A third-world country with a big army …

That’s Iran. That’s North Korea. 

That’s also Russia. 

Which one is the bigger threat?  That all depends on who you talk to. 

For my money, it’s a toss-up between Iran and North Korea.

Iran is a theocracy run by mullahs espousing a religion which in its most extreme forms has all the hallmarks of a death cult. There aren’t a lot of other world religions that reward those who die while killing non-believers – including women and children – with an express ticket to Paradise.  Plus, the leadership takes every opportunity to proclaim “Death to America,” even while negotiating with our diplomats over slowing Iran’s nuclear weapons program. 

Did that ever give Barack Obama or John Kerry pause?  Nope, not for a minute. What could possibly go wrong with that?  

North Korea is a dynastic dictatorship with a near-religious worship of the Kim family (Koreans put family names first), including the current ruler Kim Jong-un. The Kim family has maintained control over North Korea for many decades now, living quite luxuriously while the population – except for the military – starves. North Korea does have a huge army, masses of artillery on its southern border with South Korea within striking distance of Seoul, and is developing and testing not just nuclear weapons but also the means to deliver these on new generations of missiles. 

Like Iran, North Korea hates us and everything we stand for.

For decades diplomats around the world including our own have tried to convince North Korea to tone it down a tad. They tried bribing North Korea with food, fuel, economic assistance, and foreign investment. None of this ever worked. Also like Iran, North Korea has the same death-cult mentality. However, in the North Korean leadership’s view it’s better for all North Koreans to die if they can take out everyone else in the process.

At least the Iranian extremists have a goal – unite the world’s Muslims to establish a global theocracy governed by Sharia law.  I don’t think anyone is sure what the North Koreans want as an end game. I don’t know if even Kim Jong-un does. 

Both Iran and North Korea are irrational to many of us. And scary. 

But to Democrats and Republicans like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, and of course our media, Russia is now the real threat to us.

There’s no doubt that Russia is a geopolitical rival. Then again, so is China.  Yet I can’t remember either one of those – since Khrushchev and the passing of Mao – ever threatening to annihilate us.  Iran and North Korea do that all the time. And they are both developing the means. 

It wouldn’t be in the economic self-interest of either Russia or China to start a war with us.  Their respective leaders may be duplicitous and conniving – most world leaders are – but they aren’t crazy. Also, both countries lost millions of people in WWII alone and aren’t willing to lose millions more in what would surely be an all-out nuclear holocaust for little if any gain. 

Iran and North Korea, on the other hand, seem to welcome a war; Iran expects to survive with help from Allah, while North Korea doesn’t seem to care if anyone survives. 

So why the recent obsession with Russia?

Well, the Russians are well-documented weasels. They have a lot of conventional weapons, a big army, and huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, which make them dangerous, but not really our equal militarily for a variety of reasons. The Russians realize that. 

So instead of getting into a head-to-head military face-off with us even with conventional forces, they tend to focus on stealth and misdirection to accomplish their objectives.  That’s how they got Crimea, pretending they weren’t involved when they actually were, behind the scenes. 

They’ve become very good at using disinformation, cyberattacks, and subterfuge to confuse and disorient their adversaries to achieve their strategic objectives. That’s much less expensive, in manpower and resources, than using troops, tanks and artillery to get what they want. That’s important because the Russians really don’t have the money to go all out in traditional warfare. 

It’s actually pretty smart. And they don’t have a lot of alternatives.

Their army may be big, but it’s not very good, very well equipped, or very well trained.  Or even that highly motivated.  The same goes for their air and sea forces.  About half their armed forces are comprised of poorly paid conscripts serving 12-month service obligations; that’s not a great way to establish a professional military. We know from our own experience. 

Russian specialized units – such as Spetsnaz – are on par with similar units in other parts of the Western world, but the rank and file members of the rest of its armed forces aren’t.          

The current – and probably for the foreseeable future – leader is Vladimir Putin, who rose through the ranks of the KGB to lead post-Soviet Russia.  Putin has made no secret of his desire to reassemble the Soviet Union. He’s moved on parts of the Ukraine, annexed Crimea, and used Russia’s oil and gas exports to intimidate parts of the old Soviet Union. 

He’s not a good guy. Again, most world leaders aren’t. But he is smarter than most. He knows how to game international politics and leverage the power he has like few others. 

Nobody should trust him or his word about anything. Or doubt his resolve to maintain and build power. His political enemies inside Russia go to jail, or get killed. Protestors and journalists get beaten or sometimes disappear altogether. He’s a de facto dictator, albeit popularly elected. 

The majority of Russians love him. His popularity there is off the charts. He’s making a lot of Russians proud by standing up to the rest of the world and – in the eyes of many in Russia – reclaiming the role the old Soviet Union had as a world power to be reckoned with. 

Still, he leads a country that continues to be a third-world nation with a big army. They make and sell pretty good weapons systems and produce a lot of oil and gas, but that’s about it. There’s not much else to their economy beyond that.

Maybe that’s why Barack Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat today. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s Democrats didn’t see Russia as a big deal. Even before then, they often ridiculed Reagan for his focus on the Soviet Union as part of the "evil empire."

Now, of course, it’s an entirely different matter.

Why? Because Democrats need a scapegoat – a pure evil boogie man – to blame for their historic losses in the last election and the easiest play is to blame Putin and the Russians.  After all, didn’t Trump say he wanted better relations with Russia? And that he admired Putin? Then there was Trump’s joke – or was it? – that if the Russians could find Hillary’s 30,000 missing e-mails he’d appreciate it.  

Democrats and the media are in a frenzy about all things Russian.    

That’s helping take the focus off bigger threats, I believe.  

Okay, so maybe the Russians actually did hack the DNC and released e-mails from that hack to WikiLeaks. 

To which I say: So what?

Compared to real existential threats from a nuclear Iran and North Korea – two looney-tune countries who openly want to destroy us – Russia is mouse nuts.