American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The idea that peace in Ukraine would be premature remains predominant in a few major European capitals, especially London, as well as inside hawkish American think tanks which have invested their reputation in defeating Russia — a goal that appears to be further away than ever before. Two prominent foreign policy scholars, Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte, put it far more candidly than Ischinger in a Foreign Affairs piece. “Most important, the US and Europe shouldn’t rush any talks to end the conflict,” they wrote.

Four years into the war in Ukraine, taboos around NATO’s role in its outbreak show signs of weakening.

In a recent televised rant on the Fox News Channel, the neoconservative publicist Mark Levin made the eye-opening claim that the current US-Israeli War on Iran is “every bit as important as World War Two.”

Never has humankind seen so much power concentrated in the hands of one so capricious.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, Europe has had only two options regarding its stance toward Russia: forever war or offering Russia a sensible peace and security pact.

For four years, analysts and policymakers have warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot afford to lose” in Ukraine. Increasingly, some argue he cannot afford peace either. In this view, the war is existential for his regime. Defeat would shatter Putin’s legacy and potentially end his rule. Trappedbetween humiliation and collapse, inviting comparisons to the fate of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II, Putin is portrayed as having no viable off-ramp from an unwinnable war.

In the view of General de Gaulle, “Treaties are like young girls and roses; they last while they last.” By that standard, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization seems to be wilting pretty fast. The Israeli-U.S. war on Iran has opened up (or revealed) divisions that may prove fatal.

To date only one person that we know of from the Trump administration has resigned over the decision to attack Iran. Joe Kent a very senior official in the administration. Retired Green Beret and CIA para-military operative, was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He resigned on March 16 writing in his resignation letter to Trump that Iran “posed no imminent threat to our nation” and that the administration “started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby”.

Peace is not merely the absence of fear. It stabilizes the conditions under which ordinary people can act, plan, invest, and raise families.

An American and six Ukrainians have been arrested on terrorism charges. Sometime back I wrote an article in which I noted the greater risk of terrorism generated by Ukrainians would come to Europe and in fact had already arrived on a small scale (https://gordonhahn.com/2015/11/05/europes-new-terrorist-threat/). This was confirmed by prior and later events.

Bad Ukrainians must not be allowed to worship false idols.

Bad Ukrainians are irrationally attached to outdated holidays. Orthodox Christmas, which most Ukrainians have traditionally celebrated according to the Julian calendar, has been moved to fit the Gregorian (“European”) schedule. Victory Day, which used to stand for the Soviet Union’s victory over the Nazis, has been moved, renamed, and reinterpreted in accordance with EU practice. The old holidays have been made workdays. The Kyiv government’s glorification of World War II–era Ukrainian nationalist organizations and their leaders and chants (“Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes,” “Ukraine Above Everything”) was repeatedly mentioned as casus belli by Donbas separatist insurgents, who were brought up to associate them with the fascist enemy their grandfathers had defeated.

Bad by definition are thousands of Ukrainians charged with “collaboration,” 200,000 soldiers away without leave, two million draft evaders, and untold numbers who would like to stay home on their traditional Christmas Day.

On March 5, Helsinki published draft amendments to the Nuclear Energy Act and the Criminal Code that would allow nuclear weapons to be brought into or based on Finnish soil, despite widespread public skepticism toward the change.

The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’

Gabbard’s arc from independent war skeptic to simply another Republican Party apparatchik is not dissimilar to that of Vice President J.D. Vance, who has also spent the last few weeks quietly making excuses for a war that goes against the non-interventionist promises that he and Gabbard and Trump made on the campaign trail.

The record of the war presents a more complicated picture, and forces us to consider a difficult question: Has Russia already won?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. has been seeking control over the ​Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, ‌which were damaged by mysterious blast in September 2022.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio when the U.S. would get tough on Russia during a G7 ministers meeting on Friday, sparking a sharp retort, according to three sources who attended the meeting.

Ukraine’s drive to join the European Union is facing increasing frustration. The obstacles are no longer coming from Russia, which has dropped its objection to Ukraine joining the EU: a key concession that grants a core demand of the Maidan protests of 2014. The frustration emerges because the EU cannot dramatically relax its rules of accession to satisfy Ukraine.

In the post–Cold War era significant steps were taken towards denuclearization. President Reagan had signed the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Gorbachev, which eliminated a number of nuclear missiles, and in the 1990s, following the dissolution of the USSR, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan all opted to return their nuclear weapons to the newly founded Russian Federation. It’s not to say this era had no nuclear proliferation; India joined the nuclear club in 1974 and achieved weaponization in the late 1990s, followed shortly after by Pakistan, whose technology was later used by North Korea when they achieved the same milestone.

Shortly after U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles began falling in Tehran, Iranian missiles flew in all directions at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others. The people living in these countries were justifiably terrified, which was a likely objective of those Iranian leaders who survived the first assaults. Tehran’s strategy may be to persuade America’s regional allies to reconsider their security alliances.