American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Over the past few months, there have been reports of peace initiatives by China, Brazil and the Vatican. Today we highlight some of those efforts.

The Brazilian president told reporters in Abu Dhabi, where he finished a trip to Asia, that he was trying to gather a group of leaders that “prefer to talk about peace rather than war.”

The Holy See’s No. 2 official confirmed Wednesday the existence of a Vatican peace “mission” to try to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, days after Pope Francis raised eyebrows with an offhand revelation of a secret operation that was already underway.

Brussels welcomed the conversation between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Ukraine‘s President Volodymyr Zelensky, thought to be their first call since Russia invaded Ukraine.

“It is an important, long overdue first step by China in exercising its responsibilities as a member of the UN Security Council,” said European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry released a 12-point proposal on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine which said, in part, that “Universally recognized international law, including the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter, must be strictly observed.”

French aspirations to ‘strategic autonomy’ for ‘Europe’ (and ‘strategic sovereignty’ for France) stand a chance only in a multipolar world populated by a good number of politically significant non-aligned countries, quite similar to what the Chinese seem to want. To what extent this implies some kind of equidistance to the United States and China is a question left open, probably deliberately, by Emmanuel Macron. Sometimes he seems to want equidistance, sometimes he denies that he wants it. In any case, this prospect is anathematized by German pro-Western militants, above all by the Greens who now control German foreign policy. Among them, suspicions run deep of Macron’s occasional protestations that ‘strategic autonomy’ is compatible with transatlantic loyalty, at a time of growing confrontation between ‘the West’ and the new East Asian Evil Empire. As a result, France is more isolated than ever in the EU.

Recent leaks have confirmed what has long been suggested: there is a need to re-evaluate the performance of the Russian army and to recalibrate the optimistic expectations.

The impact of Russia’s decision to institute nuclear sharing with Belarus will have wide-ranging consequences.

On the Nonzero podcast, journalist Robert Wright talks with legendary IR theorist John J. Mearsheimer about his upcoming book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, among other topics.

Russian relations with the West are in tatters. In much of the rest of the world, however, the opposite seems to be true.

Ronald Steel, a historian who derided America’s Cold War foreign policies as a succession of misguided adventures and wrote a definitive biography of Walter Lippmann, the dean of 20th-century foreign policy realism, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 92.

In his first book, “The End of the Alliance” (1964), Mr. Steel argued that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was already obsolete five years after its birth in 1949 and that it should be dissolved as a way of stepping back from what he regarded as the growing prospect of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

In the first part of this interview series, Munich-based ACTIVISM TV talks with The Nation’s editorial director and publisher and ACURA president Katrina vanden Heuvel about the war in Ukraine.

That means supporting a negotiated settlement in the name of limiting still more horrendous devastation.

Most people who remember Samantha Power know her either as a pro-war propagandist masquerading as a journalist in Bosnia or as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loyal servant in helping to orchestrate the Obama administration’s disastrous military interventions in Libya and Syria. However, she now has an important policy perch in Joe Biden’s administration from which to promote and implement a new round of destructive policies. As the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, she has a multi-billion-dollar slush fund with which to bribe foreign governments and subsidize foreign political surrogates.

Two of America’s leading neocon apparatchiks, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg and Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum traveled to Ukraine with the widow of the American tech titan Steve Jobs (who now, as it happens, owns The Atlantic) for a round of war tourism and a sit-down with Ukrainian president Zelensky.

The results are about what you’d expect. [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: James W. Carden: “The Counteroffensive” by Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum: I read it so you don’t have to.

A bipartisan group of hawks in Congress announced a new resolution on Tuesday that calls for the U.S. to seek the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over.

Reps. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) and Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) are co-sponsoring what they call the Ukrainian Victory Resolution, and have been framing it, perhaps not surprisingly, with the lofty rhetoric of World War II. So far the bill has 18 bipartisan co-sponsors.

Europe may join hands with China to bring the war to an end.