American Committee for US-Russia Accord

I’m disappointed. Crushed even. The European Values think tank has just produced a report that contains a spreadsheet with the names of 2327 ‘useful idiots’, that is to say people who have appeared on RT… And what do you know? I’m not on the list!

The false analysis by the DC-tied circles tended to deliberately obfuscate the facts, since their allies in the Barack Obama administration and among the neo-cons outside it supported backing such groups in order to rid the region of the Syrian Baathist dictatorship…

Nation editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel and Nation contributing editor and ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen write:

The 130 people murdered in Paris on November 13 and the 224 Russians aboard a jetliner on October 31 confront America’s current and would-be policy-makers, Democratic and Republicans alike, with a fateful decision: whether to join Moscow in a military, political, diplomatic, and economic coalition against the Islamic State and other terrorist movements, especially in and around Syria, or to persist in treating “Putin’s Russia” as an enemy and unworthy partner

If the goal is defending US and international security, and human life, there is no alternative to such a coalition.

This article is the first in a trilogy examining how the West’s biases and wishful thinking have led to unrealistic and unmet expectations of imminent regime collapse in Russia.

The Turks shot down a Russian airplane over Syria. The facts are disputed. Turkey claims that the Russian plane violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds, and that it was given multiple warnings before being shot down. The Russians deny entering Turkish airspace, and the rescued navigator of the plane says that no warnings were given.

I can’t say who is telling the truth, but if it is the Turks, then they, and their NATO allies, are guilty of double standards. After the Syrians shot down a Turkish plane which had violated Syrian airspace in 2012, Turkish president Abdullah Gul complained that, ‘it is routine for jet fighters to sometimes fly in and out over [national] borders’, and the then Turkish Prime Minister (now President), Recep Tayyip Erdogan, remarked that, ‘a short term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack.’

As the Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the implausible to the absurd, almost every bad thing is blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the previously pristine Internet into a “sewer,” reports Robert Parry.

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.