American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Spearheaded by actor and director Rob Reiner and Atlantic senior editor David Frum, CIR’s advisory committee, which includes war-hungry neoconservative scholar Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations, political scientist Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and former National Intelligence director James Clapper….

Appointment hearings for Jon M. Huntsman and A. Wess Mitchell were wholly in line with the beltway consensus on Russia.

Bloomberg View’s Leonid Bershidsky reports “Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden…Europeans too are involved in shaping the way Ukraine is governed, not just because they are donors — the U.S. is more important in that respect because of its influence on the IMF…”

They might have saved everyone a lot of time if they had simply said, “Kissinger, si, Kennan, no.”

Isis evidently does not have any doubts about the Russian air strikes being aimed at itself and cannot have done so since the raids started on 30 September, because an operation such as getting a bomb on to a plane at Sharm el Sheikh airport would take weeks to set up. There is a further misunderstanding about the Russian attacks on Isis and other salafi-jihadi armed groups in Syria. They are much heavier than anything being carried out by the US-led coalition, with 59 Russian strikes on one day recently compared to the US launching just nine.

Why, unlike during the preceding 45-year Cold War, is there no significant American mainstream opposition to the new (and more dangerous) one? Cohen poses this question as a kind of paradox for tonight’s discussion…

There’s a lot to unpack about the newly formed Committee to Investigate Russia, which aims to “help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.” Perhaps its most striking feature is that no Russia experts are involved; that’s a sign of the times.

The misrepresentation of Russia’s stated objectives in Syria and the Russian population’s reaction to President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in the war-torn country continues in U.S. mainstream media and think tanks

When alarms began to ring and a control panel flashed in front of Stanislav Petrov, a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel seated in a secret bunker south of Moscow, it appeared that the world was less than 30 minutes from nuclear war.

In this wide ranging interview, Stephen Kinzer wonders, “How would we react if the Russians had military maneuvers in Tijuana, or the Chinese opened a base in Montreal?…under international law and the principles of Westphalian independence, they have every right to do that. But in reality we would never tolerate that.

Thom Hartmann talks with Professor Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies & Politics at NYU and Princeton. Professor Cohen’s books, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution and, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, which examines the origins of the “New Cold War.” For the podcast, click below.

Dylan Royce, a Russian concentrator at the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, writes that “If Syria turns into Russia’s new Afghanistan, it could also become a proxy war between Russia and the U.S., with all its grave implications. The rebels Washington supports will accomplish little more than helping the radicals into power…Syria might fall under the rule of those who will cause the country, its region, and the West far more harm than the victory of Syrian President Bashar Assad (and, thus, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin) ever could have.

It is therefore time to accept that the U.S. has run out of moves in Syria.”

Then as now, arguments for arming Ukraine are based on disingenuous interpretations of past agreements and an equally reckless disregard for the present circumstances.

No one in their right mind, of course, would claim that a writer who tried to analyze the economic, social, and political differences between New York and Texas was somehow engaged in “anti-American propaganda,” or an attempt to prove that the United States is a “fictitious nation.” But when it comes to Ukraine, the current government and its supporters are rabid in attacking anyone who points out that Ukraine is not united in its desire to fulsomely embrace the European Union.