eastwestaccord

The price for failing to hold the perpetrators of this debacle accountable is that their worldview still dominates America’s national security establishment.

From producing reports and analysis for U.S. policy-makers, to enlisting representatives to write op-eds in corporate media, to providing talking heads for corporate media to interview and give quotes, think tanks play a fundamental role in shaping both U.S. foreign policy and public perception around that foreign policy. Leaders at top think tanks like the Atlantic Council and Hudson Institute have even been called upon to set focus priorities for the House Intelligence Committee. However, one look at the funding sources of the most influential think tanks reveals whose interests they really serve: that of the U.S. military and its defense contractors.

The conventional wisdom at the tragic first year mark of the Russian-Ukrainian War is that President Joe Biden and his national security team have done an excellent job of managing support for Ukraine and challenging Russia’s invasion.  The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, an excellent Kremlinologist, summed it up this way in the current issue: “Biden has conducted a foreign policy of competence and moral clarity, skillfully balancing strength, diplomacy, and restraint.”  Well, I would take issue with the conventional wisdom.

Veteran U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh claims that the U.S. was behind the Nord Stream pipeline explosions last year. What’s the connection between that incident and the war, one year on?

Among the wreckage the riots now convulsing Paris may leave in their wake include President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform; Macron’s ability to effectively govern for the next four years; and, quite possibly, the Fifth Republic itself. As The New York Times reported last week, protesters have been heard chanting, “Paris Rise Up…We decapitated Louis XVI. We will do it again, Macron.”

But another, less noted, casualty of Macron’s high-handed attempted to impose a neoliberal “reform” opposed by large pluralities of French citizens, may well be the idea of European strategic autonomy on matters relating to defense and foreign policy.  [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: James W. Carden: Strategic Autonomy: The End, For Now

The United States and its NATO allies do not disclose exact figures for its European-deployed stockpiles.

Russia will station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, President Vladimir Putin said on Saturday, sending a warning to NATO over its military support for Ukraine and escalating a standoff with the West.

When thinking about Ukrainian democracy under peril, Western observers typically think about the Russian invasion that began last year. But critics and dissidents inside and outside of Ukraine also warn of a different threat to democracy, one coming from within, with the war catalyzing an escalation of authoritarian trends under President Volodymyr Zelensky. One such critic is Olga Baysha, associate professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and author of Democracy, Populism and Neoliberalism in Ukraine. Starting out her career as a news reporter and editor in Kharkiv, Baysha spoke to Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic about this growth in political repression. [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: Branko Marcetic Talks with Olga Baysha, Author of Democracy, Populism and Neoliberalism in Ukraine

The geopolitical logic of confrontation has no prospects

In view of the recent geopolitical upheavals, and particularly the war in Ukraine, it does not make sense (and does not promise much success) to build a new global security architecture based on the logic of a bipolar confrontation for several reasons… [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: Joachim Schuster, MEP: Can Détente Point the Way Out Of The Ukraine War?

If there ever was a question of who is boss in Europe, NATO or the European Union, the war in Ukraine has settled it, at least for the foreseeable future. Once upon a time, Henry Kissinger complained that there was no single phone number on which to call Europe, far too many calls to make to get something done, a far too inconvenient chain of command in need of simplification.

Then, after the end of Franco and Salazar, came the southern extension of the EU, with Spain joining NATO in 1982 (Portugal had been a member since 1949), reassuring Kissinger and the United States against both Eurocommunism and a military takeover other than by NATO. Later, in the emerging New World Order after 1990, it was for the EU to absorb most of the member states of the defunct Warsaw Pact, as they were fast-tracked for NATO membership. Stabilizing the new kids on the capitalist block economically and politically, and guiding their nation-building and state-formation, the task of the EU, more or less eagerly accepted, would be to enable them to become part of ‘the West’, as led by the United States in a now unipolar world.

The best available solution to the violence in the Donbas was the Minsk agreements.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.

The US’ humiliating exclusion from the centre stage of West Asian politics constitutes a “Suez moment” for the superpower, comparable to the crisis experienced by the UK in 1956.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has been framed in multiple ways by multiple commentators of international affairs.  Depending on one’s point of view, it could be characterized as a war between Russia and Ukraine, a proxy war between Russia and NATO, or a proxy war between Russia and a US-backed West.  The latter two perspectives anchor the war in the larger context of the gradual deterioration of US-Russia relations since the high point at the end of the Cold War.  In this framework, most scholars who adhere to this position perceive the expansion of NATO as a key reason for the deterioration and eventual break-down of ties between Moscow and Washington. [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: Pietro Shakarian: On the Agency of Former Soviet Republics

This is an account of another American who, like Daniel Ellsberg, did the right thing at the right time in the middle of a war. But unlike Ellsberg’s, his act of courage did not make the headlines, and he suffered little for it.

His name is George W. Ball.

He was a Midwestern lawyer who did not politically support John F. Kennedy in his 1960 presidential campaign and did not serve bravely or endure violence during World War II. But he had played a key role in the American postwar rebuilding of Europe and was appointed early in 1961 as an undersecretary of state in the Kennedy Administration.

Today we mark the tragic anniversary of the 2003 Iraq War with several articles which take a look back and which note the current rejuvenation (if not celebration) of several of the neoconservatives who helped pave the way for Mr. Bush’s disastrous war of choice.

From journalist Norman Solomon:  “War Made Easy,” produced in 2007 by the Media Education Foundation at the height of the Iraq war, takes a blistering look at how U.S. media outlets from Fox News to MSNBC enthusiastically disseminated Bush administration propaganda and helped sell a war that would kill thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them innocent civilians.