizardly Russian sociopaths who deserve having their brutish faces pushed into boiling vats of cooking oil again. Ahh, there’s nothing like the prospect of a new World War to whet the creative juices.