At the height of the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet leaders embraced people-to-people contacts to facilitate the exchange of people and ideas—we need to do the same once again.
Analysis
Stephen F. Cohen: Democrats Are Repudiating FDR’s Precedent of Detente With Russia
Hegel liked to say, “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk” – that wisdom comes too late. A Hegel-like historical irony may also be unfolding.
The Problem Neither Obama Nor Bush Could Solve (Nikolas K. Gvosdev)
Obama has also received tremendous criticism—some of which is justified—for how he has handled Putin and the relationship with Russia. Yet a good deal of the Obama administration’s Russia policy has been shaped by self-imposed U.S. constraints.
Paul Robinson Comments on a Recent Conference in Moscow
Is there an ideological/philosophical divide lying at the root of current Russia-West tensions?
A Guide to the “Stans” of Central Asia (Pietro Shakarian)
Russia scholar Pietro Shakarian produced this useful and learned guide to the “stans” of Central Asia. Shakarian tells us that “In the Russian language, the term “Средняя Азия” (Srednyaya Aziya), literally “Middle Asia,” is used to denote the former Soviet Central Asian republics. By contrast, the term “Центральная Азия” (Tsentralnaya Aziya), or “Central Asia,” denotes a much broader geographic region, encompassing not only the former Soviet Central Asian states, but also Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Afghanistan, portions of southern Siberia, and other areas.”
Katrina vanden Heuvel: Will our endless wars fuel the next populist revolt?
In 2016, Washington pundits were shocked to discover the grim reality and anger of working people in “flyover country” that fueled the candidacies of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. The foreign policy establishment of both parties may soon discover that utterly ignoring popular discontent with America’s wars may fuel a similar populist eruption.
Rethinking Putin: A Talk by Professor Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen speaks aboard the Nation cruise, December 2, 2017, introduced by Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel.
PODCAST: Another Fateful Turning Point in the New Cold War (Stephen F. Cohen)
TheNation.com.) Cohen reminds listeners that Ukraine remains the political epicenter of the new Cold War, but Syria is where it may now become a hot war.
Nation Contributing Editor and ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US–Russian Cold War. (Previous installments are atThe Syrian ceasefire agreement—brokered by Secretary of State Kerry and his Russian counterpart Lavrov, and emphatically endorsed by Russian President Putin but less so by President Obama—offers hope on several levels: from the suffering Syrian people to those who want an American–Russian coalition against the Islamic State and its terrorist accomplices with the possibility of a broader diminishing of the new Cold War. But, Cohen adds, the chances of a successful ceasefire are slim, partly due to the number of combatants and lack of a monitoring mechanism, but mainly due to powerful forces opposed to the ceasefire both in Washington and in Moscow.
American opposition is already clear from the statements of leading politicians, from Secretary of Defense Carter’s clear dissatisfaction with Kerry’s negotiations with Moscow, and from anti-ceasefire reports and editorials in the establishment US media. Meanwhile, Putin’s unusual personal ten-minute announcement of the ceasefire on Russian television suggests that many of his own military-security advisers are opposed to the agreement, for understandable reasons. According to Cohen, this is now very much Putin’s own diplomatic policy, leaving him vulnerable to the commitment of Obama, who has previously violated agreements with Moscow, most recently and consequential regarding Libya.
In Ukraine, President Poroshenko continues to demonstrate that he is less a leader than a compliant victim of domestic and foreign political forces. Having again promised Germany and France that he would implement the Minsk Accords for ending Ukraine’s civil war, which they designed, he promptly reneged on the commitment, bowing to Ukrainian ultra-right movements that threaten to remove him. Having called for the ouster of his exceedingly unpopular Prime Minister Yatseniuk—“our guy,” as the US State Department once termed him and still views him—Poroshenko then instructed members of his own party to vote against the parliamentary motion, leaving Yatseniuk in office. With Washington, and Vice President Biden in particularly, widely seen to be behind this duplicity, Poroshenko increasingly resembles a temporary pro-consul of a faraway great power. At the same time, on the second anniversary of the violent Maiden protests that brought to power the current US–backed government, the State Department hailed the “glories” of what is now virtually a failed Ukrainian state and ruined country.
Paul Pillar: Ceding Diplomatic Leadership to Russia
Late this month Russia will host and broker a new round of Syrian peace talks in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi.
Dr. Ira Helfand: Can we prevent nuclear war?
Ira Helfand, MD is co-President of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. As co-Founder and Past President of Physicians for Social Responsibility, IPPNW’s US affiliate, he knows terrible truths about nuclear war.
Paul Grenier: Russia, America, and the Courage to Converse
Despite its claims to “open-ness,” liberalism in its late modern Western form becomes self-contained to the point of closure. Allied with such power constructs as the “liberal world order,” globalization (a word that came into common usage only after the fall of the Soviet Union) tends towards the homogenization of political space and the radical constriction of pluralism.
Lyle J. Goldstein: From Siberia to Crimea: The Revenge of History in U.S.-Russian Relations
One is tempted to conclude that the Washington foreign-policy establishment has learned little over the past century.
Is Everything We Thought We Knew About Russia Wrong? (Reinvent, Video Discussion)
Reinvent which also featured ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen, Susan Eisenhower and Prof. Richard Sakwa. “The mainstream media inside the Beltway, those publications which have some authority with the political elite, has essentially engaged in group think: a kind of religious adherence to the narrative that Russia, that Putin, is solely to blame.”
“In the US, there is almost no real, serious public debate about this gravest of international crises,” said Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, in a video conversation hosted byJeremy Kuzmarov: Cardin’s Senate Report Repeats Russophobic Charges
On January 10, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) released a Foreign Relations Committee staff report purporting to detail a “nearly two decades-long assault on democratic institutions, universal values and the rule of law across Europe and his own country” by Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Ben Norton: MSNBC FINDS RUSSIA 5000% MORE NEWSWORTHY THAN WAR ON YEMEN
For the popular US cable news network MSNBC, the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world is apparently not worth much attention-even as the US government has played a key role in creating and maintaining that unparalleled crisis.
Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr: A Searing Antiwar Speech, Fifty (One) Years Later
“The March on Washington was a powerful speech,” Lewis said to me recently, over the phone. Lewis was present for that one, too: he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial minutes before King did. “It was a speech for America, but the speech he delivered in New York, on April 4, 1967, was a speech for all humanity—for the world community.” He added, “I heard him speak so many times. I still think this is probably the best.”
Leonid Bershidsky: The Do’s and Don’ts of Fighting Russian Interference
A major report by Senator Ben Cardin suggests a broad response to Russian interference in the West. Only some of his recommendations make sense.
Paul Robinson Reviews Frédérick Lavoie’s New Book on the Ukraine Crisis
Frédérick Lavoie is an independent journalist from Quebec, who speaks Russian and has spent his career reporting on the countries of the former Soviet Union. His new book Ukraine à fragmentation(which unfortunately is only available in French) takes the form of a long letter to Artyom, a real four year old boy from Donetsk who was killed by a Grad rocket in January 2015.
Max Blumenthal: How ‘Russiagate’ Helped Secure a Dangerous Arms Deal
Brian Milakovsky, a Fulbright scholar who is working with an aid organization on the Ukrainian side of Donbas, told me the Javelins would provoke Russia to escalate its military involvement and dramatically deepen suffering on both sides.
New Nukes? Turning Away from Disarmament (Andrew Bacevich)
Do nuclear weapons help keep us safe? Or do they threaten our very existence? Rhetorically, American presidents endorse the latter proposition, routinely expressing their commitment to nuclear abolition. In practice, however, they opt for the former, investing large sums of money to maintain and refurbish the nation’s nuclear arsenal.