--- One main reason the US is building up forces in CA is presumably to help stabilize the region, i.e., the same reason Russia is building up forces in CA. This is why Moscow did not object to Washington's moves to do so and, if you can believe the foreign minister, actually asked the stans to allow US troops into their borders. This is a series of horribly failed states we are talking about here. Russia does not want failed states full of Islamic extremists on its borders. I believe that a lot of crap has been written about the "US wanting to boot Russia out of the stans" based on knee-jerk assumptions that Russia and the US are playing a zero-sum game in the region. They are not. They need each other.
BTW since this uses up my daily quota and I want to be a good boy, about the comment that sci-fi was born out of US racism on a different thread -- Jules Verne? H.G. Wells? These guys are from Kansas? How to explain the huge popularity of sci-fi in the Soviet Union?
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