Thus The Guardian today. “Senior Labor member of parliament and former defense secretary Bob Ainsworth warns that Russia is a bigger threat to world peace than the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” elaborates the newspaper. I was drawn to the article at once. “No leader of a major power has behaved as overtly aggressively since Stalin in the postwar period, and, sadly, Putin would be very pleased with the comparison,” he is quoted. This sounded promising enough, and so I continued reading. “Stalin’s policies pushed the world into the cold war,” Ainsworth is quoted again. “Putin has the potential to be equally as dangerous.” This I found rather disappointing, it goes without saying. New cold war is no joke, to be sure, but I would give Putin much more credibility than Ainsworth does. Given the state in which the world finds itself at this juncture, which is as precarious as precarious can be, Putin has the potential of being much more dangerous than Stalin in the postwar period. Sadly or not, Putin could only be insulted by Ainsworth’s careless comparison. “As bad as?” I can imagine him screaming in his office. “Suckers!”