The news is that America is going to pull its troops out of Germany. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it’s about time. They were there for a reason: to stop the Soviet army, and that reason no longer exists. So why are they still there? Inertia? That’s my guess. We’re no longer worried about the Soviet hordes streaming through the Fulda Gap in armor-tipped columns to lay waste to western Europe.

It never ceases to amaze this old Cold Warrior that the Soviet Union fell apart so fast, but it certainly did, and now France and Germany don’t need our protection from the Russians any more. And if they decide to go at each other in the old fashioned way, well, I will relish seeing the footage of France signing yet another surrender, and hey! THAT would be a reason for me to actually visit Paris: Just so I could watch French waiters kissing a little German heinie…

But really, what do European nations have that would cause it to go to war against each other now? Natural resources? They have little of their own any more, certainly nothing worth fighting over, and their borderless trading sort of pools it all together anyway. National honor? We’re talking Europeans here. Honor has little to do with anything. Except. Just maybe. You know, that old France-Germany thing. I don’t know about the Germans, but the French certainly seem to have hung onto an unjustifiable snobbery.

Basically I see us with two possible enemies, both hard to pin down.

There’s the radical Islam thing. It’s like a metastasized cancer. The bad cells are so closely entwined with good that it is going to be difficult to target THEM without that feared collateral damage.

And there’s the 800-pound canary: China. China certainly has the manpower. And they’re fast acquiring the technology. What they lack now is the capability for force projection. Nobody has the capability like we do to move real forces around the globe. I know, ours could be a lot better, but we still stand far above anybody else in the world.

So there we have two enemies. So what’s the reason for the conflict? In the case of the Islamists, they want to impose a reactionary view of their religion on the world. They desire nothing less than conversion or death for the world. Their aims are transparent because they have already demonstrated their wishes in Moslem communities in non-Moslem countries, to wit: imposing Sharia courts in Canada… One only has to look to Iran or pre-invasion Afghanistan to see what their wishes for the world would be.

Int he case of China, it’s harder for me to nail down. I have a gut feeling that they want the world, but I don’t know why… It certainly can’t be communism, because they’ve steadily departed from Marxism, Leninism and even Maoism over the last couple of decades. Maybe it is just a power thing, some sort of hive psyche which drives them towards a goal that not one of their living leaders will see. But they’re moving that way.

What I see is that they will not do it in some big battleground, but in a thousand little confrontations which leave ther rest of the world asking, “Is it REALLY worth a war to keep China from taking over THAT little country?” China has been experimenting with this tactic for years in Tibet. And they keep rumbling about Taiwan. So time will tell a tale. The odd thing is that Viet Nam and North Korea haven’t become Chinese in any overt manner. I didn’t say it was easy, though, did I? And just like Libya kissing up to America after the Iraq invasion, if China were to successfully subjugate Taiwan, you can bet that the other nations in that corner of the world would be a whole lot more receptive to Chinese wishes