Analysis

It lets Democrats off the hook for their own failures—and betting the resistance on finding a smoking gun is a fool’s game.

NATO Defense Ministers begin their 2 day meeting in Brussels today, Wednesday, June 24. To mark the occasion we are publishing the following open letter, sent to President Bill Clinton in 1997, that warned against the policy of NATO expansion. The signatories informed the President that they “believe that the current U.S.-led effort to expand NATO…is a policy error of historic proportions.” The letter was signed by, among others, ACEWA Founding Board Members Sen. Bill Bradley and Amb. Jack Matlock.

NATO Defense Ministers are meeting in Brussels on June 24-25. To mark the occasion we are publishing George F. Kennan’s May 1998 interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In it, Kennan foresaw the perils of NATO expansion, telling Friedman “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war…I think it is a tragic mistake.”

Mere hours after the blast, commentators were referring to the attack as “blowback” for Russia’s foreign policy. This is not a word you hear frequently in the aftermath of terror attacks on European and American cities — despite decades of Western military intervention in the Middle East, with much of it engendering intense resentment among Arabs and Muslims.

The “poetician, not politician” always seemed conscious of the Russian adage that a great writer is more than a writer—he is a second government.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who died last week, challenged Soviet authorities for decades while Americans at far less risk remain silent in the face of Cold War hysteria. Prof. Stephen F. Cohen wonders why established American figures — in the media, Congress, universities, cultural life, and elsewhere — have not protested the Soviet-style abuses now engulfing US politics in a wave of McCarthy-like hysteria. They have far less to lose than did Yevtushenko.

In this podcast, Fred Weir, Moscow Correspondent at The Christian Science Monitor, and Pietro Shakarian discuss Russian politics and society, US-Russian relations, the centenary of the Russian Revolution, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, the American Rust Belt, and Weir’s experiences covering Russia as a journalist, living on an Israeli kibbutz, and working as a journeyman ironworker.

In February, ACEWA Founding Board Member and NYU and Princeton Professor Emeritus Stephen F. Cohen gave a lecture on the crisis in Ukraine and the state of US-Russian relations and the very real possibility of a new and even more dangerous Cold War between the two nations. Coming as it did in the days leading up to Minsk II it makes for relevant viewing today.

 

Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria.

In 1963, the same year as his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. King pointedly said: “We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

It may be considered a singular success for Western statesmanship to have brought two old rivals for power and influence in Central Asia…The US, especially, missed opportunities to integrate both countries into a single world system, by rebuffing reforms of the International Monetary Fund that would have strengthened China’s decision-making influence, and by blocking Russia’s overtures for NATO membership. This led both countries to seek an alternative future in each other’s company.

The intervention in Russia’s civil war is a classic example of how the U.S. can be lured into doing something unnecessary and dangerous in a war in which it had nothing at stake to satisfy allies on the basis of shoddy information.

Filip Kovacevic, an Adjunct Professor at University of San Francisco, writes, that “pro-NATO discourse” has presented “NATO membership as the ultimate proof of Montenegro’s political and economic ‘development’ and ‘maturity’.”

Four months after the Minsk II accords, the Ukraine crisis continues to simmer, with occasional violent eruptions. The ceasefire in Donbass has not prevented some 1,000 people from losing their lives since February, adding to the previous fatality count of more than 5,000. Some of the heavy weapons that both sides should have pulled back from the line of contact are still positioned close to that line, and are active.

The idea that Vladimir Putin is going to be cowed into submission by shows of U.S. military strength or abandon defending what he believes are Russian security interests is naïve.

The U.S. Department of Defense reportedly has plans to place tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and other heavy weapons in the Baltic countries and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. It is easy to see what this is about. It is an attempt to send a signal—a warning, of sorts—to Russia amid the continued tensions that events in Ukraine have heightened.

Alexey Navalny has become a media hero for protesting Putin’s corruption. But his own politics are downright Trumpy.

Some experts have also pointed out that the fraught state of relations between the US and Russia only adds to the risk of a nuclear conflagration—accidental or otherwise.

The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko died on April 1 at the age of 84. In April 1987, exactly 30 years ago, The Progressive published this interview with Yevtushenko by Katrina vanden Huevel (at the time assistant editor, and now editor and publisher of The Nation).

ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussion of the broadening US-Russian cold war and confrontation over Ukraine. The main focus is on escalating challenges to the agreement reached by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Sochi in May to implement the Minsk plan for ending the Ukrainian civil war through negotiations.