Don’t Be Afraid of an American with a Gun

The growth of the U.S. defense budget to $603 billion and the statement by James Mattis, the current head of the Pentagon, that the U.S. should communicate with Russia from a position of strength haven’t made a big impression on Moscow. In the opinion of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees our country’s defense industry, Mad Dog (Mattis’ unofficial nickname), who up to now has commanded U.S. troops in various parts of the world, has let time positively pass him by and has no real understanding of the military might of Russia, which today is “the only country in the world capable of deterring any aggressor, along with its retinue.”

And so that James Mattis could get a better sense of just how much he overreacted regarding “Russia’s rusty missiles,” Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin made a number of killer (in the literal sense of the word) arguments. First and foremost is Sarmat, a new intercontinental ballistic missile capable of overcoming all existing missile defense systems and delivering a 10-ton nuclear payload to any point in the world via either the North Pole or the South Pole. Moreover, an upgraded version of the Tu-160, the strategic bomber better known as the “White Swan,” should be in the air as early as next year. According to Deputy Defense Minister Yuriy Borisov, the improved Tu-160M2 will be 2.5 times more efficient than its predecessor. In space, if one is to believe The National Interest, Russia has already tested its Nudol anti-satellite missile, while in the depths of the ocean it has tested Status-6, an unmanned nuclear submarine capable of stealthily approaching the shores of a possible adversary. A sudden, qualitative change has taken place in the theater of land operations as well. Beyond Iskanders and Armatas, military robots are now actively making themselves at home there. As an example, Dmitry Rogozin mentioned the Nerekhta robot system, with which ground troops and special operations forces are planned to be equipped. It’s the usual hi-tech miracle, the deputy prime minister asserts: A four-eyed nerd, if you will, waits in ambush and, moving his finger across a touch screen, remotely controls the actions of a killer robot …

It seems for the time being the Kremlin may truly not fear an American with a gun. Sen. John McCain, with whom Russia’s military might doesn’t sit too well, thinks Donald Trump was being stingy in adding just $54 billion to the Pentagon’s budget when substantially more was needed. In actuality, the old hand on Capitol Hill, obsessed with defense spending and anti-Russian sanctions, has simply underestimated the ideas of his commander-in-chief, who hasn’t set out to waste his energy on trivialities but rather to radically restructure the entire U.S. economy, which had become even more derivative under Barack Obama.

The price of the matter is a trillion dollars for investments in the country’s infrastructure, and Donald Trump has no doubt that Congress will approve his proposal. Who in his right mind would turn down new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, railroads, and millions of new jobs and new opportunities? At the same time, it must be understood that as long as the U.S. Federal Reserve has its printing press, even the nearly $20 trillion in national debt won’t be such an insurmountable stumbling block for Donald Trump’s new economic policy. Especially since Trump, unlike the legal scholar Obama, is a successful entrepreneur, that is, a businessman. And if he succeeds, Russia as a result will end up face to face with a totally different America, one that has fundamentally new technetronic capabilities, including in the realm of weaponry.

Donald Trump’s investment revolution is already being compared with Stalin’s modernization of the 1930s, without which there would have been no victory in World War II or a Soviet atomic bomb either. But in Russia today, national projects on a similar scale are nowhere in sight.