In Russia, Vladimir Putin was in the last few months of his term as President, and he was term limited; he couldn’t run for President again. This wasn’t a big problem for Vladimir. His handpicked successor was Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister. Medvedev became the President and Putin took the job of Prime Minister, and ran the place anyway. It would be the equivalent of John McCain winning the election and naming me the Vice President, and then letting me run the country in his name. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!” Nobody expected any difference in Russian policy.
I was scheduled for another Middle Eastern tour during the summer. This was going to be a relatively simple tour, hitting Turkey, Kurdistan, and Israel. This would be my third trip to Kurdistan, and the second to Turkey and Israel. In a way this was a farewell tour for me. The Turks and the Kurds were squabbling, but nothing serious. Nobody wanted to screw up the very nice oil relations they were developing. When they redrew the maps, the Kurds grabbed as much of the oil territory as they could get away with, and they now had an awful lot of oil. Behind the scenes, State and Commerce were developing some nice talking points and a three-way trade agreement which I would sign. I wasn’t asking that they love each other, just that they behave and not shoot each other. They could squabble with each other as much as they wanted, but everybody wanted the oil to flow!
Israel wasn’t as happy with me. Yes, we had destroyed Iraq, but that wasn’t enough. They wanted us to destroy Iran for them! They were constantly screaming about Iranian nuclear ambitions, the plans and facilities for an Iranian bomb. The Iranians knew how to build one, but they needed to generate enough fissile material. We had a ton of economic sanctions in place against the Iranians, but they were slowly developing the ability, and there wasn’t much we could do about it short of a full scale nuclear pre-emptive strike. No, I was not going to do that.
Nuclear proliferation was a problem facing the whole world. Technology had advanced to the point that if you could get the fissile material, anybody could build a bomb. It might be big and bulky, but it would work. Shrinking the package down to a size you could put in a missile warhead was a separate issue, and was much trickier, but you could easily make something that would fit in the back of a minivan, and with a little practice, something that could be made into a bomb suitable for an airplane to deliver. In addition to the original five nuclear powers of America, England, France, Russia, and China, the nuclear club now also included India and Pakistan. Israel was known to have nukes, but they wouldn’t confirm that publicly. South Africa under apartheid also had nukes, but had dismantled them before the blacks took over, so there wouldn’t be a “Black Bomb.” Otherwise, there were probably another dozen Western European and Asian nations who had the ability to create a bomb in anywhere from six months to two years.
Generally speaking, these nations were all considered relatively sane places. Even Pakistan had strong controls on the nukes, and weren’t about to let the nut jobs get their hands on one. That didn’t apply to Iran and North Korea, where the governments were controlled by crazies. Iran was a major supporter of Islamic terrorism, and in poll after poll, at least of third of the population thought nuking Israel and America would be a good idea. In my first life, Iran eventually got the bomb, and within a matter of months had turned one over to Hezbollah, with tragic results for everybody.
North Korea was a different matter. Completely sealed inside its own borders, with about zero contact with the rest of the planet, the world’s only Communist monarchy actually seemed to believe the nonsense they spewed out. They constantly provoked South Korea and the United States, lobbing shells over the border or harassing ships and planes. If they had been another country, I would have smashed them years ago, but if I responded to them appropriately, they would attack South Korea. There were tens of thousands of artillery tubes and missiles aimed at Seoul, which was close enough to the border that North Korean troops could walk there in a day. Throw in nuclear weapons, and it gets very dangerous indeed. The South Korean administration wanted us to tread very lightly. They were in the midst of an appeasement mode, hoping their pleasant actions would pay dividends. I couldn’t see any, and I knew the next few South Korean administrations would take a considerably different tone.
For seven years my response to the demands that I do something were the same. Ignore them! Behind the scenes, diplomatically I made sure that the Buckman Doctrine was well known to both countries. Yelp all you want, but if you actually attack us or our allies, you’ll never do it a second time. It was questionable whether the North Koreans believed me or their own press clippings more. To my critics, I simply refused to get into a debate. I didn’t issue challenges or warnings, I didn’t draw red lines or lines in the sand, and I refused to get caught up in hypothetical scenarios. Ambiguity could be quite useful.
As I was leaving office, my inevitable conclusion was that the world was somewhat stable, but massively fucked up in a lot of places. On more than one occasion I wondered what, if any, effect I had on things. Sooner or later, in an awful lot of these places, the locals were going to get sick and tired of the assholes running things, and they would revolt. Generally that led to wholesale slaughter and civil war. The assholes running these countries were often the only people holding things together! Some days you just couldn’t win!
In America, which at times I considered as screwy as any third world shithole, the Republican and Democratic primaries slogged on. John McCain rode his Super Tuesday wins to glory. Mitt Romney dropped out a few days after Super Tuesday, and gave a speech calling for unification of the party under John McCain. Mike Huckabee decided to keep going, betting that he could grab enough Southern and Western states with his religious and socially conservative message. It worked, too, but not to the level that was needed. Mike picked up a few small states, but John picked up the ‘Potomac Primary’ of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., and then ran the board on ‘Super Tuesday II’ at the beginning of March. That gave John a mathematical lock on the nomination, and Huckabee dropped out. John was the official Republican nominee.
On the Democratic side, things just dragged out. I thought the damn thing was going to go right up to the convention, something that hadn’t happened since 1980, when Ted Kennedy tried to screw with Jimmy Carter’s re-election run. It didn’t work out that way. While Obama and Clinton were essentially tied after Super Tuesday, Obama ran the board in all of the February primaries, generally beating Hillary two-to-one all month long. The March primaries went back to the draw that the earlier primaries had been. The whole damn thing dragged on into June, with Obama slowly gaining ground on Clinton, using crazy ‘super delegate’ rules to pick up more votes. Eventually Barack Obama clinched the number necessary, mid-June, and Hilary dropped out. There had been huge amounts of bad blood shed by then. The odds that Obama would pick Clinton for his running mate were too low to be meaningful. Meanwhile, reports of John Edwards’ zipper problems were slowly surfacing, despite his repeated denials. Within the next few months he was going to self-destruct disastrously. He would not be the V.P. candidate.