The facts ARE known.

Columbia DID go into Ecuador.
Columbia used a trace from Chavez to the Dead man to find him
Columbia surprised them in a place they thought was off limits
Columbia was able to obtain the papers, and computers, and everthing else kept in this assumed ?safe? place.
Records were found that lead to monies as much as 300 million plus delivered and or promised.

FARC is holding more than just a few American citizens, as well as having branches among the gangs in the US. Some are now getting training in Iraq, since the average American will not defend themselves.

In what was considered a bizarre response

Bizarre? How is it bizarre to posture to inject destabilization and uncertainty in the Oil market, and thereby taking attention off of who losing what and what is happening where.

It is also important to note that the United States military debates its over-reaching strategy out in the open for the world to see.

This is an assumption that what is for public consumption is meaningful and similar to what goes on behind closed doors. The two cant be the same since the public tears the wings off of flies and never tries to understand things, just tries to sling parts to get their agenda first. Transparency has other purposes than just transparency.

By the way, I am past two big paragraphs and other than a lead in, you arent heading towards something that is related to the title

In the sense of power distribution, international relations is similar to a zero-sum game

WRONG.

Not at all. That?s the Marxist view that when someone has something someone else had to lose something. It?s a socialist communist view of the world, that capitalists don?t have. in case you haven?t noticed, japans success is proof that it isn?t zero sum at all. there really IS plenty for all. and soon technology will enter space, and the amounts of material there are so extreme that if it was safe we could nudge them together and create and crash planets. But don?t worry, when we start shooting our toxic process waste which only is made in space not earth, and we send it to the sun for destruction, there will be a bunch of political greenies that will holler that we are polluting the sun now. (of course anything we send to the sun, unless quite large, would be shredded and ejected long before it actually got to the ?surface?)

When one nation loses power, some other nation or nations gain power.

WRONG?

This again assumes that all of them cant cooperate. Your on a cruise ship. does the increased power of the captain in the cruise ship take away your power as a person? does your putting yourself in the hands of power, abrogate your power if they don?t lock you to them and your free to change your mind?

The status of the US did not increase after Russia pretended to fall. In relation to each other the gap got wider, but that?s a relative measurement, not a measurement of the actual state in relation to everything else.

When the USSR collapsed, the United States largely gained the power that was left on the table. This has been a point of consternation for some time for the former world power.

Really? Then why is the world more communist than when they fell? We didn?t gain any increased power. What we gained was the ability to act without so much interference from flies, and such. that?s not the same as increased power.

In fact, I suspect that you have a very mainstream media shallow concept of what power really is. which is what those in power would want you to have. it makes you a lot less effective. It makes it akin to you trying to run a breakneck race in a house of mirrors. Your nose ends up broken, and the competitor just calmly walks through never rushing.

In order to achieve such a status, the United States would have to relinquish or lose some of its current power.

How so?

Your are looking at the world through a very limited spy glass. The glass of power politics, the glass of soviet communism, and world socialsm.

If you looked at the same thing through capitalist eyes you would not see this as a situation in which one has to destroy the other to live.

The communist way is primitive, like the sociopaths that dominated the small migrating groups of humans that had to ruthlessly hate others to stay alive.

In that primitive world, what someone else gets, means your familiy starves.

In the capitalist world, they don?t accept that the fruit tree that is there is all that is. they plan and they are left to produce orchards. And now there is no reason to kill the person next to you for an apple.

This view of the world comes from the mathematics that they use to define social costs in our terms. I may post about this if someone asks me to.

In this case, and their world view, the minute that smoethign is newly invented the world is worse off. (so its an impediment to change and the preservation of sociaslit control)

So, and they have used this as a explanation, the minute that someone invents insulin, the world now has a social cost in that not everyone that needs insulin has it.

So the socialists now say, that the world is imbalances and those that don?t have insulin are now suffering. There is no thought of time. No thought of change. No thought of logistics of distribution and costs.

The only thought is that now we have made an improvement, the world suffers. You have internalized that, and are now spitting it as if it was truth, and your not even questioning where you got that view.

One ought not to be na?ve to think that these nations which murder journalists and dissidents, repress speech, and shun the rule of law inside their own borders are suddenly acting with the purity of wind-driven snow once on the international stage.

If you did what you just said, you would be questioning the validity of the zero sum angle which only exists to justify their actions against us and then seem reasonable to those here that would not side with them if they were a bit more clear on things.

Currently, both Russia and China have ties with Venezuela (that include Russia shipping military goods to Venezuela).

How about Russia giving Chavez the plans and helping build an ak107 factory, grenade launch and dragunov sniper rifles. (This is for 4g/5g warfare).

The reason this was done was that it was feared that america was going to eneter iran. However, that was why all the burners were turned on all aroud the world.

Iran is the only land bridge between Russian military equipment and all their customers that cant be monitored, guessed, and so forth. (at least not easily).

So iran was and is key to closing the door into the middle east and Africa. Spain was bombed so that russia would have control of the straight.

Ajerbaijana and Georgia are so important because they make this land bridge up too. and allows them to use turkey if the line in the sand si broken and turkey is forced again to side with them. its why russia also yelled at the US in the Caspian threatening them.

If Georgia and ajerbaijan fall to the west, then they have to use the Caspian to get the weapons to iran to be distributed. And if you move by ship you can establish an upper limit to whats being moved.

Turkey, iraq, iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, are a one nation barrier to the unchecked movement of weapons and military equipment and expertise.

Given that russia desont really produce much, and relies on raw materials, its in their interest to destabilize the countries that could enter the business (Africa), and to destabilize oil producers (inflate prices artificially), and collude on prices and supplies (opec).

The major difference that people like you are not picking up is that china, if it allows the expansion of the growth to move to the rest of the country, will end up being very western in that it makes its money in turning raw materials into products.

Such a system, is a system that does better with stability. So the question with china is will it stay on this route which favors international stability and no zero sum games, and then they will have too much material to make it worth playing war games.

Russia unlike china never promoted this second teir economics. They manipulated to centralize things for the kgb through 25 or so oligarchs. China didn?t create oligarchs, but did create wealthy people.

This make china hard to understand because they are at a crossroads.

Russia though has never left the place it was at before. The people who are in the politburo, and most key places are the same people who were in place during the cold war. The same education.. the same bad news.

Forgive me if I don?t comment on Kosovo? your article as was said in the above comment, is so all over the place that its just spew.

Currently, the United States economy is in trouble; there is broad consensus on that at this point. Bad lending is never a good thing for an economy.

Oh I agree? so are central banks that are companies? and that socialists forcing banks to loosten up their lending policies so that people who cant afford the loans get them in an attempt to speculate with everything they have, is also detrimental. Too bad we don?t remember that they forced the banks to do this to make the options open to people with means also open to people with little means, experience, and knowledge.

Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, three times is planned.

The United States military is structured to win two conflicts simultaneously. If both Kosovo and Colombia-Venezuela go hot, even militarily we would be stretched thin, if not to the breaking point.

The only counterbalancing effect is whether those nations would prefer to ride on America’s economic coattails or if they’d rather see American foreign power decline to their advantage

What counterbalancing effect?

You have no idea of the mentality of which your talking about. What limits you and your imagination doesn?t even apply to them (given history and the tenets of the ideology)