Wow......
When LS and Travis Mcgee debate........ it’s a chance for the rest of us to perk up and pay close attention
Ah, we’re only differing over what the potential of America still is.
I’m always an optimist. I think it’s warranted by history. In 1812, with only six frigates, we captured two British frigates, a host of other ships, and made them tie up a significant portion of their navy just blockading three ports. Reading the Brit press, they were utterly shocked, and at the end of the war were already saying that the Age of America had dawned. Mind you, this is 80 years before the Spanish-American War when the real Age of America dawned.
Despite massive abuse, neglect, and downsizing, the productive potential of the USA remains a massive giant waiting to be awakened.
But the Russians have proven over 40 years that their main advantage was their gigantic population and a willingness to kill them. They no longer have that option. Many, if not most, of their “breakthroughs” in the Cold War later were shown to be illusory, from their achievements in the “Space Race” to their fatally flawed SSTs and Alpha subs. Remember we ACCELERATED those failures by letting them “steal” blueprints & tech from us that we had injected with critical failure points (hence the explosion of the Transsiberian Pipeline.)
Travis is right that in raw numbers right now it appears that this fire was no big deal. But I tend to look at underlying fundamentals. The Russkies’ are all bad.