By George Friedman The United States has captured a group of Russian spies and exchanged them for four individuals held by the Russians on espionage charges. The ways the media have reported on the issue fall into three groups: That the Cold War is back, That, given that the Cold War is over, the point of such outmoded intelligence operations is questionable, And that the Russian spy ring was spending its time aimlessly nosing around in think tanks and open meetings in an archaic and incompetent effort. It is said that the world is global and interdependent. This makes it vital for a given nation to know three things about all of the nations with which it interacts. First, it needs to know what other nations are capable of doing.