Analysis

For the Russian government to take timely measures in the ongoing crisis situation and prevent long term negative consequences for its economy, it would be better if the pain so many people are experiencing were given due coverage and explained.

Russia and Iran want to divide ISIS territory between the Kurds and the Syrian government that is led by Asad. The United States should allow this to happen if it wants an exit strategy.

What is perhaps most shocking about Mensch’s op-ed and its prominent placement by the Times is that the story has all the elements of a “tinfoil-hat” conspiracy. It’s the sort of wild-eyed smearing of American citizens that the Times would normally deride as an offensive fantasy that would be either ignored or mentioned only to mock the conspiracists.

For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored Russian interests in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs neophyte Trump apparently does.

The tendency to blame domestic disappointments on foreign bogeymen is not new and is perhaps better understood as a wave that periodically surfaces, then temporarily subsumes American politics. Indeed, this current reliance on conspiracy theories and accusations of unpatriotic disloyalty has been a feature, not a bug, of discourse regarding Russia since the onset of the crisis in Ukraine in early 2014.

“The senator from Kentucky,” said John McCain, speaking of his colleague Rand Paul, “is working for Vladimir Putin … and I do not say that lightly.”

What did Sen. Paul do to deserve being called a hireling of Vladimir Putin?

Even at the height of 1950s red-hunting, Sen. Joseph McCarthy never took to the Senate floor to accuse a colleague of working for Moscow; he reserved his invective for the campaign trail. Senator McCain has now outdone him.

The latest official to throw cold water on the MSNBC-led circus is President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morell. What makes him particularly notable in this context is that Morell was one of Clinton’s most vocal CIA surrogates.

President Donald Trump has received the first formal pushback to his desire, stated on the campaign trail, to explore the possibility of working with Russia to combat Islamic extremist movements in the Middle East.

What to make of the ongoing ceasefire violations and the constant remobilization and deployment of Russian forces along the border? Some have suggested that the same mindset that pushed for the rapid annexation of Crimea will inform the suggestion that Russia needs to consolidate the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine now before Ukraine has the ability to field better military forces.

If you recall the allegations against Russia and Syria during the Aleppo battle, they were largely to do with motive. Civilians allegedly died because they were targeted, hospitals and aid convoys, likewise, were hit because the Russians or Syrians were deliberately seeking to hit them.

This December, the world will witness the 70th anniversary of a publication best known for tracking the end of the world.  Founded in 1945 by veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was launched in the wake of the devastating nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the goal of informing the public about nuclear policy. But since 1947, it has been known largely for a metaphorical device it introduced in June of that year: the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close humanity is to extinction.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War.  Cohen deeply regrets that the discussion must begin again with neo-McCarthyism, but it has become perhaps the most important factor in today’s American political-media establishment, and it is growing by the week.

Last week, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland opened a can of worms by dismissing references to her family’s World War II history as Russian disinformation. That wasn’t entirely true, and in the current climate, history is politics.

In 2014, history returned to Europe with a vengeance. The crisis over Ukraine brought back not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the 100th anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war. The great powers lined up, amid a barrage of propaganda and informational warfare, while many of the smaller powers made their contribution to the festival of irresponsibility.

AFTER THE Soviet Union collapsed, Richard Nixon observed that the United States had won the Cold War, but had not yet won the peace. Since then, three American presidents—representing both political parties—have not yet accomplished that task. On the contrary, peace seems increasingly out of reach as threats to U.S. security and prosperity multiply both at the systemic level, where dissatisfied major powers are increasingly challenging the international order, and at the state and substate level, where dissatisfied ethnic, tribal, religious and other groups are destabilizing key countries and even entire regions.

Democrats and liberals have climbed into bed with the neocons to push the “Russia-did-it” conspiracy theory as a way to “get Trump,” but this New McCarthyism has grave dangers, writes Robert Parry.

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

What’s surprising is how far back America’s evangelizing approach to Russia goes — and how it continues to distort our thinking today.

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.