American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Exaggerated fear of foreign subversion can be more damaging to our democracy than external enemies.

Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on foreign-language propaganda, all that President Vladimir Putin has achieved outside Russia is the status of a Bond movie villain. He may enjoy it, especially since there’s no 007 in sight to tackle him, but his variety of pop stardom is growing into a problem for his country: He is seen as a bigger threat to the West than his actions warrant.

Former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen makes a dubious claim and offers an even worse recommendation…

The military leaders of the world’s most lethal nuclear-tipped states met in February, the first such meeting in three years. The two generals got together again earlier this month, once more in relative obscurity that belied their meetings’ tremendous importance.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fourth year, are at TheNation.com.) This installment focuses on the House’s hearings on what Democratic Representative Adam Schiff termed “the Russian attack on our democracy”…

WITH THE Cold War’s demise, the menacing Russia that long loomed over Europe seemed to vanish. The Russia of 1992 was just a fragment of its historic self in military punch and economic weight. Not even Russia’s still-formidable nuclear arsenal deflected perceptions of decline. It was inevitable, then, that Western policy makers would feel that this shrunken Russia was more to be ignored than feared. They were wrong.

Mensch is a British former Conservative MP and chick-lit author who these days spends most of her time on Twitter issuing frenzied denunciations of imagined armies of online “Putinbots.” She is—and this is no overstatement—one of the least credible people on the internet.

The situation in Ukraine and in insurgent areas of the Donbass is steadily deteriorating. This is proved by the clashes of the last few days, which, though limited, have certainly been the most violent since January 2015. The “Minsk 2” agreements are in a process of dissolution, and this largely due to the Kiev government. This was predictable. We must therefore review the situation in order to attempt to understand how we got here.

Gallup found that between 2006 and 2016 the percentage of Americans who expressed confidence in Congress as an institution fell from 19 percent to 9 percent. There is a reason for this.

Rep. Schiff and many other Democrats apparently want to broaden and deepen the existing confrontation between the United States and Russia without giving any thought to its possible consequences.

It is hard, given the tenor of the policy discussion on Capitol Hill over the past week, to escape the conclusion that President Obama is under intense pressure—not only from both political parties, but also, disturbingly, from the NATO supreme allied commander—to wade ever deeper into the Ukrainian morass.

The American people will be footing the bill — but, by and large, they haven’t heard much about our country’s planned trillion-dollar nuclear weapons upgrade.