Of course, things will change with global warming, but the magnitude shouldn’t be overestimated:

Though growing seasons in the High North increase, their thin, rocky and acidic soils are unlikely to compensate for the desiccating breadbaskets.

Furthermore, there’s the whole issue of trying to build a massive human infrastructure while beset by numerous other problems.

Re-Africa. 2-3C of warming, which is the maximum we can expect in a few decades even taking into account the runaway effects, will dessicate the north and south, but equatorial regions will hold, and rainfall with increase in highland areas and East Africa.

However, for the Chinese to force themselves into the habitable areas of Africa is child’s play relative to fighting Russia.

Re-Iran. This reinforces the fundamental point that the US is in a real predicament as to what to do with Iran. Do nothing, and they get a bomb (assuming Israel doesn’t drag the US into a war by itself, which is likely). Bomb bomb Iran, and there’s a harvest of other bad consequences.

Sure, that worked well for the Wehrmacht…

By the way, I don’t think Soviets in Afghanistan had the same “burdensome restrictions” on firing, and they still losed. And what about the French in Algeria?

Sure, you could wipe out every one of them, and turn the country and its “terrorists” in a radiactive wasteland. But in that case, you win nothing.

I think, you are a bit overplaying amount of military aid which Poles are going to get.
Surely a single Patriot battery mentioned in article which you are referring to will not constitute a significant improvement of Polish air defenses.
At best it may defend Warsaw area or so.
About a dozen of two of such installations would be needed for a viable air defenses there.
Somehow I do not see it coming, at least until 2015 and possibly not at all due to pending American economic collapse.

In any case Poland (even if armed with best American weapons) does not constitute any realistic existential threat to Russia.
At worst one might see some competition to gain influence in the buffer zone between Russia and Poland and this would affect lets say Baltic states, where Russians are sincerely hated but Poles are not loved either, may be on Belarus and certainly on Ukraine which is politically disintegrating as we speak right now.

However with the exception of Ukraine all these areas are strategically irrelevant and quite retarded, so it is not of critical importance, who would be more influential in which particular spot.
Ukraine is more tricky.
Turks would very likely join any Russian-Polish dispute and all that would in all probabilities result in Russians seizing east part, Poles west and Turks south.
Some permanent state of low level war could well develop, but all 3 nations in question are used to war there, they don’t really care about conclusive victory and somehow various groups of Ukrainians and Cossacks are ending up incorporated into these 3 competing armies and as a result they are actually fighting between themselves.

This is from moral point of view a very sad state of affairs, but nevertheless history shows that it is a natural situation on Ukraine.

So in general I do not see much dangers for Russia on the west of it.

However I can see such threats on far east and these are related to IMHO inevitable ecological collapse of China.
You was trying to dismiss a risk from “yellow peril” in one of your article, but I think that some part of your argumentation is flawed.

I can certainly agree that it is not true that millions of Chinese are settling on Russian far east right now, however once their ability to feed themselves is exhausted (and that may come true as fast as within 10 years and surely within 20-30 years at the latest), they will have to do something about it.
I disagree with your argumentation that Chinese will try to exploit Africa in preference to Russia.
I am aware of large Chinese investments, say in Sudan, but nevertheless I am sure that climate change will destroy carrying capacity in Africa even more than in China.
Because Chinese South will also suffer a lot, Russian far east seems to be one of very few options available left.
That area will actually [i]benefit[/i] from GW as well.

So you might except massive migration into Russian territory.
Atomic arsenals may prove not to be as useful for Russian defense as much as one might initially believe.
Chinese are nuclear weapon state as well and they are bound to substantially scale up their arsenals in next decade or so.
This alone may discourage use of nukes on both sides but even if Russia resorted at the end to nuclear strikes, it would merely assist Chinese with their population control projects.

Race specific weapons which you have mentioned as an alternative are in SF domain at the moment (and use of smallpox or measles against some secluded tribes is of little relevance here).
It is not clear that they could be developed at all and even if they could then in all probabilities Chinese would possess Russian specific weapons as well.
Any biological agents released to environment are subjected to mutation and natural selection, so in all probabilities after only a short while they would kill Chinese as easy as Russians.
Another problem is that Russians are to some degree genetically related to Chinese, perhaps as a legacy of Mongol conquest – Ogedei Khan or Batu Khan (batiin) and their empire comes to mind.

Chinese migration into Russian Far East territories might also take a form of massive and yet completely chaotic movement of substantial numbers of Chinese ecological refugees.
Such situation may be impossible to control by military means at all.
On the other hand there is no significant Russian population in areas of question to provide resistance at grassroots level.

So here I can see perhaps biggest threat to Russia in near future.

Re. Israel/US war on Iran:
Still I do not see it as a foregone conclusion that such a war will proceed (it of course can, but doesn’t have to).
Iran was recently armed by Russian Tor-M1 air defenses, may soon get (or already got) SA-300 and that should allow for successful defense of critical nuclear installations.
Part of their centrifuges facilities is also hidden deep in the rock formation, so perhaps nuclear strike would be needed to disable it.
I doubt that Israel or US have appetite for that at the moment.

Rapid proliferation of nukes in countries like Japan, S. Korea or even in few South American nations would result as a fallout from such attack with possible further uncontrollable proliferation across the world.
Not the best development from US perspective.

1) a) First, I wouldn’t so lightly dismiss the F-16 – it is only a few years older than the MiG-29, a very capable fighter – and one should bear in mind US military aerospace technology was usually around a decade ahead of the Soviet. In its upgraded form, I would imagine it is a match for similarly upgraded Flankers.

Second, the far more consequential delivery are Patriot missile batteries, slated for 2010. Washington’s military aid to Poland will probably rise along with its perception of the Russian threat.

Third, I agree that is it stands today Poland cannot pose an impossible challenge to the Russian military – that is true. But the modern fighter & ABM phalanx will make it an exceeding costly nut to crack, especially since Russia will not be able to concentrate all its military assets against it alone, and because Poland will have access to superior intelligence & surveillance from the US, as well as outright NATO commitments (which as of today will be fulfilled in its case, if perhaps not in a decade),

This is not, of course, to say that Poland and Russia will fight a war anytime soon. However, this does mean that Russia will not be able to use the fact of its military superiority as easily to pressure Poland on other areas (e.g. economic), that it would otherwise; and it would also mean that Poland will have more of a security buffer to revive Prometheism and undermine Russia from within by supporting separatist movements within it if relations were to become acrimonious enough.

b) I agree Poland is not a priority for the US right now (neither is Georgia, I think, which I believe they consider a lost cause). But that is because the perception of threats other than Russia appears much more immediate to American policy-makers. For instance, there have been huge arms sales to the Gulf states in the past year, including Patriots, which I imagine is to protect their oil and other assets from Iranian missile attacks should there be a war.

c) Re-Ukraine. The only times I mentioned it is a prospective US ally was in the context of the US itself trying to make it an ally. Considering the ideological bankruptcy of the Orange movement and the much stronger support for closer ties with Russia, that is a highly unrealistic prospect – despite the wishes of the Western-leaning Ukrainian elites.

2) Israel is extremely unlikely to accept an Iranian nuclear capability – even a few nuclear strikes on its small, highly-urbanized territory will permanently cripple it – and as such will strike Iran when it gets to the nuclear threshold, even without US consent. Iran’s retaliation will almost certainly bring in the US to a war, for which the US will be immediately ready. As such, the rational thing for the US to do would be to plan out the strike with Israel in such a way as to immediately destroy Iran’s capability to close the Strait of Hormuz and destroy its nuclear sites. Whether they can pull this off is very much open to question.

Base on your posts one can learn, how to understand some prerogatives of Russian policy a bit better.

Nevertheless, I would like to make 2 comments regarding your analysis.

1. It seems that you are overestimating a bit an importance of Poland in US-Russian dominance games.
You are probably aware that Polish army is not in the best shape and in itself it does not pose any realistic threat to Russia.
You have presented recent Polish acquisition of 48 American F16 C/D aircraft as a sort of game changer from the point of view of local security, but I don’t think that this move actually changed much.
After all F16 is becoming to be an obsolete aircraft and it would not be a huge challenge for Russian military.
Poles have many problems with operating these aircraft and that is because of relatively high rate of technical failures of various sub-systems installed on said F16-s.
Polish F16-s are also not equipped with decent weaponry systems and as such are of very limited use in case of conflict with Russia.
At the moment they are perhaps good for training purposes.

You are also talking about powerful Polish lobbies in the US.
Are you aware of recent failure by US to send some higher rank official to their commemorations of beginning of WW II?
Are you aware that their highest profile guests there were highest rank officials from Germany and Russia (countries incidentally responsible for starting WWII with Ribbentrop – Molotov pact)?
I doubt that discussed move by US was reassuring there…

It seems that Poland is not so important at the moment for American policymakers and it may at best enjoy a status of auxiliary ally.

I would suggest that countries like Georgia are at the moment much more important in US strategy for example because of oil pipelines etc.

You have also mentioned Ukraine as prospective US ally, but that is not so.
This country is hardly governable at the moment, their eastern part is under practical control of Russian “fifth column” and most of citizens are against membership in NATO.
Pro-Western Yustchenko is completely discredited and alternatives are only eager to show, how much pro-Russian they are.
All this may well lead to collapse of this country (you should also take possible Polish and also Turkish fiddling, which may facilitate these ends).

2. It seems that you are accepting military attack on Iran either by US, Israel or both as something close to a foregone conclusion.
However you are not taking into account likely impact of such attack on global economy and in particular American economy itself.
It would be in all probabilities disastrous.
Perhaps bad enough to make an attack not really feasible.
US (and also Israel) are nuclear weapon states, Iran understands well that an attack on Israel would be a suicidal undertaking, so I doubt that ayatollahs would order it.
Perhaps no war on Iran will be launched and US and Israel will have to learn, how to accommodate for nuclear armed Iran after all?

“Winning the peace” is an oxymoron in Third World high-fertility tribal societies with a strong sense of self-confidence, identity and access to cheap weapons. You have to impose YOUR peace, with the unrepentant ruthlessness of a traditional empire. “Western imperialism” (of early-era colonial vintage) has a far better chance of pacifying Afghanistan than its latter-day incarnation as “Western humanitarianism”, which is a dead end.

Why? Because humanitarianism is weakness, and treated as such by traditional peoples. The very fact of what NATO is doing in Afghanistan, trying to instill the accouterments of modern civilization onto a profoundly pre-modern culture, sets Afghans against it – far more so than any number of accidental air strikes on wedding parties.

From the evidence, it appears the US doesn’t understand this (or doesn’t want to understand this) and the corollary that withdrawal is the least bad strategic option. Instead, the generals are demanding more and more troops without setting out any limits or goals, going down the same road General Westmoreland took in Vietnam.

Though this could change in future. It would be interesting to know how many of those in favour are of the younger generation.

That would indeed be interesting. On the one hand, one of the key reasons middle-aged and older men think conscription is good is that they served (and in most cases turned out fine), and so should younger men. Enthusiasm amongst younger people who have to serve will no doubt be longer, but might be counter-balanced by their greater sense of nationalism.