American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Ian and Pascal Lottaz discuss the panic and the state of denial within European capitals following  President Trump’s radical shift in US policy towards the war in Ukraine.

The British response was muddled from the start.

In a moment of candor shortly after the Russian invasion, Ukraine’s President Zelensky told The Economist, “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this meant the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives.” His government was then involved in peace negotiations with Russia, but under pressure from the West, those promising negotiations were abandoned. Since then, the ongoing war—tragically unfolding in lives lost and people displaced (but profits gained from arms sales!)—may be viewed as a fulfillment of Zelensky’s chilling prediction.  [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: Benjamin S. Dunham: Ukraine: Why President Trump Is Leaving the Biden Policy Behind

Ukraine has no significant rare-earth deposits other than small scandium mines. The US Geological Survey, an authority on the matter, doesn’t list the country as holding any reserves. Neither does any other database commonly used in the mining business.

The meeting between Trump Vance and Zelensky is a great clarifying moment, the first time president Trump or any president has, in a dramatic way, said no to the Washington establishment consensus in foreign policy, or, more informally, the blob.

Trump and Vance see Putin as a ruthless but rational actor (much, perhaps, as Trump sees himself) who will make a deal and stick to it if it meets Russia’s essential conditions. They do not believe that Putin has any intention of going on to attack NATO. Above all, they are determined not to make any more U.S. security commitments in Europe beyond NATO’s existing borders.

They were therefore furious when Zelensky at the press conference put public pressure on them to promise a U.S. military “backstop” for a European “peacekeeping” force in Ukraine

Why are our leaders not worried, especially after the last 3 years of super power escalation? Here with moderator Pascal Lottaz to discuss this are three wonderful guests: Governor Jerry Brown, the 34th and 39th governor of the state of California; William D. Hartung, a Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Cynthia Lazaroff, a Documentary Filmmaker & Founder of U.S.-Russian exchange initiatives and NuclearWakeUpCall.Earth

This panel was convened by Katrina vanden Heuvel the President of the American Committee for US-Russia Accord and and former editor of The Nation magazine. 

On ascending the throne in 1881, Tsar Alexander III of Russia proclaimed that “From henceforth, all matters of state will be discussed quietly between Ourselves and God.” Both parts of this statement contain excellent advice for contemporary leaders. If you have a direct line to God (and several obviously think that they do), you should use it. And whether talking to the Divinity or anyone else, international affairs should be discussed quietly.

This is probably pointless advice when offered to products of democratic political systems; and in the case of President Trump he would need to experience something like a lightning bolt on the road to Damascus to follow it. Nonetheless, recent days have, or should have, offered a lesson in the folly and dangers of megaphone “diplomacy.”

As president, Trump failed to make good on his campaign promise to end the war in 24 hours. But he has quickly initiated direct talks with Russian officials and signaled to Ukraine and European allies that they will not be given a veto over seeking a peace accord.

To those who reject Donald Trump’s approach to Ukraine, I ask: what is your plan? More fighting? More death? Perhaps another summit – cocktails with Klaus – at which Western leaders can pledge their support for a cause they were never quite prepared to pay for.

The Catholic theologian and neoconservative political writer George Weigel, in an open letter published shortly after Trump’s re-election last November, outlined the case against Vladimir Putin. It is, perhaps, unfair to single out here only Mr. Weigel, who was simply presenting what has long since become the party line that one can hear repeated on all the cable news channels or read in the Washington Post. His open letter nonetheless conveniently summarizes in one place all the usual accusations against the Russian leader and lays out the usual definition of who Putin supposedly is. Weigel’s letter was addressed to J.D. Vance, then the newly elected vice president. It accused Vance, in effect, of feeling insufficient hatred for the Russian leader, which is immoral.

A Trump-Putin deal to make peace in Ukraine could be closer than some people think. There are plenty of pitfalls that could upend the dramatic about turn in American-Russian relations inaugurated by Trump’s telephone conversation with Putin, but as of now the two countries are tantalising close to agreement on the essential preconditions for an armistice that would halt hostilities in Ukraine and initiate the negotiation of a detailed peace treaty.

The moral arrogance to which liberal internationalism is prone was summed up in the famous words of the Democratic secretary of state Madeleine Albright (frequently quoted by President Biden): “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” This ideological framework led all too many American liberals to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Libyan state—and to advocate for a dramatic U.S. intervention in Syria, which would have been catastrophic.

Deterrence has long been a cornerstone of international security. Yet in today’s multipolar world, where power is decentralized and alliances are fluid, maintaining effective deterrence is increasingly challenging. This does not mean that multipolarity and deterrence are inherently incompatible. Instead, new deterrence strategies are needed to address the complexities of a gray-zone conflict environment characterized by incrementalism, asymmetrical power dynamics, attribution problems, and rapid technological change.

The war in Ukraine has served as a reminder to the general public that both Russia and the U.S. have massive nuclear weapons arsenals and that they continue to pose an existential threat to human civilization, and perhaps even to our very survival on the planet.

But do we actually know why? As a nuclear scientist and weapons expert I think it would be helpful to briefly contemplate, as a survival enhancing exercise, the effects of a single nuclear detonation on Washington, Kyiv or Moscow.

Keep in mind that a single Russian Sarmat or SS-18 intercontinental missile carries ten 800-kiloton bombs, and the Russian intercontinental missile arsenal can launch about 400 of those bombs within minutes of a launch command. Let’s focus here on the effects of a single 800-kiloton nuclear detonation at a height of about one mile above an American city.

The detonation of this nuclear weapon would release the near explosive equivalent of a million tons of TNT within a 100 millionths of a second and within a volume of roughly a cubic foot. Because so much energy is released so quickly and in such a small volume, the temperature inside the explosion will reach roughly 100 million degrees celsius, about five times that of the center of the sun.

President Macron of France called the summit in response to what he called the “electroshock” of the Trump administration’s election and plans to negotiate Ukraine peace without the Europeans. The result so far however appears to have been even less than a mouse — in fact, precisely nothing.

As this war has gone on, as the clammy palmed pontificators of the BBC have grimaced at the terrible death toll, both they, western leaders and Zelensky himself, have been complicit in a campaign to prevent any possibility of dialogue and negotiations to end the madness.

At the Munich Security Conference later this week, US Vice President JD Vance and envoy to Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg will use the stage to present European leaders with part of the Trump administration’s peace plan for the region. Nato membership for Kyiv will be excluded, and Russia will effectively be left with the Ukrainian land it currently holds — with the possible exception of a territorial swap involving Ukrainian withdrawal from Russia’s Kursk province, if its army can hold the territory long enough.