BODO, Norway \u2014 From his command post burrowed deep into a mountain of quartz and slate north of the Arctic Circle, the 54-year-old commander of the Norwegian military\u2019s operations headquarters watches time flowing backward, pushed into reverse by surging Russian military activity redolent of East-West sparring during the Cold War.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am what you could call a seasoned Cold Warrior,\u201d the commander, Lt. Gen. Morten Haga Lunde, said, speaking in an underground complex built to withstand a nuclear blast.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because the Cold War is back in all of its bunkered down, hunkered down glory, in northern and eastern Europe:<\/p>\n
Russia has itself fed the scaremongering with bursts of belligerent language, like the recent comment by Moscow\u2019s ambassador to Copenhagen that Danish warships \u201cwill be targets for Russia\u2019s nuclear weapons\u201d if Denmark contributes radar to a Europe-based missile defense system planned by NATO. Denmark\u2019s foreign minister, Martin Lidegaard, dismissed the threat as \u201cunacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s muscle-flexing is due in part simply to the fact that the country is spending more on its military and has re-established abilities eroded during the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s. When Mr. Putin first became president in 2000, Russia spent $9.2 billion on its military, but this has since risen 10 times and will increase again this year despite a slumping economy, hammered by a collapse in the price of oil and also by Western sanctions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Good thing Pres. Obama hit the “reset” button on US Russia relationships, isn’t it?<\/p>\n
Apparently he didn’t know what it was going to reset to<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dig out those Members Only jackets, and crank some Duran Duran. It’s “Back to the 80s” week, all over Europe! Only not in A fun way: BODO, Norway \u2014 From his command post burrowed deep into a mountain of quartz and slate north of the Arctic Circle, the 54-year-old commander of the Norwegian military\u2019s operations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52342"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52344,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52342\/revisions\/52344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}