The United States spent a half century avoiding war with the Soviet Union because both sides possessed the ability to annihilate the other with nuclear weapons. The standoff was termed MAD--mutually assured destruction-- as indeed it is. The nuclear weapons are still in the bunkers. Arms control efforts after the fall of the Soviet Union have reduced the number of warheads, but there are still more than enough to destroy the respective enemy.
What has changed since 1991 when the Berlin Wall came down is that American leadership, political and military, now thinks about what was once unthinkable--war against Russia. It will be indirect at first as it was in Vietnam and it will start in Ukraine's Donbass. The eastern industrialized region is mostly populated by ethnic Russians since the days of Stalin.(See Curzon Line) A separatist insurrection is raging there and no end to the fighting is in sight. A recent peace initiative by Germany's Angela Merkle and France's François Hollande failed to make any progress towards a peaceful resolution. Given the geopolitics of Europe the clash between NATO forces deployed on Russia's borders and Russian forces in Ukraine is almost inevitable.
Corporatist leadership wants Ukraine in America's orbit as a member of NATO. That is why operatives where sent into Kiev to engineer an election unseating the Ukrainian government friendly to the Kremlin. Now, the same cold warriors* who brought us the wars in the Middle East want the United States to arm Ukraine with American military weapons. They want yet another war to realize their vision of United State's global military-corporate hegemony which will assure uninterrupted energy flows to the West. If you believe the New York Times, the Current Occupant is going along for their ride after Russian backed separatists defeated corrupt Ukrainian military forces supported by fascist militias and recaptured the Donetsk airport. A joint report from those bastions of American exceptionalism, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs says the best way to escalate the Ukrainian war is to supply $3 billion in military arms to the Kiev regime. Forget those arms will kill more Ukrainians than the thousands that have died already. The US corporate imperialists only have their global policy objectives to consider, and they want Crimea back. Never mind that Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia from which they were separated by Khrushchev and the Politburo in 1954. At the time of Crimea's transfer to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the peninsula had a population that was only 22% ethnic Ukrainian.
Rest assured Vladimir Putin will not sit idly by as the US escalates an insurrection into a full-scale war on Russia's southern border. Putin knows what happened in Fallujah. The amount of infrastructure damage in Donetsk from the war is already enormous. Putin will move to protect Russian lives, and the Kremlin will have the justification it needs to openly pour men and material into the Donbass. It will be only a matter of time before NATO personnel come into conflict with Russian troops. Then, all bets are off and the planet killers come out of the bunkers.
*Some examples are Strobe Talbot who served in the Clinton administration; Ivo Daalder who was a policy advisor to the Current Occupant during his 2008 campaign, and served as representative to NATO during the Libyan incursion. Two former ambassadors to Ukraine signed their names to the report. Zibigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter has long advocated reducing US adversaries to the status of colonies. He recently advocated arming the Kiev regime with anti-tank weapons for use in "urban warfare of resistence" intended to bog Russia down in prolonged suffering. Secretary of State John Kerry and Joint Chief of Staff General Martin Dempsey are all on board the train to WWIII. So is Mrs. Current Occupant who sits on the board of the Chicago foreign policy group. The Current Occupant talks about changing borders with the barrel of a gun. The question is: is that barrel labeled "NATO"?