I’ve read some pretty bad book reviews in my time, but I’m pretty certain this is the worst. Why the New York Times would give a book like this to somebody like Fukuyama to review I can’t imagine. (Because the book has ‘History’ in the title?)
Analysis
Russia’s Endgame in Donbass (Paul Robinson)
Although in recent weeks the attention of many has shifted to events in Syria, the war in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, has not entirely ended. Fighting continues to kill two or three people each week, and the peace process established at Minsk in February 2015 has reached something of an impasse, due to disagreement over the provisions concerning constitutional change and the holding of local elections
Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor: US Double Standards in the New Cold War
Moscow and Washington have conflicting narratives, expressed in their respective mass media and periodic “diplomacy,” regarding the history, causes, and nature of the new Cold War. Not surprisingly, both narratives are often self-serving and unbalanced. But, Cohen argues, the near-consensual version presented in the mainstream media of the American establishment ought to be of grave concern to all Americans…
Dr. Ellen Mickiewicz: The New York Times’ Misleading Media Report
In the New York Times of October 24, 2017, a front-page story repeats some of the errors about the U.S. audience for RT on YouTube and then adds its own mistakes. RT has very high numbers on YouTube, because they show sensationalist videos from foreign countries under the RT logo. [Read more…] about Dr. Ellen Mickiewicz: The New York Times’ Misleading Media Report
Katrina vanden Heuvel: The escalating nuclear threat finally has the public’s attention. Now what?
Nuclear anxiety is on the rise. While President Trump has denied reports that he sought a “nearly tenfold” increase in America’s nuclear arsenal, there is no disputing that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe is escalating on his watch.
Is Europe’s Buffer Zone in Ukraine Keeping it Safe? (Olena Lennon, Brian Milakovsky)
Figures cannot express the full cost of suffering and strife in eastern Ukraine…Denis and Yulia survived the shelling in summer 2014, when the Ukrainian army drove the separatists out of their city. But that winter, their home was destroyed by a direct hit from separatist artillery, killing both of Yulia’s parents.
They returned, and for months cleared the rubble and planted their garden under intermittent shelling….Gazing at the cinderblock walls of their house Yulia sighs: “For me and the kids, this is already happiness. Just give us peace so we can enjoy it!”
Just give us peace.
Whoever heard of a moderate with a Kalashnikov, anyway? (Robert Fisk)
Vladimir Putin…knows that Turkey is helping Isis – this is why he is going to destroy the Isis oil smuggling route to Turkey – and, as a former serving KGB officer, he understands the cynicism of any crisis. If an American aircraft had strayed into Turkish airspace, he asked at his Kremlin press conference with François Hollande last week, does anyone believe that Turkey would have shot down the US pilots? We all know the answer to that. If Turkey wished to destroy Isis, why does it bombard Isis’ Kurdish enemies?
Text: Remarks by Stephen F. Cohen Professor Emeritus Princeton University and New York University At San Francisco Commonwealth Club
Below are Prof. Stephen F. Cohen’s remarks to the the Commonwealth Club of California given on November 18, 2015:
I am delighted to be here in San Francisco with you. The farther you go from Washington and the mainstream media, the better introductions you get!
Some of you may know that the small group of us who have been protesting against the American policy since the Ukraine crisis began two years ago have been described in harsh and derogatory language as “Putin’s apologists, Putin’s useful idiots and Putin’s best friends in America.”
Paris should have changed everything but for these people it hasn’t. I clicked on the Internet this morning and there it was again. So let me begin with a word about myself.
My answer to these charges is that, “No, I …. not you, am a patriot of American national security,” And I actually have been since I started studying Russia about 50 years ago. [Read more…] about Text: Remarks by Stephen F. Cohen Professor Emeritus Princeton University and New York University At San Francisco Commonwealth Club
Paul Robinson: European Think Tank Designates 2,327 “Useful Idiots”
I’m disappointed. Crushed even. The European Values think tank has just produced a report that contains a spreadsheet with the names of 2327 ‘useful idiots’, that is to say people who have appeared on RT… And what do you know? I’m not on the list!
Gordon Hahn: Who Got Syria Wrong and Who Got It Right
The false analysis by the DC-tied circles tended to deliberately obfuscate the facts, since their allies in the Barack Obama administration and among the neo-cons outside it supported backing such groups in order to rid the region of the Syrian Baathist dictatorship…
Coalition or Cold War with Russia? (Stephen F. Cohen, Katrina vanden Heuvel)
Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and Nation contributing editor and ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen write:
The 130 people murdered in Paris on November 13 and the 224 Russians aboard a jetliner on October 31 confront America’s current and would-be policy-makers, Democratic and Republicans alike, with a fateful decision: whether to join Moscow in a military, political, diplomatic, and economic coalition against the Islamic State and other terrorist movements, especially in and around Syria, or to persist in treating “Putin’s Russia” as an enemy and unworthy partner
If the goal is defending US and international security, and human life, there is no alternative to such a coalition.
Gordon Hahn: Explaining the Failed Expectations of Russian Regime Change
This article is the first in a trilogy examining how the West’s biases and wishful thinking have led to unrealistic and unmet expectations of imminent regime collapse in Russia.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
The Turks shot down a Russian airplane over Syria. The facts are disputed. Turkey claims that the Russian plane violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds, and that it was given multiple warnings before being shot down. The Russians deny entering Turkish airspace, and the rescued navigator of the plane says that no warnings were given.
I can’t say who is telling the truth, but if it is the Turks, then they, and their NATO allies, are guilty of double standards. After the Syrians shot down a Turkish plane which had violated Syrian airspace in 2012, Turkish president Abdullah Gul complained that, ‘it is routine for jet fighters to sometimes fly in and out over [national] borders’, and the then Turkish Prime Minister (now President), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, remarked that, ‘a short term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack.’
Robert Parry: Blaming Russia for the Internet ‘Sewer’
As the Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the implausible to the absurd, almost every bad thing is blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the previously pristine Internet into a “sewer,” reports Robert Parry.
Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor: Have 20 Years of NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?
Cohen notes that twenty years ago, in 1997, President Bill Clinton made the decision to expand NATO eastward. That same year, in order to placate post–Soviet Russia, then weak and heralded in Washington as America’s “strategic friend and partner,” the Russian-NATO Founding Act was adopted. It promised that expansion would entail no “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” Cohen takes the occasion of this anniversary year to ask whether NATO’s eastward expansion has created more insecurity than the security it promised.
Could U.S.-Russia Tensions Go Nuclear?
The Russian warplane recently shot down inside Turkey’s border with Syria fits a pattern of brinkmanship and inadvertence that is raising tensions and distrust between Russia and U.S.-led NATO. Low-level military encounters between Moscow and Washington are fanning escalatory sparks not witnessed since the Cold War. And there exists a small but steadily growing risk that this escalation could morph by design or inadvertence into a nuclear threat.
Dave Majumdar: How Bill Clinton Accidentally Started Another Cold War
Who bears responsibility for the current tensions between America and Russia? There are many answers to that question but blame is overdue to President Bill Clinton…
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
The United States and its allies are stepping up military exercises and patrols just as its adversaries are. There’s even talk in NATO of training, for the first time since the Cold War’s end, for scenarios in which conventional war turns nuclear. In some ways, it’s like the early days of the Cold War redux, where the rules of the road are unclear and there is little communication between rivals.
As in the 1950s, America’s perceptions of its rivals, and theirs of Washington, are inordinately driven by the bellicose rhetoric that each side hears from the other. Russia, China and Iran are famous for their fighting words.
And American politicians are just as personal and pugilistic.
Paul Robinson: Impossible Victory
If Kiev really truly wants Donbass back it has no choice. It has to negotiate with the rebels and come to an agreement on autonomy and amnesty which satisfies the rebels…
Dmitry Suslov: Egoistic Hegemonism
The never-ending political infighting in the US could be viewed as an inevitable stage in an overly complex path the US must take to find its place in the world, one that is changing in spite of what the US wants or thinks. On the other hand, these political struggles make it even harder and more painful for the US and for the rest of the world to adapt to these changes.