American Committee for US-Russia Accord

In this clip Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the use of ATACMS by Ukraine against Russia is a signal that the US wants “escalation” in the conflict. “Without the Americans, it’s not possible to use them,” he said while speaking to reporters at the G-20 in Brazil.

After more than two years of grinding conflict, Ukrainians are increasingly weary of the war with Russia. In Gallup’s latest surveys of Ukraine, conducted in August and October 2024, an average of 52% of Ukrainians would like to see their country negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible. Nearly four in 10 Ukrainians (38%) believe their country should keep fighting until victory.

The notion that Trump was “soft” on Russia during his first term was (and remains) a destructive, highly politicized myth.  Over the past four years, though, Trump and at least some supporters in Congress, the news media, and the foreign policy community seem to have gained an understanding that Washington’s current Russia policy has been disastrous and requires drastic reforms.  It is less certain whether he will muster the courage to ignore the smears and make the necessary policy changes to begin repairing relations with Russia.

Joe Biden has lifted the ban on Ukraine using long-range missiles to fire into Russian territory by permitting them to be used against Russian and North Korean forces in the Kursk region.

The US president will allow Ukraine to use US-made Atacms rockets, which have a range of 190 miles (300km) – a decision being justified by the presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone for an hour on Friday afternoon, a German government source said on Friday.

The FBI and the rest of the “foreign malign influence” industry have decided that the greatest moment of danger is the post-election period.

ACURA’s Benjamin Schwarz talks Trump’s national security appointments and what US foreign policy might look like under Trump II.

You still hear it every day in Washington: it is an article of faith repeated far more often and much more reverently than any liturgy or Mass in this indisputably post-Christian city. “We have an advantage that Russia and China cannot possibly hope to duplicate!”

Russia has abandoned all previous hopes of repairing relations with the West, or at least with the United States.

Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and hawks and doves all realized that there were limits to American power. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the humiliation of communists worldwide. Washington perceived an entirely new world, reflected by George H.W. Bush during the first Gulf War when he announced, “What we say goes.”

In the past decade, a disturbing phenomenon has arisen in the Western world. One might call it the “New Red Scare.” According to many, the West is the target of a highly sophisticated, professional, and dangerous campaign of foreign subversion, coming mainly from the Russian Federation. Accusations abound against “Russian agents,” “Kremlin influencers,” “Moscow proxies,” and the like. Don’t like someone, call them “pro-Russian;” dislike what they say, call it “Russian disinformation;” want to silence them, call them a “Russian agent.” And so on. Increasingly, reasoned debate is being replaced by silencing and name-calling.

Newspaper headlines and television pundits are screaming that Donald Trump’s election is a threat to “our democracy.” A strange charge following an election when a clear majority of voters chose the winner. Isn’t that consistent with the very definition of “democracy”?

The news from the Ukrainian front line is grim. Ukrainian forces are heavily outnumbered and outmatched in artillery and ammunition. There are growing signs of exhaustion, demoralization, desertion, and evasion of service by both the elites and ordinary people. Russian success is grounded in the fact that Russia simply has far greater resources than Ukraine in terms of both industry and manpower. It has been able to recruit hundreds of thousands of new troops by paying them very high wages, up to six times the average salaries in the regions from which they are drawn.

State Department spokesman Matthew Miller reiterates Biden Administration’s unconscionable lack of interest in pursuing negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

ACURA president Katrina vanden Heuvel (of The Nation magazine) talks about the election results and what’s next in US foreign policy.

Remarks by Professor Nicolai N. Petro (University of Rhode Island), delivered at the “Reimagining Neutrality” international conference in Kyoto University, Japan, on October 25, 2024.

In “Planning for a Post-American NATO,” Phillips O’Brien and Edward Stringer attempt to address the security vacuum they foresee resulting from a second Trump administration. They highlight, in particular, my proposal for a “dormant NATO,” in which I lay out an organizational framework in which the United States would remove its ground forces from Europe in order to shift the burden of defending the continent away from Washington and toward the region’s own governments. According to O’Brien and Stringer, a dormant NATO could quickly become a dead NATO, because the alliance would struggle to survive unless the United States clearly displays an overwhelming commitment to Europe. Without that commitment, the authors argue, older divisions will return, with central and eastern Europe turning more hawkish while northern and western Europe continue to free ride on Washington. “A European security alliance,” they write, “could collapse under the weight of such incompatible outlooks.”

For further information, contact: info@defusenuclearwar.org

At 11:45 pm on Election Day, Nov. 5, activists will gather near Vandenberg Space Force Base to witness and protest the test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). During such tests, which occur several times a year, the weapons are launched from the Vandenberg base near Lompoc, Calif., and aimed at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Activists with the Defuse Nuclear War coalition issued the following statement on Saturday:

We condemn these launches in the strongest possible terms as a wasteful, dangerous step backward for peace. Scheduling this latest test on Election Day is a clear attempt to avoid public scrutiny of these tests, even as the continued existence of ICBMs is a profound threat to the life and security of every single person in the United States and around the world. We ask that the upcoming ICBM test, and all future scheduled tests, be canceled.

ICBMs have been sold to the public as a guarantor of security. In reality, they are an imminent threat to public security. In the words of the late Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine, these weapons make “any conflict enormously more dangerous than it has to be” by increasing “the danger that any armed conflict between major nuclear states can escalate to all-out war.” ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and, once launched, cannot be recalled, virtually guaranteeing a strike on the country that launches them. As long as ICBMs exist, we live with the constant risk that misinterpreted intelligence, human error, or a single rash decision could end civilization as we know it within an hour.

Maintaining these weapons is a huge waste of resources. The U.S. has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars to “modernize” its ICBM force, which in practice means replacing the entire system. The ICBM  program is now an astonishing 81% over budget and years behind schedule. Yet the U.S. Secretary of Defense has certified, through a “comprehensive, unbiased review” not shared with the public, that the program will proceed.

Test launches damage human communities and ecosystems. The Marshall Islands, already forced to bear the overwhelming environmental costs of U.S. nuclear weapons testing, are still used as a target test area.

When tensions among nuclear-armed states are high, each test launch carries an added risk. The U.S. military has acknowledged as much by pausing these launches at high points of tension in the war in Ukraine. The risk of nuclear escalation remains too high to introduce the possibility of misinterpretation of a test into the mix.

Organizers MacGregor Eddy and Leah Yantanon are available for interviews and comments. They can be contacted at info@defusenuclearwar.org.