By resuming nuclear testing, the United States would give a major gift to its chief nuclear rivals.

As the February 5 expiration date for New START — the last nuclear arms control treaty remaining between the U.S. and Russia — looms, the Trump administration appears ready to let it die without an immediate replacement.

It should always have been obvious that by making an enemy of post-Soviet Russia, the European Union and Britain were ensuring their dependence on the United States, and making themselves unable to resist even its most illegal and immoral actions – as demonstrated by their approach to Israel’s war on Gaza and the US attacks on Iran and Venezuela. [Read more…] about Anatol Lieven: Europe and Ukraine: Coalition of the Ambiguous or Lunatic Asylum?

The following passages from the British Parliamentary debates on Ukraine on 7th and 11 January can be read as a kind of appendix to the debate between Critic and myself posted on 10th January. They reveal very clearly the lens through which official Britain sees the world.

As the European leaders push for the Ukraine war to continue, they increasingly warn of an all-out war with Russia by the end of the decade, if not sooner. [Read more…] about ACURA Exclusive: Are the Russians Coming? by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes

Goethe once noted: “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”

Spheres of influence stem from the very nature of states and international relations. States will always seek to secure their interests by exerting influence over their neighbors, and the more powerful the state, the greater the influence that it will seek.

“War is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading,” Pope Leo XIV said in a forceful address on Jan. 9 to ambassadors from the 184 countries that have full diplomatic relations with the Holy See. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

Ukraine has lost an entire generation in the four-year war with Russia and, if the conflict continues for another two years, it will lose another one.

Cora, my friend and frequent collaborator, died in December at age 91. She was a champion of the United Nations and its mission to advance peace and women’s rights—and along with her husband, Peter, a brilliant international lawyer, she never stopped organizing to save the world from nuclear destruction. Unfortunately, in the last months of her life, that organizing became more necessary than ever.

The United States did not deny Cuban statehood during the Cuban Missile Crisis; it insisted that Cuba could not host Soviet nuclear missiles. Nor does Washington’s current pressure on Venezuela imply a desire to abolish Venezuelan sovereignty. These are examples of coercive security politics.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University published newly declassified verbatim transcripts of three conversations between Presidents George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin and their top national security advisers in 2001, 2005, and 2008. The transcripts contain a number of surprises and have significant historical implications…

The Ukraine war has, since its outset, been fertile ground for a particular kind of intellectual axe grinding, with establishment actors rushing to launder their abysmal policy record by projecting its many failures and conceits onto others.

The go-to method for this sleight of hand, as exhibited by its most adept practitioners, is to flail away at a set of ideas clumsily bundled together under the banner of “realism.”

When the Trump administration ordered special‑operations forces to seize Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3, 2026, electricity failed across Caracas and airfields filled with U.S. aircraft. The Venezuelan leader was spirited to New York to face an indictment on drug charges while President Trump pledged that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a safe transition could be arranged. He offered “boots on the ground” if necessary and invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify an operation condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Within hours, social media feeds filled with profile pictures draped in the Stars and Stripes and statements like “FAFO.” The mission’s execution and talk of “restoring democracy” tapped a familiar chord in the American psyche. The reactions to this raid highlight an ugly truth about the United States: Americans love war. They do not like higher taxes, a debased currency, or flag‑draped coffins, but they love war. And our short memory ensures we will learn nothing from the disasters we have created.

At Yalta in 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had no doubts about the role their great powers would play in pacifying and stabilizing the postwar international order: the victorious allies that had won the war would collaborate to preserve peace, if necessary, by the combined deployment of their enormous military power.

As negotiations accelerate toward a compromise settlement to end the Ukraine war, the voices of the Ukrainians living through the daily horrors have in many ways been suppressed by unending maximalist rhetoric from those far from the frontlines.

Nicolai N. Petro is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island, and formerly the US State Department’s special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union. Prof. Petro discusses the pending end of the Ukraine War and why Europe will likely fragment as a consequence of its proxy war against Russia.

In 2014 and 2022, the EU initiated sanctions regimes against Russia. The lists of entities and individuals were originally supposed to target Russia’s econmic and political elites only. But since 2024, the list has been expanded to include “disinformation” and is being used to target journalists and academics even in EU and Schengen-state areas, like the German nationals Alina Lipp and Hüseyin Dogru, , Jacques Baud, and Nathalie Yamb. To discuss the historical precedents is Professor David Gibbs, a professor of history at the University of Arizona.

Known as the “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum,” this group, founded in Poland in 2022, calls for nothing less than the complete dissolution of the Russian Federation and its replacement with dozens of smaller ethnostates. According to the group’s defenders, such a breakup would better represent the interests of Russia’s many regions and minority populations. After all, the logic goes, Russia is fundamentally an imperialist state.