Freedom party branch head calls for minorities to be ‘put in their place’ amid dispute over statue of leader linked to pogroms…
DIPLOMATS: NATO TO INVITE MONTENEGRO TO JOIN ALLIANCE (Associated Press)
Foreign ministers from NATO countries were expected to invite Montenegro to join the military alliance despite Russia’s objection to the move, diplomats said, the latest sign of discord between the West and Moscow even as they both battle the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq.
Paul Robinson: European Think Tank Designates 2,327 “Useful Idiots”
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!
PUTIN, OBAMA DISCUSS SYRIA POLITICAL SETTLEMENT (Associated Press)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Monday that he and President Barack Obama have a shared understanding on how to move toward a political settlement in Syria, but added that incidents like the recent downing of a Russian warplane by a Turkish fighter jet stymie broader cooperation against extremism.
Gordon Hahn: Who Got Syria Wrong and Who Got It Right
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…
Coalition or Cold War with Russia? (Stephen F. Cohen, Katrina vanden Heuvel)
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.
Gordon Hahn: Explaining the Failed Expectations of Russian Regime Change
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.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
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.’
Robert Parry: Blaming Russia for the Internet ‘Sewer’
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.
Russia says Turkey ‘shot down plane for IS oil’
Russia has accused Turkey of shooting down its warplane near the border with Syria in order to protect its oil trade with the Islamic State (IS) group.
Speaking at international talks on climate change in Paris, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the downing of the plane a “huge mistake”.
Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor: Have 20 Years of NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?
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.
Could U.S.-Russia Tensions Go Nuclear?
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.
Dave Majumdar: How Bill Clinton Accidentally Started Another Cold War
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…
Close Encounters: Risking an Accidental War
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.
Paul Robinson: Impossible Victory
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…
ISRAEL DEFENSE MINISTER SAYS RUSSIAN PLANE BREACHED AIRSPACE
According to the AP, the Israeli Defense Minister said on Sunday that there has been one incident so far of a Russian plane entering Israeli airspace and it was “immediately corrected in the communications channel.” He didn’t say when it occurred.
“Russian planes don’t intend to attack us and therefore there is no need to automatically, even if there is some kind of mistake, shoot them down,” he said.
Harry Cockburn: Russia warns Trump over Iran nuclear deal: ‘US withdrawal will seriously aggravate situation’
Russia has warned Donald Trump’s administration not to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal – saying America’s withdrawal would harm “predictability, security, stability and non-proliferation around the world”.
Russian jet hit inside Syria after incursion into Turkey: U.S. official
The United States believes that the Russian jet shot down by Turkey on Tuesday was hit inside Syrian airspace after a brief incursion into Turkish airspace, a U.S. official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official said that assessment was based on detection of the heat signature of the jet.
Dmitry Suslov: Egoistic Hegemonism
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.
Some Thoughts from Professor Martin Hellman of Stanford on the Nuclear Risk
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.