American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Cohen notes that twenty years ago, in 1997, President Bill Clinton made the decision to expand NATO eastward. That same year, in order to placate post–Soviet Russia, then weak and heralded in Washington as America’s “strategic friend and partner,” the Russian-NATO Founding Act was adopted. It promised that expansion would entail no “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” Cohen takes the occasion of this anniversary year to ask whether NATO’s eastward expansion has created more insecurity than the security it promised.

The Russian warplane recently shot down inside Turkey’s border with Syria fits a pattern of brinkmanship and inadvertence that is raising tensions and distrust between Russia and U.S.-led NATO. Low-level military encounters between Moscow and Washington are fanning escalatory sparks not witnessed since the Cold War. And there exists a small but steadily growing risk that this escalation could morph by design or inadvertence into a nuclear threat.

Who bears responsibility for the current tensions between America and Russia? There are many answers to that question but blame is overdue to President Bill Clinton…

The United States and its allies are stepping up military exercises and patrols just as its adversaries are. There’s even talk in NATO of training, for the first time since the Cold War’s end, for scenarios in which conventional war turns nuclear. In some ways, it’s like the early days of the Cold War redux, where the rules of the road are unclear and there is little communication between rivals.

As in the 1950s, America’s perceptions of its rivals, and theirs of Washington, are inordinately driven by the bellicose rhetoric that each side hears from the other. Russia, China and Iran are famous for their fighting words.

And American politicians are just as personal and pugilistic.

If Kiev really truly wants Donbass back it has no choice. It has to negotiate with the rebels and come to an agreement on autonomy and amnesty which satisfies the rebels…

The never-ending political infighting in the US could be viewed as an inevitable stage in an overly complex path the US must take to find its place in the world, one that is changing in spite of what the US wants or thinks. On the other hand, these political struggles make it even harder and more painful for the US and for the rest of the world to adapt to these changes.

Martin Hellman is Professor of Electrical Engineering (Emeritus) at Stanford University and a member of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. During the 1980s he was Director of the Beyond War International Scientific Initiative, and co-edited “Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking” with Anatoly Gromyko of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Published simultaneously in Russian and English late in 1987, this book how how humanity had to change to change to survive in the nuclear age. He writes:

The news that Turkish fighters shot down a Russian jet near the Syrian border, is unlikely to lead to a nuclear crisis …  but there is a chance that it could. If Russia had shot down one of the Turkish planes – or were to do so in a future such encounter to prevent more of its pilots being killed – we would be bound by Article 5 of the NATO Treaty to treat it the same as an attack on one of our own aircraft. Yet the word nuclear appeared nowhere in any of the coverage I saw: Reuters, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Telegraph, and the Guardian, and Yahoo News. 

If we keep ignoring that risk, eventually one of these provocative incidents will blow up in our faces. The time to recognize that danger and to start work on reducing the risk is now, not once a crisis exists. Neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev wanted to teeter on the nuclear abyss in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But both nations ignoring risks that should have been evident caused exactly that to happen. 

If Syria, or Ukraine, or the Senkakus, or one of the other global hot spots should escalate to a full-blown crisis, we can hope that it will end like 1962’s Cuban crisis, without the use of nuclear weapons. But, given how often such events occur and the horrendous consequences of a nuclear war, counting on a positive outcome would seem to constitute gross negligence. 

 

Last month, the Russia-Fearmongering-Industrial Complex grew ever greater when reports surfaced that Russian actors had purchased more than $100,000 worth of political ads to display on Facebook.

ACEWA Founding Board Member and Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. Cohen points out that in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on Paris, on November 13, French President Hollande announced a coalition with Russia against the Islamic State, ratified, it seemed, by the European Union when it evoked its mutual defense provision on behalf of France. All of the news reported by Batchelor at the top of the broadcast, Cohen argues, suggests that powerful forces and ramifying events are working against such a coalition.

Gathering clear data on the scope of these activities is both phenomenally important and phenomenally difficult.

What a difference a year – an eternity in geopolitics – makes. No one could see this coming; the ideological matrix of all strands of Salafi-jihadi terror – which Russia fights no holds barred, from ISIS to the Caucasus Emirate beating a path to the Kremlin and about to embrace Russia as a strategic ally.

It is perverse to find good in the tragic events that took place in Paris 10 days ago, but they did force Washington and the European powers finally to take seriously Moscow’s proposal for a united front against the Islamic State. It is an almost unspeakable pity it took so devastating an act, given the thought that such an alliance might have been enough to prevent Paris altogether. In effect, we watch now as the West acknowledges that there is something, some irreducibly humane value, that supersedes the incessant search for advantage in a strategic rivalry that need not beset us in the first place.

For several years, Cohen has argued that the new Cold War is more dangerous than its 45-year predecessor, which, it is often said, “we barely survived.” Here he updates and aggregates evidence for that argument. Meanwhile, many American participants and commentators continue to deny—for personal and political reasons—that there is a new Cold War.

This incident should (but of course will not) make American policy makers alive to the fact that alliances can be dangerous things. Far from ensuring stability and security, alliances that overextend themselves, like NATO, put the stronger members (like the United States) at the mercy of weaker member states that indulge in reckless behavior they otherwise would never have even contemplated. Such is the case with Turkey’s actions this morning, and such may very well be the case with the Baltic states and Poland vis-à-vis Russia in the not-too-distant future.