I agree on the first part - the animosity has been worse, it will pass, and the people on the Left pushing the most radical agenda are by and large useless; even the so-called "Antifa" are actually afraid when real violence is used against them.

On the second part, I disagree. Cold War II is not as clear cut as Cold War I was. It comes on the heels of 30 years of undisputed American hegemony and arrogance in world affairs. Majorities or at least pluralities of voters in both parties are deeply and fundamentally distrustful of the reasons for Cold War II happening in the first place.

I am happy to see that now about 70% of Republicans are against sending more weapons to Ukraine. I don't need to bore you with a full litany of the facts, but you're well aware of the Bandera UPA-OUN activities, the way the US government sheltered many of them and sent them to Canada and the US (fun fact: an ex-gf admitted she was able to emigrate from Ukraine because of a relative who "emigrated" to the US in 1945), and how those people then wrote the history books used in Ukraine since 1991, poisoning entire generations against Russia by exaggerating everything bad Russia ever did and imputing "Russianness" to everything Soviet (fun fact 2: during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War some moronic talking head talked about how much Georgia had suffered under Russian dominance, particularly under Stalin).

I am sure you know that Soros was operating in Kiev since 1995 (fun fact 3: I applied to work at the Kiev office of his operations in 1997 without realizing what that organization was). You know the way the US supported Yushchenko to increase influence, and how in 2013 Yanukovich (legitimately elected) was initially told he could sign a trade treaty with both the EU and Russia until someone in the White House pulled the rug out from underneath him and forced the Europeans to give him a binary choice: EU OR Russia. Then, when he picked the more rational treaty (Russia was the export destination for some 60% of Ukraine's economic output), the pro-EU forces were paid by the US to orchestrate a coup to overthrow him (undemocratic). You know that the protestors hired snipers to start shooting at the police to encourage return fire, which was blamed on the police. You know Victoria Nuland hand picked the coup leaders who would replace a democratically elected Yanukovich.

You know that while all this was going on, Russia had been systematically mistreated by the US from the 1990s on. Jeffrey Sachs enriching himself on the Moscow Stock Exchange, shock therapy pronouncements from other figures, demanding Russia take all Imperial Russian and Soviet debt, the support for Chechen terrorists, support for other breakaway movements, destroying Russia's overseas investments in places like Iraq, bombing Russian ally Yugoslavia on the flimsiest of pretexts (UN later proved the Kosovars killed before the war were actually terrorist fighters), and breaking the 1990 promise not to move NATO eastwards. Then, when Russia genuinely wanted to help the US after 9/11, the US took advantage of it to engineer "revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and put military bases everywhere in the region, and finally the addition of the Baltics to NATO. When Russia asked if it too could join NATO, it was told it would be "too destabilizing". But then Ukraine and Georgia were offered a path to NATO membership and Bush wanted to put anti-ICBM missile batteries in Ukraine.

This was aimed at Russia's nuclear deterrent. By this point NATO had indicated it was intent on encircling Russia with hostile states, building them up and arming them and then seeking to disable Russia's only means of defending itself against the US. At that point Russia would be nearly defenseless against the "defensive" alliance and might suffer a fate similar to Iraq, Libya, or Serbia.

Honestly, I don't blame Russia for deciding to act pre-emptively. As the war has shown, if the Ukrainian army had been given a few more years of NATO training, it might have proven fatal to Russia.

Believe me, I harbor no illusions about the fact that Russia's government is not free or open at this point, but to risk nuclear war in order to attempt to encircle and undermine it is really too much. Hopefully Russia will force Ukraine to disarm and be a neutral like Austria or Switzerland during the Cold War. After the cost of the war Russia will certainly keep much of the East and maybe even parts of the center if it does indeed go on the offensive. Given the historic ties of the various parts of Ukraine handing over half the country to Russia makes sense anyway.

The US-China relationship has deteriorated so quickly I don't even know what happened. The Chinese haven't been behaving all that differently than they were 10 years ago. I get the feeling that the US just wants to turn off the flow of money back and forth to keep China from rising too far. However, the problem will resolve itself without any need for the US to antagonize things. China has peaked demographically, it's getting old before it's getting rich, and although it will remain an extremely powerful global player, it will not take over the world.

The US, by contrast, has been an arrogant hegemon. The US foreign policy establishment, already drunk on its own power after World War II, became completely uncontrolled in the 1990s and now the US finds itself in a position similar to that of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Its friends and allies resent it and aren't happy with the way they've been treated like vassals, countries that try to "reform" often find themselves betrayed (Mubarak) or killed (Qaddhafi). Third world countries are buying into anti-colonial rhetoric in part because of continued mistreatment and the way they are dictated to.

Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right when he said, "Geschichte ereignet sich immer zweimal - das erste Mal als Tragödie, das zweite Mal als Farce." The first Cold War was indeed a tragedy, but this Cold War II is truly farcical. The problem is that because the people running things in Washington are at this point dilettantes and out of control lackeys, we could still blunder our way into World War III.