The president's initial policies towards the Middle East in particular have been shaped on the premise that the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program, the continuing conflict in Iraq and the Israeli-Arab conflict are all susceptible to peaceful negotiation and resolution. Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who played such a constructive and justly acclaimed role in negotiating the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland, took on his new assignment as the president's chief Middle East peace negotiator committed to, and openly expressing, precisely that view.

Ironically, the idea that major land wars between large industrialized nations are now a thing of the past was also shared by the tough military realists, as they believed themselves to be, of the previous Bush administration.

In the first six years of the Bush administration, U.S. policymakers, spearheaded by Donald Rumsfeld during his momentous six-year reign as secretary of defense, were convinced that the advent of precision weapons, reconnaissance and communications meant the United States would remain militarily supreme around the world without needing hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of ground troops to fight large-scale wars.

Republicans, raised in the age of Tom Clancy novels, have lived in a world where this seemed to be true for the past quarter-century.

Democrats don't buy into the vision of electronic super-weapons rendering huge masses of less well-equipped troops, cannon and armored vehicles obsolete as enthusiastically as Republicans do, but they still think that the age of massive land confrontations has passed.

That is also the wisdom in every major nation of the European Union, and it's especially the case among European Commission policymakers in Brussels.

The only trouble is that a lot of other major powers around the world do not believe it is true -- and are planning based on very different assumptions.

The Russian army is currently upgrading its equipment on a more massive scale than at any time in at least the past 30 years. It could afford to do so for years because of the soaring global price of oil and gas. But even after global energy prices collapsed following the start of the global economic recession in September 2008, the Russian government has remained steadfastly committed to its ambitious military modernization programs.

Russia therefore is still moving energetically to modernize its army with the latest T-90S Main Battle Tanks, Black Shark tactical support attack helicopters, BMP-90 armored personnel carriers, Multiple Launch Rocket Vehicles and many other systems.

Also, the Russian National Security Council led by its tough Secretary Nicholas Patrushev, a close ally of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, recently released a new national security doctrine emphasizing the importance of building up both conventional and strategic nuclear forces to defend Russia against presumed threats, especially from the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

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