Consider the demographic disaster that has overtaken Russia?

: AIDS, tuberculosis and other contagious diseases, alcoholism and drug addiction. Consider also: the role that Russia occupies in the global community; its susceptibility to ethnic fragmentation and terrorism; the perilous state of its market economy and the marginalization of its most vulnerable citizens; its progressive relapse into totalitarianism; the poisoning of its environment; and the proliferation of its nuclear materials black market. Got all that? How might it happen that “as Russia goes, so goes the world”?