American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The US on Friday announced a new $250 million weapons package for Ukraine that includes HIMARS ammunition, air defenses, Stinger missiles, artillery rounds, and other equipment.

An interesting poll by the Cato Institute of likely voters in the three states expected to play a decisive role in November’s presidential contest shows that not only are Americans paying attention, but have distinct feelings about how hard the U.S. should be leaning in on global conflicts.

Ukraine has occupied more territory in Russia this year than Russia has occupied in Ukraine, but the margin of difference is relatively small. What drove Zelensky’s bold gamble and will it, ultimately, succeed?

Two Weeks to Pressure the Profiteers that Threaten Life on Earth

We are faced with twin existential threats, both rooted in corporate greed. Continued burning of fossil fuels will make this world uninhabitable within a few decades. A nuclear war would make this world uninhabitable in a few minutes. And yet neither Democrats nor Republicans seem capable of addressing these threats to the degree necessary to prevent unimaginable disaster. [Read more…] about A message from Timmon Wallis of the Warheads to Windmills Coalition

Some Western supporters of Ukraine have been presenting the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian province of Kursk as a great victory that will significantly change the course and outcome of the war. They are deceiving themselves. While legally and morally justified, the attack has failed in all its main objectives, and may indeed turn out to have done serious damage to Ukraine’s position on the battlefield. One U.S. analyst has compared it to the Confederate invasion of the North that led to the battle of Gettysburg — a brilliant tactical stroke that however ended in losses that crippled the Army of Northern Virginia.

A message from RootsAction and the Teach In Network:

For generations, teach-ins have combined with direct action to propel movements for peace and social justice.

From the era of the Vietnam War…

To the 1980s struggle to end apartheid in South Africa…

To protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

We’re excited to announce the launch of the Teach-In Network — to provide resources for activism on and off campuses — to educate and build movements for challenging what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.”

If you’re interested in participating, click here to sign up for updates about online toolboxes and other resources.

We’re building a roster of dynamic expert speakers for both on-the-ground and virtual teach-ins. The Teach-In Network website makes it easy for you to quickly tell us what you’re planning and how we can help.

In a world of shifting power balances, Americans can no longer compete internationally with wealth and weaponry alone.  We live in a world in which other nations no longer automatically defer to the United States.  Our national margin for error has demonstrably narrowed.  In several regions war has already replaced the Pax Americana.  It threatens to do the same in still others.  Our highly professional military remains peerless, but our diplomacy – our first line of defense – increasingly lacks traction.  Our country needs to get a lot better at diplomatic reasoning and the practice of diplomacy.  To match the professionalism of our competitors, we must professionalize our own diplomacy.  But what is diplomatic professionalism?

Over the course of the last 25 years, a decisive policy shift has taken place in the United States that has altered the way US politicians, the US military and the US media operate. During this period, America has adopted an agenda of perpetual war and full throttle eastward NATO expansion abroad, accompanied on the domestic front by financial deregulation and the promotion of constant fear of an external “evil” threat of one sort or another.

The highest stakes in the Ukrainian offensive into Russian territory in Kursk may turn out not to be how far they advance nor whether they can hold it. The advance seems already to be running out of gas and few in the U.S. or NATO have any expectation that Ukraine can hold onto the territory they so quickly took.

“Since the end of the Cold War, defense industries have not been doing much production work for the department,” declared William A. LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Global Security Forum in April.

This shocking statement from LaPlante jibes with the response we have seen from the U.S./NATO defense industrial base to the Russian invasion of Ukraine — a response which has been underwhelming to say the least.

Russia will make changes to its doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons in response to what it regards as Western escalation in the war in Ukraine, state media quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Sunday.

NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe speaks to nuclear expert James Acton from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about the dangers of what is being called the new nuclear age.

The Democrats’ 2024 party platform approved on the first night of the convention claims that the Biden administration “is showing what it means to act responsibly as a nuclear power.” But nuclear weapons were scarcely mentioned during the United Center speeches, if at all. Where were all the nukes?

15 years ago, Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia was widely regarded by geopolitical observers as a textbook example of what you should not do if you were a former Soviet republic.  By contrast, Georgia’s southern neighbor, Armenia, under the presidency of geopolitical “chess master” Serzh Sargsyan, exhibited very much the opposite image—that of a small ex-Soviet state successfully balancing between East and West. [Read more…] about ACURA Exclusive: Pietro A. Shakarian: Armenia and Georgia: A Tale of Two Neighbors

An inside look at what Russia expects—and doesn’t—in a cease-fire with Ukraine.

Professor Cohen’s thoughts on the early years of the Russia, Ukraine conflict.

A retiring foreign editor, to nervous laughter from his colleagues, joked that “The Economist never met a war it didn’t like.”

Sober consideration of the topic of Russian messianism is quite difficult today.  The public, that is to say the public in the West, has been primed for more than a century to take it on faith that Russia has insatiable ambitions. First it was Czarist Russia that wanted to conquer all of Europe and large chunks of Eurasia. Then it was the USSR that wanted to conquer the world. As Victor Taki recently pointed out here in Landmarks, though the early Bolsheviks did indeed have such unrealistic ambitions, and even though most Westerners have assumed that those same ambitions persisted right up until Perestroika, in reality the USSR returned to Russia’s centuries-old tradition of great-power balancing already by the mid-1930s.

For the first time in more than 35 years, there is serious talk about increasing the size and diversity of the already massive and costly U.S. nuclear arsenal. Such an expansion would increase global nuclear dangers and reverse decades of progress in slashing U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles.

“Containing” China and Russia is the hip new idea in Washington and Brussels. What could possibly go wrong?