Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

That's how I'd view Iran and Russia. There are people no doubt in Russia who want to see a confrontation between the U.S. and itself in order to get the sort of final battle that they envisioned during Communism, and there are people in Iran who no doubt see Iran as a sort of vanguard of Third World revolutionism who want to see a similar conflict, but neither of these options are particularly enticing as things to buy into.

Putin's Russia is a piss poor imitation of what was a police state with no democracy which had going for it a basic equality among its citizens.

Iran today under Ahmadhinejad is a piss poor imitation of a Third World country modernizing and pursuing an equal society through bypassing capitalism using indigenous ways of thinking and acting. Instead, you have rule by conservative clerics and a President who believes that the equivalent of the Second Coming in Shi'ite Islam, the coming of the Mahdi, is imminent and that we're entering the end times.

If they band together, hell, even if they include China, of which similar criticisms could be made, it would still add up to second rate imitations of systems which were themselves questionable banding together for questionable aims against the U.S., which their economies are close to in many respects. Authoritarian conservatism in leadership, some intervention in the economy by the leadership, and relative pro-capitalist, albeit within the nation not international, conditions characterize all three regimes. This is not what people should be fighting for and potentially dying for.

If it comes to war with these characters on one side, I'd either support some kind of banding together of Chavez and company, depending on their response, or fight for non-alignment.

The best alternative would be for Chavez and other leftist leaders of South America to remain somewhat independent of China, Russia, and Iran, and themselves be non-aligned.

So, I guess, in other words, if it comes to a confrontation between the U.S. and its allies and Russia, China, and Iran, I'd support non-alignment, being for neither side.