American Committee for US-Russia Accord

It should be cold comfort indeed, but the successive inability of one US administration after another to control Israel and the extraordinary passion with which the leaders of Western Europe, Canada and NATO continue to defy the United States to risk thermonuclear world war with Russia at the whims of Ukrainian junta leader Volodymyr Zelensky are not unprecedented.

The strategic cooperation between China and Russia increasingly forms an organizing principle in U.S. defense strategy.¹ Russia’s role in American strategic thinking assumed new prominence after the invasion of Ukraine, but the Biden administration’s policy was still to view China as the greater threat. Either way, there exists a decades-old consensus that a conjoining of Chinese and Russian military efforts would represent a new level of threat to the United States.²

Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote.

Russian troops have infiltrated the strategic city of Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine and are now trying to surround it.

Lots of people talk about there being a single peace deal for Ukraine, but in truth it will be far more complicated than that, requiring separate deals on an end to the hostilities, Ukraine’s EU future, NATO, and on the future EU/UK relationship with Russia after the war ends.

Canada is moving towards direct war with Russia. And the escalation to the NATO proxy war is happening with barely any pushback.

Alexander Rabinowitch has died. Rabinowitch was a Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, where he taught from 1968 until 1999. He is the author of groundbreaking studies of the Russian Revolution, including The Bolsheviks Come To Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd and The Bolsheviks in Power: The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd.

The United States was a youthful 89 years old when The Nation was founded by abolitionists at the end of the Civil War. Over the ensuing 161 years, our magazine has maintained a set of North Star values that have guided us through the darkest moments in this country’s 250-year journey.

When Donald Trump arrived in the White House in January 2025, securing a quick end to the war in Ukraine was near the top of his foreign policy agenda. Despite political backlash, he pushed ahead with this objective early in his second term by resuming dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin and initiating parallel diplomatic tracks with Kyiv and Moscow.

The Great Betrayal: How The Democrats Became The Party of War, hailed by Professor Richard Sakwa as “a brilliant, timely, and important achievement,” is available now from OR x Nation Books.

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Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.^[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold.^[2]

The message BidenWorld sent early on was that heterodox voices, even tepid ones, were not welcome. Consider the case of a respected expert on Russian affairs, Dr. Matthew Rojansky, who was then serving as the director of the Kennan Institute at the Congressionally-funded Woodrow Wilson Center. Rojansky had been denied a position on the Biden NSC because he was viewed as “soft” on Russia. Administration officials feared that appointing Rojansky would, as a contemporaneous report by Politico put it, “signal a conciliatory U.S. policy toward Moscow.”^[3] The incident had echoes of the 2009 Freeman affair, when a foreign lobby (Israel’s) mobilized its allies in the media and on Capitol Hill to block an appointment it deemed threatening to its agenda. This time around, another foreign lobby (Ukraine’s) slammed the door on Rojansky.  From the start, Biden’s White House was a closed circle—new names, new faces, and new thinking were not welcome.

The parallel one reaches for to best describe the inner workings of the Biden White House is that of the Reagan White House. Back then, a chief executive of questionable sentience relied on a tight circle of political operatives to run the day-to-day operations of the White House. During Reagan’s first term, that job fell to a “Troika” consisting of Chief of Staff James Baker, Counselor to the President Ed Meese, and Deputy Chief of Staff Mike Deaver. Meese did policy, Deaver was the image-maker. Baker was in charge of everything else. Joe Biden had a Troika of his own: White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti, and Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed. Klain and Ricchetti were longtime centrist Democratic operatives. Reed was the policy wonk. No friend of progressives, Reed came up through the ranks as a centrist policy adviser to Senator Al Gore in the 1980s. He later served as a domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.

On the foreign policy side of the ledger, what was old was new again. Like Presidents Carter and Clinton—and his erstwhile Democratic rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—Biden embraced a vision of the world divided between democracy and authoritarianism. While the script had been slightly updated since the end of the Cold War, the story was a familiar one: The US and its NATO allies were now said to be threatened by an “authoritarian axis” led by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia. The axis is also said to include Iran, North Korea and other revisionist powers. Discussions regarding our putative “friends” and “allies” that also happen to be authoritarian (Saudi Arabia, Turkey) or ethno-nationalist (Israel, Ukraine) are usually excluded from the schema.  In December 2021, Biden hosted a ‘Summit for Democracy’ that brought together leaders from over 100 countries in support of a rather amorphous strategy to “defend” democracy—a cause that Biden claimed was “the defining challenge of our time.”

More thoughtful men than Biden saw things rather differently. George Kennan, for one, felt that there was nothing “more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” The problem, as Kennan correctly foresaw, was that an embattled democracy will tend “to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision to everything else.  Its enemy becomes the embodiment of all evil.  Its own side is the center of all value.”^[4] While Kennan wrote those words in 1961, it would be hard to find a better description of the politics of the New Cold War. The main deliverable of Biden’s “democracy” conference was the creation of a Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal, which, at a cost of nearly half-a-billion dollars to US taxpayers, would seek to promote “democracy, fight corruption, and defend human rights worldwide.”^[5]

As with so many of the ideas and programs championed by the Democratic establishment since the end of the Cold War, the “autocracy vs. democracy” paradigm borrowed liberally from the neocon playbook. Biden’s old friend, the late Senator John McCain, had long called for the creation of a global “League of Democracies.” Speaking at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in 2007, McCain said the new league would, “form the core of an international order of peace based on freedom.” It would be able to “bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow’s and Beijing’s approval.^[6] McCain’s proposal might just as easily have come from the pen of Samantha Power. As with the men and pigs at the conclusion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it comes to the neocons and the Democratic elite, it is now impossible to say which is which.

NOTES:

^[1] For example, no dissent on matters relating to Israel was welcome; see: https://www.commondreams.org/news/biden-silencing-dissent-gaza. For reporting on his tyrannical streak, see, for example, https://thebrunswicknews.com/president-biden-has-notorious-temper-yells-curses-frequently-in-private-report/article_107fcc8f-b3f8-5dad-a447-083dbde1eaa1.html

^[2] Including The Brookings Institution, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The German Marshall Fund, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for American Progress, The Center for a New American Security, and The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

^[3] https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/19/biden-russia-expert-483000

^[4] For Kennan, see: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/17/hang-up-the-magical-thinking-and-try-strategic-empathy-on-for-size/

^[5] On the Democracy Summit and Biden’s remarks, see: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/12/23/summit-for-democracy-summary-of-proceedings/

^[6] For McCain’s remarks, see: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/inline/docs/McCain_05-01-07.pdf

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.

The New York Times columnist depicts Ukraine as belonging in the ranks of the world’s great powers on pragmatic as well as ethical considerations. That is true militarily, in French’s view, not only because of Ukraine’s surprising tenacity in the face of Moscow’s brutal aggression, but because of the country’s tangible achievements in drone warfare and because it might possess “the largest and most battle-hardened land force in the Western world.”

Over the weekend, Finnish President Alexander Stubb suggested that Ukraine is in its “best position” since the start of the country’s war with Russia. He claimed that for every Ukrainian soldier killed, eight Russians are dying. Yet if that were true, the number of Russian dead would exceed the size of the Russian army. The war propaganda machine is back in full force, and it relies on the assumption that the rest of us cannot count.

Prof. John Mearsheimer pushes back against widespread Western claims that Russia aims to conquer all of Ukraine. In his assessment, he argues that the narrative of Putin seeking full territorial control or broader European expansion is “completely wrong,” pointing instead to the limits and realities of the ongoing war. His remarks challenge dominant interpretations of Moscow’s long-term intentions and the strategic assumptions shaping the conflict debate.

The Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China reaffirm their comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era.

This month, as delegates from around the world gathered at the United Nations to talk about nuclear nonproliferation, the U.S. and Russia chose to remind everyone just how much destructive power they command.

Over the course of his three presidential campaigns (2016, 2020, 2024), President Donald J. Trump promised an America First foreign policy—one that would see America pull back from postwar European security commitments, end the war in Ukraine, and keep the country out of the Middle East “forever wars” that so beguiled (and then bedeviled) every US president for the past quarter of a century.

Earlier this month, Mendel gave an extensive interview to Tucker Carlson. She made many explosive remarks, questioning Zelensky’s character and his commitment to democracy and fighting corruption. But her most significant comments were on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations and the negotiations in Istanbul in the early weeks of the war.