American Committee for US-Russia Accord

“I think the situation we face today in the world is much more dangerous than it was during the Cold War,” warned realist John J. Mearsheimer in this conversation.

In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.

But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse

In 1919, John Maynard Keynes was a young economist with the British delegation negotiating the Versailles Treaty. Keynes strongly objected to the harsh economic treatment being meted out to Germany. He resigned and went home to write “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” which accurately predicted how the treaty would sow the seeds for future conflict. Had Keynes been alive last year, he might well have written “The Economic Consequences of the War,” predicting how the economic sanctions being placed on Russia would, in fact, unravel Europe’s political order.

U.S. military analyst Michael Vlahos believes that the Ukrainian army is heading for a collapse. Dr. Vlahos predicts that Russia will win the war and that Putin will sit at the border when negotiations on the future of Ukraine begin.

More than 14,000 U.S. entities are registered to conduct defense trade activities. Their deals are monitored by an alphabet soup of agencies including Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Trade secrecy clauses in federal law mean this flow of gear, weapons and ammunition is almost never revealed to the public.

During the Cold War there were similar dangerous moments, but John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, as well as Ronald Reagan and Michael Gorbachev, managed to avoid the worst-case scenario. George H.W. Bush talked in 1990 about a “Europe whole and free” and a new “security architecture from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” while Boris Yeltsin, during his 1992 address to the joint chambers of Congress, exclaimed, “God bless America.”

Berlin-based peace advocacy group Detente Now has released a negotiation proposal authored by Professor Dr. Peter Brandt, Professor Dr. Hajo Funke, General (ret.) Harald Kujat and Professor Dr. h. c. Horst Teltschik.

Legitimate self-defence and the quest for a just and lasting peace are not contradictory

Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on 24 February 2022, Ukraine has been waging a legitimate defensive war in which its survival as a state, its national independence and security are at stake. This statement is true regardless of the democratic and rule-of-law quality and constitutional reality, also regardless of the much more complicated antecedents and the equally more complicated global political context of the war.

However, the legitimacy of armed self-defence on the basis of Article 51 of the UN Charter does not release the government in Kiev and the states supporting it from the obligation – not least vis-à-vis their own people – to exercise reason, not to give in to the increase in violence and destruction and to politically promote the attainment of a just and lasting peace. Even during the war – and especially during it – the constant efforts to find a diplomatic solution must not diminish. [Read more…] about Ending the War with a Negotiated Peace: A Proposal from Detente Now

The window for a negotiated end to the war is closing rapidly. This autumn could be diplomacy’s last chance to secure any kind of a settlement. If that doesn’t happen, Ukraine’s fate will be decided on the battlefield and when the guns go silent, the Ukrainian state may not exist in any meaningful sense.

The trouble started in 2014. A US supported coup took out the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president…

The failure of successive U.S. administrations to distinguish between core and peripheral national security interests lies at the heart of much of the trouble that we now face.

Keeping channels for dialogue open with the Kremlin, Pope Francis has bucked the Western world’s refusal to take a mediated approach to ending the Ukraine war.

President Joe Biden recently appointed Victoria Nuland, Dick Cheney’s point person on Iraq, acting deputy secretary of State, the department’s number two official. He named Eliot Abrams, convicted perjurer and grim apologist for Central American torturers under Ronald Reagan, to his Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Bill Kristol, perfervid lobbyist for the Iraq War, caged $2 million to pay for TV ads urging Republicans to stay the course in Ukraine. War may or may not be the health of the state, but surely it is a tonic for neo-conservative armchair warriors.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive was doomed to fail from the start. A look at the lineup of forces on both sides and what the Ukrainian army was trying to do, coupled with an understanding of the history of conventional land war, make it clear that there was virtually no chance the attacking Ukrainian forces could defeat Russia’s defending forces and achieve their political goals.

Elite fears of Russian defeat are linked to an ultimate fear of Russian anarchy, which is shared by much of the population at large. They actually agree with some of the toughest anti-Russian elements in the US and eastern Europe: that complete defeat in Ukraine would lead to the fall of the Putin regime and that this in turn could lead to a period of chaos that would gravely weaken or even destroy the Russian Federation.

ACURA’s Nicolai Petro talks about why he thinks Ukraine can still be discriminating against its eastern, Russian-speaking citizens, even when the country has a president from the eastern, Russian-speaking part of the country. And, further shares his thoughts on the influence of far-right nationalism.

If the deaths of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and several of his mercenary group’s top commanders in a fiery plane crash Thursday were indeed deliberate and directed by Vladimir Putin, it could be said the Russian president has restored his authority by the methods of the Godfather’s Michael Corleone.

In the months leading up to the Wagner mutiny, Putin’s failure to suppress the increasingly bitter public feud between Prigozhin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was beginning to weaken his image within Russia’s elite as a decisive leader. Today, few in Russia will be doubting Putin’s capacity for decisive ruthlessness, whatever they might say about his morals.