South America's Red Tide

While the world's lone superpower wages hot war with world Islamic fundamentalism and cold war with the emerging superpower of the Orient (hint: not North Korea) and takes monster storm after monster storm right in its national nads, Fidel Castro, with his stooges in Caracas and Braslia in tow, is quietly but efficiently taking over Latin America. His next target: Bolivia, where a fourth stooge, Evo Morales, is rolling inexorably toward becoming its next president.

Which means if the Bush Administration ever regained the boldness of 2001-2003 and liberated Syria and Iran and won the GWOT, it could turn around to discover a new communist empire to the South armed with Venezuelan petrowealth and Brazilian nuclear weapons and possibly including Uruguay, Argentina, and even Mexico (run by ultraleftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, if he overcomes the obstacles to his "one man, one vote, once" presidential candidacy) on its "international" roster.

No wonder the Bushies are belatedly cultivating little Paraguay, which is about the only country on that continent outside of Columbia that isn't drifting toward militant anti-Americanism. If they don't do something, and soon, border control could eventually take on a whole new, and frightening, meaning.