Here we go again!

Vlad the Inhaler has presided over the deployment of a new generation of Russian nuclear missles, pointedly said to be "capable of penetrating any prospective missle defense."

Though many conservatives disagreed, I've insisted for decades that Communism was an absurd, threadbare, self-refuting ideology which nobody in the Soviet Union, China, or elsewhere where it is the official ideology has truly believed since the early days of the Lenin and Mao regimes, or their regional equivalents. The real conflict, I suggested, was a geopolitical one between nation states over who was going to be the biggest kid on the block- or the biggest bloc on the block.

I seem to have been right. More and more, the euphoria over the end of the Cold War has given way, among the more realistic of us, to an understanding that none of the international dynamics have truly changed that much- except, perhaps, for the notion that simmering resentment against the United States among nations hitherto aligned with us can now be freely expressed, since the Russian Bear is no longer the menace he once was.

Well, that, and some of the details. I doubt that the paws of the Bear will ever be nearly as powerful, or his claws nearly as sharp, as they once were. But with the economic and military renaissance of China (which will end up being a bigger stratetic threat than the Soviet Union ever was), and the emergence of rogue states like North Korea and (shudder) Iran as nuclear powers, one does not even need to consider the threat of al Quaeda and other fanatical Islamic terrorist groups before reaching the conclusion that the world in which we live is, if anything, a more dangerous one than we had to deal with during the Cold War, not a less dangerous one.

History, it seems, repeats itself. We had to overcome a huge Soviet lead what became the race to the Moon because we were asleep at the switch while the Soviets were busily at work. Now, it's the Chinese who are getting ready to go back to the Moon, and- despite the efforts of President Bush to wake us up, we are slumbering once again.

The United States is in for a rude and woeful awakening if it thinks that we can neglect military, security, and scientific concerns (including space, which will play a far greater role in such matters in the future than it has in the past). Yet that seems to be the path we're headed down. Again.

This has been said about many elections in the past, including the last one- and not without reason. But the 2008 Presidential election may well be the most important in our history.