American Committee for US-Russia Accord

“Arctic Exceptionalism and Climate Crisis”, featuring Edward Alexander, senior Arctic lead of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, Pavel Devyatkin, senior associate & leadership group member a the Arctic Institute, Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute, and Jennifer Spence, director of the Arctic Initiative, Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. Cynthia Lazaroff, founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy, moderated the conversation.

Israel’s airstrikes on Iran and US involvement shatter the illusion that America First guides President Trump’s Middle East policy.

Interview with Prof Richard Sakwa about Global Political changes and the future of the West in Multipolar world.

Iranian and Russian parliaments recently approved a strategic pact that did not contain an explicit mutual defense clause but did include statements on working together against shared threats, sharing military and civilian nucleartechnology, and creating further economic cooperation.

In the run up to the NATO Summit at The Hague next week, June 24-25, President Donald Trump and his administration should present a clear U.S. plan for peace in Ukraine to the European and Ukrainian governments — one that goes well beyond just a ceasefire.

Pietro Shakarian, an Armenian-American  historian at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg  is an expert on Russian-Iranian relations.

The Henry Jackson Society is a so-called non-partisan British neocon thinktank (so British, that is named after an American politician). It is closely associated with the UK Conservative Party and Boris Johnson wrote the foreword to its 2019 manifesto setting out a vision for Global Britain. And it’s possible to see the hand of Johnson in the bombastic prescriptions of this report.

In the West, this is a time of forever wars.  Forever wars have no defined or achievable objectives.  Therefore, they include no plan for their termination or the reconciliation of the parties to their results.  In forever wars, what passes for strategy is the fantasy that the will of the enemy will somehow evaporate, leading to its unconditional surrender.  But ‘we will win, they will lose’ is a pipe dream, not a program.  Even wars of attrition need steadfast purposes that both sides can, eventually, reluctantly agree to.

Declassified British files shed further light on the controversial question as to what assurances were made to Russia by UK officials about the expansion of Nato into eastern Europe.

The European Union’s latest moves (as part of its 17th package of sanctions against Russia declared in May) to target much more intensively Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and other vessels illustrate the danger that, as long as the Ukraine war continues, so will the risk of an incident that will draw NATO and the EU into a direct military clash with Russia.

With its long-standing good relations with both Tel Aviv and Tehran, the outbreak of war in the Middle East has put Moscow in a delicate position, but it has also been presented it with the opportunity to act as peacemaker and weaken the West’s support for Ukraine in the process.

NATO is facing the greatest crisis in its history. What appears to be its strength is increasingly accelerating its internal decline. Like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, the alliance often achieves the opposite of what it intends.

Nowhere is this contradiction more evident than in the lead-up to the NATO summit in The Hague, with its sweeping militarization agenda. President Donald Trump has proposed nearly doubling NATO’s military spending—to three trillion dollars, or 5 percent of GDP. European allies seem willing to follow his lead. For Germany, the implications are stark: nearly half of its federal budget—around 225 billion euros—would be directed toward military expenditures. The result would likely be a self-inflicted economic and social crisis.

Robert Skidelsky, Richard Balfe, Anthony Brenton, Thomas Fazi, Anatol Lieven, Ian Proud, Geoffrey Roberts, Richard Sakwa and Brigitte Granville respond to Fiona Hill’s assessment of the current Russian threat to the UK.

There are two main justifications for European rearmament. The first, and arguably the most important, is that President Trump has demanded it. Historically, the United States has contributed about 70 percent of NATO’s budget. Europe’s rearmament is in part a response to his demand that it pay its “fair share.” This goes in hand with the feeling that the US is poised to disengage from Europe—partly because of Trump’s desire to do business with Putin, partly because of the American pivot on the challenge of China. The two, of course, are linked in the current American geostrategy.

On June 1, Ukraine used swarms of drones hidden in trucks smuggled across Russia’s border to attack one leg of its nuclear triad of missiles, submarines, and aircraft.

This time, the bombing was no joke. But the Western reaction hardly took the prospect of nuclear escalation seriously.

Jeffrey Sachs, economist and U.N. consultant, talks about JFK’s “peace speech” at American University in June 1963 as a unique and powerful vision of America’s role in the world that died on Nov. 22, 1963 with terrible consequences for the country that are evident today.

Georgia is a small country on the border of large powers. Russia has legitimate security concerns, although the efforts by the US and its allies to use Georgia as a proxy raise security concerns. How can Georgia navigate the complex geopolitics that also divide its society?

“Lets us re-examine our attitude toward the Cold War…”

What Kennedy said is still relevant today, says Professor Kuznick.