I think that $40,000,000,000 for Russia is a HUGE deal. Maybe it is time to remove the Brezhniev era punitive Vanik sanctions so Russia could trade with America instead of being forced to deal with Iraq, Iran etc ...? Why Russia is under sanctions when China has the Most Favored Nation status?
It could also be that they are as poor as paupers, as corrupt as Clinton, and have more Islamic voters than any other democratic country on the planet.
This doesn't make it "a good thing" that they're selling anything bigger than a firecracker to those crazy Irani imams, but it goes some way to explaining it.
I don't mean to preach, but at the end of the First World War, the Allies went out of their way to destroy Germany financially and then proceeded to ignore it.
In 1933, H.G. Wells wrote:-
"...it will certainly return upon a still more disastrous scale in twenty or thirty years' time if no political unification anticipates and prevents it. States organized for war will make wars as surely as hens will lay eggs, but the feeling of these distressed and war-worn countries disregarded this fact, and the whole of the defeated peoples were treated as morally and materially responsible for all the damage, as they would no doubt have treated the victor people had the issue of the war been different."
He was right, but it wasn't 20-30 years, it was 6 years after he wrote these lines that another conflict returned. At the end of WWII, we had learned something and, rather than punishing two entire countries, we gave Germany and Japan every assistance to rebuild. Now look at them.
In 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West left the former USSR without any substantial assistance in re-building a political and economic framework along Western lines.
Granted, re-building a country which stretched almost halfway around the World was a daunting task, but we seem to have forgotten the lessons learned from WWI.
Russia is now bankrupt, corrupt, desperate, envious and increasingly disenchanted with the indifference shown by Europe, America and others towards its plight.
Hitler was elected by popular vote as the last act of a starving people surrounded by relative prosperity. Russia is in a very similar position to the post-WWI Germany at the moment and is equally open to the prospect of a crazy, charismatic dictator making his move.
Russia selling the bomb to Iran (because there's no doubt that this is what they're doing) is not the concern, because Iran is not really the concern.
The worry is what this means about the desperation of Russia and the extent to which they just don't care what we say anymore.
If we continue to ignore this, Russia won't be a democracy for any longer than it takes for another Hitler to rise up through the ranks. Very scary!