We are adversaries with Russia because we have a government full of people with your mindset, looking out from the borders and seeing enemies and threats everywhere.
If we really thought strategically about things, we’d realize we should be working much closer with Russia to be partners instead of adversaries. A Russo-American partnership, combined with our natural Anglosphere alliance with England, Canada, Australia and India, is an unbeatable combination.
Russia itself has far more value to us as Americans than nonsense like defending “freedom” by poking Russia in the eye in Georgia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Transnistria, Kosovo, or Bosnia. The easiest way to “defeat” the Russian power threat is to co-opt it to our own joint ends, so that there would not be a reason to ever fight.
Russia in WWII was a much stronger country than now. It had the 60 million people of Ukraine and Byelorussia in it, and the cannon fodder of the Asian Steppes to draw on. All that is now gone.
F35’s, F22’s, etc. Who cares? Why aren’t we developing the equivalent of an AK-47 as an airplane? A plane that is simple, elegant, easily maintained, easily used, easily updated, always works, never out of style. The reason we will have so few F35’s and F22’s and all the rest is because we are constantly burdened wasting money trying for the next techno-gadget airplane hangar queen, instead of producing actual functional weapons that are always available for work.
Imagine if the Army issued light machine guns to its troops that required 30 hours of maintenance and oiling for every hour of firing! You think we would win any wars that way?
That is easy. We won't sacrifice a few thousand pilots like the Soviets did.