American Committee for US-Russia Accord

…what a surprise it would be if the principal legacy for Obama were not the opening to Iran, even if it were to fulfill all positive expectations, but a deepening cold war, potentially even hot war, with Russia, writes American Conservative founding editor Scott McConnell.

The two generals nominated to sit atop the Defense Department’s hierarchy agree: President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the greatest threat facing the United States today.

U.S. Air Force Gen. Paul Selva — President Barack Obama’s pick to be the next vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he “would put the threats to this nation in the following order: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea…

Civil society in Russia appears to be coming into its own

What Rogin is doing isn’t reporting; it’s pandering.

Princeton and NYU Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics 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 expands upon last week’s, which focused on several highly questionable Washington narratives that imply the necessity of war with Russia.

According to Dr. Gordon Hahn yesterday’s violent clash between Right Sector and Ukrainian police does not bode well for the Poroshenko government in Kiev. Hahn notes, “President Poroshenko is now faced with the Hobson’s choice of either disarming PS [Right Sector] and other armed neo-fascist groups and their ‘battalions’ in order to establish the Maidan regime’s monopoly over the means of coercion or fashioning yet another compromise with neofascism.”

bit by bit, as a result of the Ukrainian blockade and the Russian and rebel responses to it, the DPR and LPR are turning into de facto independent states without any substantial economic ties to Ukraine. The longer this goes on and the deeper the process the goes, the harder it will be to reverse it.

Washington’s use of the “established deconfliction channel” to warn Moscow that it was readying its missiles might have, for now, reduced the risk of escalation. But the risk is still substantial. That the bombing came on the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entrance into World War I underscores the oft-made point that war is unpredictable.

Russia and the United States, who have favored opposite sides in the Syria conflict…are beginning to see eye to eye on one key point: the current path in Syria leads nowhere.

I lived most of my adult life during the Cold War, and, throughout, I never lost sight of one overwhelming reality — at any time, the Cold War could turn hot, resulting in the extinction of our civilization. Now, inexplicably, we are recreating many of the conditions of the Cold War.

When a prominent Washington peace activist was asked recently to name the leading anti-interventionists in the Senate, he responded, “Rand Paul and Mike Lee,” both Republicans. Democrats are in the midst of a furious struggle over what they stand for and who is included in their coalition, yet on foreign policy questions, their silence is deafening.

Back in the Cold War, the Soviets used to refer to the United States as the ‘glavnyi protivnik’ (‘main enemy’). When presidential candidate Mitt Romney declared in 2012 that Russia was America’s ‘number one geopolitical foe’, he was roundly condemned for hyperbole. Now, his point of view seems mainstream.

What grates on many realists is that Wolfowitz, twelve years removed from the U.S. government and over fourteen years since Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced, still refuses to admit that the Iraq War was a mistake.