I wish I could say that this book was a joke. If you were going to write a parody of the collusion story, this is perhaps what it would look like. Unfortunately, Harding is deadly serious and I suspect that a lot of uncritical readers will soak it all up…
Analysis
Jeremy Corbyn talks common sense on nuclear weapons (Katrina vanden Heuvel)
The new leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has sparked a political firestorm by challenging the myths around nuclear weapons and Cold War deterrence.
Doug Henwood Interviews Professor Kristen Ghodsee, Author of ‘Red Hangover’
In her new book ‘Red Hangover’ Kristen Ghodsee examines the legacies of twentieth-century communism twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall fell. Ghodsee’s essays and short stories reflect on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after 1989.
Harper’s Forum: Destroyer of Worlds: Taking stock of our nuclear present
Seven writers and experts survey the current nuclear landscape. Our hope is to call attention to the bomb’s ever-present menace and point our way toward a world in which it finally ceases to exist.
Elaine Scarry: In the United States, Just 1 Person Has the Power to Kill Millions of People
Our nuclear-weapons strategy enables one man, the president, to kill and maim an unthinkable number of people in a single afternoon.
James Carden: William Perry Sounds the Alarm Over the Present Nuclear Danger
What will the consequences be if the bipartisan consensus on Russia continues to be almost completely untethered from reality?
Adam Shatz: The President and the Bomb
Of course the threat of nuclear war never vanished. All that went away was the bipolar conflict with the Soviet Union, the theatre in which we feared the war would erupt.
Donetsk Republic opposes visit of UN representatives to Donbass discussing ‘peacekeeping’ soldiers (NewColdWar.org)
The Donetsk People’s Republic is opposed to plans by political leaders in Kyiv to invite to the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine representatives of the United Nations to discuss a possible ‘peacekeeping’ mission to the region, says Denis Pushilin, the representative of the DPR to the all-party Contact Group of the Minsk-2 ceasefire process.
Pepe Escobar: Syria war, Sochi peace
Diplomatic sources confirmed to Asia Times much of the discussions in Sochi involved Russian President Vladimir Putin laying out to Iran President Hassan Rouhani and Turkey President Recep Erdogan how a new configuration may play out in a constantly evolving chessboard.
Ted Galen Carpenter: The Duplicitous Superpower
How Washington’s chronic deceit-especially towards Russia-has sabotaged U.S. foreign policy.
What Would a Realist World Have Looked Like? (Stephen Walt)
Here’s a puzzle for all you students of U.S. foreign policy: Why is a distinguished and well-known approach to foreign policy confined to the margins of public discourse, especially in the pages of our leading newspapers, when its recent track record is arguably superior to the main alternatives?
I refer, of course, to realism.
Reality Peeks Through in Ukraine (Robert Parry)
With corruption rampant and living standards falling, Ukraine may become the next failed state that “benefited” from a neoconservative-driven “regime change,” though the blame will always be placed elsewhere – in this case, on the demonized Russian President Putin, writes Robert Parry.
Stephen F. Cohen: Russia Is Not the ‘No. 1 Threat’—or Even Among the Top 5
By declaring Putin’s Russia to be the greatest danger to America, the political-media establishment itself is endangering US national security.
Poland’s Plans to Stick Washington With a Bigger NATO Bill (Doug Bandow)
Of course, the “Russian threat” is not so great as the Poles would have others believe. For all of Warsaw’s concern for “central and eastern Europe,” there have been no real Russian threats against those states. Nor has Vladimir Putin done anything to suggest his interest in an aggressive war to conquer the region. No one imagines a revived Red Army heading toward Montenegro, recently invited to join NATO.
Alexander Baunov and Thomas De Waal: Red Scares, Then and Now
By treating Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies as an existential threat, Western leaders are playing directly into the Kremlin’s hands, and validating its false narrative about Russia’s place in the world.
Andrew Higgins: Why Putin’s Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling
American liberals are so upset about Trump that they cannot believe he is a real product of American life,” Mr. Kurilla said. “They try to portray him as something created by Russia. This whole thing is about America, not Russia.”
Military to Military: Seymour M. Hersh on US intelligence sharing in the Syrian war
When it comes to tackling Islamic State, Russia and the US have much to offer each other. Many in the IS leadership and rank and file fought for more than a decade against Russia in the two Chechen wars that began in 1994, and the Putin government is heavily invested in combating Islamist terrorism.
Lev Golinkin: Europe’s White Supremacists Have Powerful Allies
After a massive neo-fascist march in Poland and new reports of neo-Nazi influence in Ukraine, Lev Golinkin, an author who fled then-Soviet Ukraine as a child, says both the US and Russia have troubling ties to Europe’s far-right
Paul Robinson: The hunters become the hunted
In an ironic twist of fate, those shouting loudest about Russian ‘fake news’ and demanding that the West take action against RT and other Russian media outlets, are now finding themselves accused of being Russian agents… I can’t help thinking that what goes around comes around, and that Legatum and co. have only themselves to blame for their predicament.
World Disorder in the New Year (Stephen F. Cohen)
Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. Cohen points out that the Cold War that erupted two years ago has now spread from Ukraine and Europe to Syria and Turkey. The old order is dying, but a new one is not yet clear.