American Committee for US-Russia Accord

By threatening Ukrainian membership in NATO, and ignoring objections to the alliance’s expansion across Russia’s political spectrum, the administration contributed to an invasion few thought would happen.

Connecting the ‘Davos ideology’ to Europe’s self-immolation…

Based on the results of the research conducted by the Századvég Foundation, Europeans would expect their leaders to work towards a peace agreement as soon as possible and a quick end to the war. Across the EU, 82 percent of respondents agree that Russia and Ukraine should be forced into peace talks in order to end the war.

The war in Ukraine is a tangled mess of causes. As Nicolai Petro has argued, it is at once a conflict between Russia and the US, a conflict between Russia and Ukraine and a conflict within Ukraine. But at its core there are two conflicts: the conflict over whether NATO should have an open door for Ukraine and the conflict over whether the Donbas should be part of Ukraine, an autonomous region or even a part of Russia.

The dangers of the conflict are much greater than hawks would have us believe.

It escapes a normal mind what part of mutually assured destruction allows a shrug.

The Pentagon said Thursday that the US would continue to support Ukraine in the event of a potential operation by Kyiv to take back Crimea.

“This department has said that we will be with Ukraine for as long as it takes. That includes an operation in Crimea,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh at a press conference.

When top U.S. and European defense officials meet at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on Friday to discuss the war in Ukraine, the biggest issue on the agenda will be how the coalition can continue to supply Ukraine with more sophisticated weapon systems.

Specifically, the Ukraine Contact Group, a formal assembly of some 50 nations, will be discussing tanks. Pressure will be on Germany to yield to demands from Britain, Poland, and the Baltic States to send Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, and allow other NATO countries that have the tanks to do so too

‘We should be doing what we can to achieve a ceasefire,’ says University College Cork Emeritus Professor Geoffrey Roberts.

Columnist Peter Hitchens writes, “During the whole Cold War I never really believed we were in danger. The Cuban crisis, which slightly overshadowed preparations for my 11th birthday, persuaded me that everyone would have more sense. I thought and think that TV dramas about a nuclear Armageddon, such as the BBC’s The War Game and the American The Day After, were unconvincing. They couldn’t come up with a believable reason for a war to start. But now it seems entirely plausible.”

Col. Douglas Macgregor gives updated casualty figures in Ukraine and discusses the efforts among Western government to provide more and more equipment to Kiev.

Fort Sill officials have confirmed a “contingent” of Ukrainian soldiers landed at the Lawton airport on Sunday night and are currently on Fort Sill.

The soldiers are here to spend the next several months training on the U.S. Patriot missile system before a battery is deployed to their country to assist in the war against Russia.

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the cold war – the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage Cold War in Eastern Europe.

Why did Russia make the decision to go to war in Ukraine in 2022? It had been over two decades since the US and NATO broke their promise and marched nearly a thousand miles east toward Russia’s borders. It had been eight years since the US supported a coup in Ukraine that removed a democratically elected pro-Russian government and replaced it with a hand picked government that was pro-West. Worse, from Russia’s perspective, the newly installed government was anti-Russian. It had been five years since the US dissolved the boundary between defensive and offensive weapons and begun flooding Ukraine with lethal weapons.

Nearly a year in, the war in Ukraine has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and brought the world to the brink of, in President Joe Biden’s own words, “Armageddon.” Alongside the literal battlefield has been a similarly bitter intellectual battle over the war’s causes. 

Commentators have rushed to declare the long-criticized policy of NATO expansion as irrelevant to the war’s outbreak, or as a mere fig leaf used by Russian President Vladimir Putin to mask what Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates recently called “his messianic mission” to “reestablish the Russian Empire.” Fiona Hill, a presidential advisor to two Republican administrations, has deemed these views merely the product of a “Russian information war and psychological operation,” resulting in “masses of the US public … blaming NATO, or blaming the US for this outcome.” 

Yet a review of the public record and many dozens of diplomatic cables made publicly available via WikiLeaks shows that US officials were aware, or were directly told over the span of years, that expanding NATO was viewed by Russian officials well beyond Putin as a major threat and provocation, that expanding it to Ukraine was a particularly bright red line for Moscow, that it would inflame and empower hawkish, nationalist parts of the Russian political spectrum, and that it could ultimately lead to war.  [Read more…] about ACURA ViewPoint: Guest Post by Branko Marcetic: Diplomatic Cables Show Russia Saw NATO Expansion as a Red Line

Walter Lippmann (1889 -1974) was perhaps the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. He was also among its wisest strategists. Among the many things that the Ukraine war has exposed is the conspicuous lack of media voices like Lippmann’s,  as well as the paucity of strategic thinking at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

The core ideas  underlying  both neoconservatism and liberal internationalism remain deeply embedded in the rhetoric, practice, and failures of American foreign policy over the last two decades. They have led in part to the fractured U.S.-Russia relationship, and in many ways the conflict roiling Eastern Europe today.

The Ukrainian people — all of the Ukrainian people — need catharsis and reconciliation before healing. When they can begin, in the face of ongoing war with Russia, is the question put to Ukraine scholar Nicolai Petro, whose new book is, “The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution.” Kelley Vlahos and Daniel Larison talk with Petro about the history, the competing identities, and the institutional barriers within Ukraine that have made the East-West conflict what it is today. Dan and Kelley also discuss Russia’s decision to ditch nuclear talks and how the one nuclear treaty left between Washington and Moscow could be on its way out forever.

The bipartisan consensus in the Beltway on the United States being    the ‘indispensable’ world power is usually attributed to the neocons who have been the driving force of the US foreign and security policy in successive administrations since the 1970s.

The op-end in the Washington Post on Saturday titled Time is not on Ukraine’s side, coauthored by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in George W. Bush presidency and Defence Secretary Robert Gates (who served under both Bush and Barack Obama), highlights this paradigm.