American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The United States has far fewer motives to militarize the Arctic than any other Arctic state.

For a learned perspective on what has been unfolding in Afghanistan we sat down with Dr. Anatol Lieven last week. Anatol is a member of the board of ACURA and senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown in Qatar and in the War Studies department at King’s College London. From 1985 to 1998 Anatol worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Southern Caucasus. His latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State, was published by Penguin in 2020. – JWC

Vaccine hesitancy at least partly reflects one of my core themes – the paradox of Russians’ view of the state: on the one hand, many want a socially interventionist state that protects them from harm (and protects them from the more coercive parts of the state itself!). On the other, they know its limitations, and moreover, they know too well the potential dangers of interacting with what is a fickle and rather callous bureaucratic machine (perhaps no more so than many Western states, if we’re honest).

The Delta variant is roiling Moscow with a sudden surge in coronavirus infections and fatalities, but life in Russia’s capital is proceeding largely as normal – for now.

On the eve of his meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden on September 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pulled the plug on three of his country’s television news stations—NewsOne, 112 and ZIK—accusing them of peddling “Kremlin-funded propaganda”.  A veteran of the broadcast media himself [he was previously a comedian], Zelensky’s action may perhaps be seen at first glance as largely symbolic.  It is, in fact, both inflammatory and short-sighted.

Appearing on Charlie Rose in January 1993, then-former assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke and Princeton University Russian studies professor Stephen F. Cohen discussed the unrest in Yeltsin’s Russia, the war in Bosnia, and the foreign policy problems President Clinton was about to inherit.

Treating Ukraine as an ally creates serious and growing perils for the American people.

In Anne Applebaum’s world, our repeated failures in the past 20 years are just a matter of a lack of will and insufficient firepower. If only it were so easy.

One would assume that U.S. foreign policy would undergo a full reset after all these embarrassing failures, but don’t count on it.

ACURA Board member and University of Rhode Island professor Nicolai Petro observes that “The COVID-19 pandemic has not affected relations between the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church in any particularly dramatic way, since the theological and historical context for such events is not new for either party…”