American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Putin again had some interesting things to say, though one could scarcely glean this from Western press reports, and certainly not from the US media. Beelzebub is never deserving of serious attention.

The United States and Russia have been accusing one another of violating the INF Treaty in recent years.

Nation contributing editor and ACEWA Founding Board Member Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold war. This installment focuses on the Pentagon’s announcement that it will quickly quadruple the positioning of US-NATO heavy military weapons and troops near Russia’s eastern borders. The result, Cohen argues, will further militarize the new Cold War, making it more confrontational and likely to lead to actual war with Russia. The move is unprecedented in modern times.Except during Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia, making the new Cold War even more dangerous than was the preceding one. Russia will certainly react, probably by moving more of its own heavy weapons, including new missiles, to its Western borders, possibly along with a large number of its tactical nuclear weapons. The latter reminds us, Cohen points out, that a new and more dangerous US-Russian nuclear arms race has been under way for several years, which the Obama Administration’s decision can only intensify. The decision will also have other woeful consequences, undermining ongoing negotiations by Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov for cooperation on the Ukrainian and Syrian crises and further dividing Europe itself, which is far from united on Washington’s increasingly hawkish approach to Moscow.

Cohen ends by expressing despair that these ongoing developments have been barely reported in the US media and publicly debated not at all, not even by current presidential candidates and the moderators of their “debates.” Never before has such a dire international situation been so ignored in an American presidential campaign. The reason may be, Cohen adds, that everything that has happened since the Ukrainian crisis erupted in November 2013 has been blamed solely on the “aggression” of Russian President Putin—a highly questionable assertion and media-policy narrative.

I have acquired a copy of a recent report which analyzes the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy. I thought, therefore, that I should share the report’s conclusions with you.

According to Prof. Stephen Walt, one of the many problems with Hillary Clinton is that “Clinton and her advisors are deeply committed to the familiar strategy of liberal hegemony the United States has followed ever since the end of the Cold War.”

Russiagaters allege, with no evidence, that “Russia attacked America” in 2016, but many Russians believe-with reasonable cause-that the US has been attacking their country for 25 years.

From The Doomsday Machine, which was published this month by Bloomsbury. The book is an account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s drawn from Ellsberg’s experience as a consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House, drafting Secretary Robert McNamara’s plans for nuclear war.

The following seems to be a rather ominous development for freedom of speech in academia and journalism an attempt to discredit all dissenters from the Washington consensus on Russia.

Along with that concentration on Russia comes the deprioritization of the real-world effects of the Trump presidency and active political efforts to oppose them…

From the start the Obama neolib-necon narrative that at the root of the anti-Assad uprising was simply a peaceful expression of deep Syrian democratic aspirations proved a false one-just as did during Western regime change efforts in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Ukraine.