American Committee for US-Russia Accord

To pick the worst press failure of the past half-decade would be a daunting assignment, but the coverage of the Steele dossier would have to be high on any list.

Presidents Biden and Putin agreed at their recent summit to establish a working group to deal with this fraught problem. How can they put the U.S.-Russian relationship on a path toward cyber stability?

The State Department is discouraging Americans from traveling there and making it harder for Russians to come here.

ACURA’s Sharon Tennison, president of the Center for Citizen Initiatives, just returned from St. Petersburg and gives us a report on her trip.

On Thursday afternoon, US president Joe Biden met with outgoing German chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House. By most accounts the hour long meeting was a cordial affair. Said Biden right before the meeting, “The cooperation between the United States and Germany is strong and we hope to continue that, and I’m confident that we will.”

The key challenge for whoever ends up taking the helm from outgoing Chancellor Merkel after sixteen years in power is two-fold: decide what to do with that bilateral relationship and figure out how to square it with the oftentimes divergent priorities of other European partners and especially the United States.

The November-December 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs followed the 9/11 attack on the United States by only a couple of months.  How different the climate was then compared to today with regard to attitudes of Russian citizens and the relations between the Russian and the U.S. governments.

World politics after the Biden-Putin Summit: ACURA’s Katrina vanden Heuvel argues that we need to rethink what real security means, and that it can’t mean a new cold war, but joint action with Russia and China on climate change, pandemics, and the threat of nuclear war.

ACURA’s Nicolai Petro in The National Interest: When the seven-year war in Ukraine began, it was primarily an interregional conflict. By choosing sides at its outset, however, Russia and the West have made it international. With the domestic and international aspects of this conflict now so thoroughly intertwined, the solution will also have to address both of these aspects simultaneously.

On July, 8, 2021 Balkin Insights published an article written by David L. Phillips titled “A Global US Can’t Avoid Confronting Russia and China.” Concerned about the tenor of this article, especially coming from an institute dedicated to peace-building, I decided a response was in order. Below is my response to Mr. Phillips’ essay.