eastwestaccord

The Iran and Ukraine conflicts have both always been intrinsically linked to domestic political rivalry in the U.S. President Joe Biden’s tough anti-Russian policies grew naturally out of the Russiagate campaign devised by Democratic strategists to paint Trump as a fifth columnist and a Russian stooge.

More than four years of war have clearly affected the politics of historical memory in Ukraine.

More than a century ago, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and began reshaping the vast Russian Empire into a socialist state, Washington made a fateful decision. After a failed intervention on the side of the Whites during the Russian Civil War, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet government. During the ensuing years, successive American administrations treated the Soviet Union not as a difficult partner to be managed but as an illegitimate regime to be isolated through sanctions, diplomatic cold shoulders, and rhetorical hostility. Thus, what most commentators call a ‘New Cold War’ between the United States and Russia is, in fact, the third phase of a conflict that began in 1917 and has never truly ended.

It is perhaps only natural that the tiny Republic of Georgia should have fallen out of the news cycle in the U.S. at this point in 2026. The flashy protests in downtown Tbilisi have long since petered out. The Georgian Dream government – the very government against whom the NGO-organized crowds had been protesting — remains stably in power. Meanwhile, there has been one crisis after another, from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran.

Legendary political scientist John Mearsheimer talks with Russian scholar Sergei Karaganov.

This film presents a synthesis of my father’s book The Doomsday Machine. His book depicts the evil murderousness of nuclear war plans, and the particular dangers posed by ICBMS, with their first strike capability, intended to be launched on warning.

Calling the Ukrainian strikes a ploy to “destabilise society”, the president said: “Russia, however, as has been stated repeatedly, is ready for peace negotiations with Ukraine. It is ready to proceed on the basis of the agreements reached back in Istanbul, agreements which, I would remind you, were initiated at the time by the Ukrainian delegation.”

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the G-7 summit in Evian, France, last week, he was ready with his latest set of military and economic requests. Near the top of his list was a new item: a license to produce Patriot anti-ballistic missile interceptors inside Ukraine.

Prof. Richard Sakwa joins Pascal Lottaz to discuss Russophobia, the post-1945 “political West,” and why Russia was never fully accepted into it. He links today’s tension to old history, power politics, and the split between Atlanticism and continental Europe, then explains how the Ukraine war, sanctions, and weak Western states have pushed the world toward more division.

It should be cold comfort indeed, but the successive inability of one US administration after another to control Israel and the extraordinary passion with which the leaders of Western Europe, Canada and NATO continue to defy the United States to risk thermonuclear world war with Russia at the whims of Ukrainian junta leader Volodymyr Zelensky are not unprecedented.

The strategic cooperation between China and Russia increasingly forms an organizing principle in U.S. defense strategy.¹ Russia’s role in American strategic thinking assumed new prominence after the invasion of Ukraine, but the Biden administration’s policy was still to view China as the greater threat. Either way, there exists a decades-old consensus that a conjoining of Chinese and Russian military efforts would represent a new level of threat to the United States.²

Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote.

Russian troops have infiltrated the strategic city of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine and are now trying to surround it.

Lots of people talk about there being a single peace deal for Ukraine, but in truth it will be far more complicated than that, requiring separate deals on an end to the hostilities, Ukraine’s EU future, NATO, and on the future EU/UK relationship with Russia after the war ends.

Canada is moving towards direct war with Russia. And the escalation to the NATO proxy war is happening with barely any pushback.

Alexander Rabinowitch has died. Rabinowitch was a Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, where he taught from 1968 until 1999. He is the author of groundbreaking studies of the Russian Revolution, including The Bolsheviks Come To Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd.

The United States was a youthful 89 years old when The Nation was founded by abolitionists at the end of the Civil War. Over the ensuing 161 years, our magazine has maintained a set of North Star values that have guided us through the darkest moments in this country’s 250-year journey.

When Donald Trump arrived in the White House in January 2025, securing a quick end to the war in Ukraine was near the top of his foreign policy agenda. Despite political backlash, he pushed ahead with this objective early in his second term by resuming dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin and initiating parallel diplomatic tracks with Kyiv and Moscow.