Escalations in a New Cold War. US-NATO Military Deployments on Russia’s Borders (Source consortiumnews.com) The Obama administration poked Russia in the eye again by activating a missile defense site in Romania while building up NATO forces on Russia’s borders, acts that could escalate toward nuclear war, notes Jonathan Marshall. If the United States ever ends up stumbling into a major conventional or nuclear war with Russia, the culprit will likely be two military boondoggles that refused to die when their primary mission ended with the demise of the Soviet Union: NATO and the U.S. anti-ballistic missile (ABM) program. The “military-industrial complex” that reaps hundreds of billions of dollars annually from support of those programs got a major boost this week when NATO  HYPERLINK “http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36272686” established its first major missile defense site at an air base in Romania, with plans to build a second installation in Poland by 2018. Although NATO and Pentagon spokesmen claim the ABM network in Eastern Europe is aimed at Iran, Russia isn’t persuaded for a minute. “This is not a defense system,” Nato-shield-russia-said Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday. “This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought [to] . . . Eastern Europe. . . Now, as these elements of ballistic missile defense are deployed, we are forced to think how to neutralize emerging threats to the Russian Federation.”