Many in Eastern Europe would argue that security dependence on the US is no illusion, but brute fact in the face of Putin's reassertive Russia. Yet, as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently attested: "As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia's conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check."5 Even after recent major increases financed by surging energy prices, Russian defence spending is still significantly lower than that of the EU member states as a whole. In fact, even on the basis of purchasing power parity, last year's Russian defence budget was roughly equivalent to those of the UK and France combined. Europe as a whole continues to spend twice as much as Russia on defence.6
Whatever the details, the implication is that Russia is NOT a threat. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
On energy, we mostly need to get out of our insane current neolib policies to eliminate the notion of that energy threat (or reframe it as the larger threat of depletion to deal with it as such). In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
