What’s surprising is how far back America’s evangelizing approach to Russia goes — and how it continues to distort our thinking today.
Analysis
A Disaster In The Making: The Long-Term Consequences Of Russia Hysteria (Michael Tracey)
MSNBC hosts continue to lead their TV shows with overwrought, BREAKING NEWS about Russia, instilling in their viewership the notion that this is the most acutely important issue facing the country. MSNBC viewers and Democratic stalwarts have repeated to me over and over again that so long as the “Trump/Russia connection” matter remains unresolved, no real legislative or policy work can be done.
The Russians Are Coming! (Paul Robinson)
Macleans magazine, which, roughly speaking, is Canada’s equivalent of Time or Newsweek, has published a couple of articles this week on the topic of the day – Russia.
The huge risk of small nukes (Philip E. Coyle and James McKeon)
Defense hawks argue that new, small nuclear weapons deployed in Europe would further deter Russian aggression in the region — and that they are critical for “winning” a nuclear war. This is a profoundly flawed argument.
VIDEO: Adversarial Relationship With Russia Result of Decades of US Provocation (Col. Lawrence Wilkerson)
The Real News talks to Lawrence Wilkerson, retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the state of US-Russia relations. Col. Wilkerson says that from the expansion of NATO to the Western-led plundering of the former USSR, the US has given Russia enough reason to feel threatened
The Truth Behind the Trump-Russia Mess (T.A. Frank)
Let’s never forget a simple fact about nearly all of these Russia-related stories: they’re based on unverifiable information from unseen sources with unknown goals. Anyone who takes this and runs with it in order to depose Trump is at risk not just of getting things way wrong, but also in creating a host of unintended consequences.
Dreams of ‘Winning’ Nuclear War on Russia (Jonathan Marhsall)
Official Washington’s anti-Russian hysteria has distorted U.S. politics while also escalating risks of a nuclear war as U.S. war planners dream of “winning” a first-strike attack on Russia, reports Jonathan Marshall.
Foreign-Policy Elites Have No Answer For Trump (Robert Borosage)
From the upholstered libraries and plush dining rooms of the foreign-policy establishment, Trump’s antics elicit gasps of alarm, murmurs of disbelief, complaints of indigestion and dyspepsia.
US Officials Won’t Say If New Anti-Russia Propaganda Project Is Targeting Americans (Adam Johnson)
The newly-created Global Engagement Center’s “focus and intent” is foreign audiences, but officials won’t rule out propagandizing Americans and funding American journalists.
Influence, Persuasion, and Effects of RT (Prof. Ellen Mickiewicz)
These days the word “influence” to analyze RT (the Russian international news and discussion program at the heart of Western concerns about its “weaponized information”) in U.S. and European press and policy-making circles is, you might notice, replacing other terms, such as “effects” and “persuasion.” [Read more…] about Influence, Persuasion, and Effects of RT (Prof. Ellen Mickiewicz)
Don’t Expand NATO Again (Daniel Larison)
The main reason that advocates for continued expansion want Montenegro in the alliance is that it keeps the idea of expanding NATO alive, and the other reason is that it irks Moscow. Neither of these is a good reason.
PODCAST: The ‘Fog of Suspicion’ and of Worsening Cold War (Stephen F. Cohen)
Princeton and NYU Professor Emeritus Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Now in their fourth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.) Discussion begins with the new McCarthyism, driven primarily by Democrats, other cold warriors, and their media alleging, without any real evidence, that President Trump has been “compromised” or is otherwise controlled by the Kremlin.
PODCAST: Dr. Sergey Markedonov In Conversation With Pietro Shakarian
The Reconsidering Russia podcast is back. The fifth and latest installment features Caucasus analyst Sergey Markedonov. The discussion covers topics as diverse as the Don Cossacks, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Syria, NATO, Mikheil Saakashvili, Russo-Georgian relations, US-Russian relations, and Markedonov’s personal experience with the Caucasus region.
VIDEO: Russia’s Role in Ukraine (Bloomberg)
Much of the Western media has consistently portrayed Russia as the bad actor in the Ukraine conflict. Are there different ways to understand Russia’s motives? Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton University and New York University discusses Russia’s role with Bloomberg North’s Rudyard Griffiths.
Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump (Glenn Greenwald)
The Russia narrative dominates national discourse, as it has for months, and becomes progressively more removed from evidence.
Roundtable 9-12 on Return to Cold War (Robert Legvold and Others)
Since the United States, in Legvold’s view, holds a “vastly stronger hand” than Russia, it has less to lose from attempting to build sustained cooperation on what Legvold sees as the defining issues of global security today.
Damage Done: How Russia Hysteria Has Hurt U.S.-Russia Relations (Nikolas K. Gvosdev)
The Russia hysteria that is sweeping Washington, DC must end before severe and irreversible damage is done both to American domestic politics and U.S. international standing.
How US nuclear force modernization is undermining strategic stability (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
When viewed in the alarming context of deteriorating political relations between Russia and the West, and the threats and counter-threats that are now becoming the norm for both sides in this evolving standoff, it may well be that the danger of an accident leading to nuclear war is as high now as it was in periods of peak crisis during the Cold War.
Round Up the Usual Suspects, It’s Time for a Show Hearing (James Carden)
During the current crisis period in US-Russian relations (which began in roughly 2012), not a single outside voice or dissenter from the Washington foreign-policy community’s consensus view of Russia has appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
America’s Failure — and Russia and Iran’s Success — in Syria’s Civil War (John Judis and Joshua Landis)
Judis: Hillary Clinton’s argument was that if we had armed the so-called moderate rebels in 2012, as she and David Petraeus advocated, the results would have been different.
Landis: Syrian rebels were going to radicalize regardless of American largesse or arms.