Maureen Dowd wrote a powerful and unnerving piece on the implications of a shifting Russian strategy the other day.

“But after 9/11, he let Cheney, Rummy and the neocons gull him into a destructive obsession with Iraq. While America has been bogged down and bled dry, China and Russia are plumping up. China has bought so much of the U.S. that we Americans would be dead Peking ducks if they pulled their investments out of our market, and Russia has transformed itself from a pauper nation to a land filled with millionaires - all through our addiction to oil.”

Read the whole thing here