[MarineHawk]

Originally Posted by Mooncricket

China, Russia, and the US have United against many things and on many subjects..........


hence why I'm asking if our relations with them have always been this strained, or if this is getting worse and worse by the moment........

Russia and the U.S. were enemies almost constantly between 1917 and 1990. There was a brief "alliance" from 1941 to 1945 to defeat Hitler, but remember:
* Stalin started off the war as Hitler's ally. They enteried into the Molotoz/Ribontrop pact and divided up eastern Europe, whereby the Nazi's too western and central Poland and the Russians gobbled up eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Besarabia. And then, stalin invaded neutral Finland. During the 30s and 40s, he killed 15-20M of his own people out of insane paranoia and to collectivize the farms (even Lenin did not try the later, knowing that they'd have to kill millions to accomplish it). Stalin, for example, destroyed the food supplies in the Ukraine in the mid 30s, and just let millins of men, women, and children there starve to death to subdue them. For that reason, the Nazis were greeted as liberators by the Ukrainians (and many Russians) in 1941 until they proved to be just a murderous.
* Russia only became our ally, when Hitler invaded Russia.
* During the war, we bankrolled Stalin's war effort with tens of thousands of tanks, airplanes, trucks, etc...
* During the war, Stalin never really acted as our ally.
* During the war, Stalin murdered the Polish government in exile after inviting them to Moscow to discuss how he would turn over power to them after the war.
* At the end of the war, Stalin occupied and imposed his dictatorship over all of eastern europe and much of central Europe.
* After the war, Stalin blockaded W. Berlin to drive us out of there.
* For the next 45 years, the USSR and the U.S. were enemies in every political sense of the word. Both did everything, short of a mutually-annihilating WWIII, to cause the collapse of the other.
* We essentially won this struggle in 1990 when the USSR collapsed (in large part because the arms race with the U.S. bankrupted their feeble Communist economy).
* For a brief period (about ten years) there was a pretense that we had the same goals and were on the same team. That fiction, was unraveled when the Russians violently resisted our attempts to put a stop to Hussein, which was bribing Putin (and Chrirac and others) with billions of petro-dollars from the oil-for-food scheme to oppose us.

There's no doubting however, that our diplomitic ties are currently strengthening with most trully democratic nations. That's about the best we can do. china and Russia, as always, want to dominate the globe. We don't want them to do so. thus, we're really not allies.

France, Germany, Britain, Poland, Australia, etc..., do not want to dominate the globe, thus we have increasingly friendly alliances with them. Sarkozy is much more friendly than Chirac; Merkel much more than Schroeder; Brown is less though than Blair, but Britain is still very friendly; most of eastern europe really love us-we're more popular there than anywhare else--in part because they are trully tasting and embracing democracy for the first time--they love it and love us for helping them get it. Seriously, the trend is up.

Also, it can get only better. I doubt many will want to read this article, but it explains what's really going on right now: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9804

If you want to know what really going on, what the facts are, and not just the general pessimistic conclusions by the media, read that article. The reason the main Dem candidates are backing off their demands/promises to immediately get out of Iraq is they’re starting to understand who the fundamentals have shifted in the last few months. Sometimes victories are costly and take time. We’re almost there. We really have no dedicated enemies in Iraq any more since the Sunni’s have turned against Al Qaeda other than the foreigners and bands of criminals. We no longer are fighting the Iraqi political insurgents who were previously by far the main reason form the civil and military strife going on over these.