American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The name’s Steele, Christopher Steele.’ That’s the way a former MI6 operative who wrote the notorious dossier alleging collusion between Trump and Putin introduced himself at a debate at the Cambridge Union last October. ‘And as you can see, sir,’ he told the union president to giggles from the audience, ‘tonight I’ve come dressed in my usual work clothes: black dinner jacket and the signature James Bond Omega watch.’

Gabbard’s arc from independent war skeptic to simply another Republican Party apparatchik is not dissimilar to that of Vice President J.D. Vance, who has also spent the last few weeks quietly making excuses for a war that goes against the non-interventionist promises that he and Gabbard and Trump made on the campaign trail.

The record of the war presents a more complicated picture, and forces us to consider a difficult question: Has Russia already won?

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the U.S. has been seeking control over the ​Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, ‌which were damaged by mysterious blast in September 2022.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio when the U.S. would get tough on Russia during a G7 ministers meeting on Friday, sparking a sharp retort, according to three sources who attended the meeting.

Ukraine’s drive to join the European Union is facing increasing frustration. The obstacles are no longer coming from Russia, which has dropped its objection to Ukraine joining the EU: a key concession that grants a core demand of the Maidan protests of 2014. The frustration emerges because the EU cannot dramatically relax its rules of accession to satisfy Ukraine.

In the post–Cold War era significant steps were taken towards denuclearization. President Reagan had signed the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Gorbachev, which eliminated a number of nuclear missiles, and in the 1990s, following the dissolution of the USSR, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan all opted to return their nuclear weapons to the newly founded Russian Federation. It’s not to say this era had no nuclear proliferation; India joined the nuclear club in 1974 and achieved weaponization in the late 1990s, followed shortly after by Pakistan, whose technology was later used by North Korea when they achieved the same milestone.

Shortly after U.S. and Israeli bombs and missiles began falling in Tehran, Iranian missiles flew in all directions at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and others. The people living in these countries were justifiably terrified, which was a likely objective of those Iranian leaders who survived the first assaults. Tehran’s strategy may be to persuade America’s regional allies to reconsider their security alliances.

At long last, a European leader has said what should have been apparent from the very first: that the Israeli-U.S. war against Iran and Iran’s retaliation against energy exports from the Persian Gulf, make it urgently necessary for European Union countries to normalize relations with Russia and resume buying Russian energy.

In light of our recent wild rampage abroad, we need to revisit events in Russia from several weeks ago. They demand a full and open U.S. national investigation.

The years between 1989 and 1991 were an apocalyptic time in which old rules, values and habits were overturned, and flux became the new norm.

A peaceful settlement in Ukraine will have profound consequences for the entire European continent. The European members of the political West will find themselves at a crossroads: either acknowledge the transformed security realities and engage in equitable, meaningful dialogue with Russia—taking its legitimate concerns into account—or prepare for a protracted confrontation with the aim of military revenge. The latter path would represent the worst possible embodiment of the historical analogy with twentieth-century Finland, writes Valdai Discussion Club Programme Director Anton Bespalov.

French leaders and the French people should be very cautious about embracing extended deterrence obligations.

A growing majority of Ukrainians would now back a peace deal involving territorial concessions—rising to 61% overall and 86% among likely voters—if tied to EU membership by 2027, security guarantees and reconstruction, underscoring how “legitimacy & question wording matter hugely” 

Breaking international law seems to be a feature, and not a bug, of Trump’s actions, consistent with his admission that he is expressly not guided by international law, norms, traditions, or common decency, but by “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Moscow has insisted that there can be no compromise on the entirety of Donbas and Crimea being part of Russia. That demand is a difficult one for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to acquiesce to, and it is unfair. But little in war is fair, and nothing in this war has been fair.

During the interview, De Wever said he advocates normalising relations with Moscow, in part to facilitate access to cheap oil and gas supplies.

How did the United States rise from a fragile collection of colonies to the dominant power in the international system, and what does that history reveal about today’s great-power competition with China and Russia?

In this conversation hosted by the University of Chicago Graham School, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer – one of the world’s leading scholars of international relations theory and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics – examines 250 years of American foreign policy. Beginning with the founding, he contrasts the United States’ liberal language of natural rights with the hard nationalism of a new state determined to secure its independence, expand across the continent, and keep rival powers out of the Western Hemisphere.

A joint interview with scholar Pascal Lottaz.