American Committee for US-Russia Accord

While the United States government was secretly preparing to bomb Syria, I was in my Siberian university classroom.

ONE DAY AFTER her network joined the rest of corporate media in cheering for President Trump’s missile attack on Syria, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was back to regular business: seeing Russian collaboration with Trump at work.

At this point, the primary consequence of Trump’s muscle-flexing has been to dramatically increase tensions with Assad’s most important ally, Russia. Defying the charge that he is “Putin’s puppet” has conveniently quieted Trump’s domestic critics and distracted from the investigation into his campaign, but it has also brought the United States much closer to a dangerous confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia.

Given the events of the past couple of weeks, including, but not limited to: the US Senate including a provision in the Defense Authorization Act which requires that 20 percent of the funds earmarked for Ukrainian security assistance be spent on lethal weaponry for Kiev; John McCain’s denigration of the Minsk II accords in a Washington Post editorial; and NATO’s decision to place troops and weapons on Russia’s western frontier, we thought it would be appropriate to re-run Sen. Bill Bradley’s recent piece on the Ukraine crisis in Time magazine.

Babi Yar’s commemorative memorial was vandalized nine times in 2015 and 2016, with everything from painted swastikas to an attempt on Rosh Hashana to burn down a menorah at the site. More recently, a Holocaust memorial in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil was painted with a swastika and SS runes.

For all of the reporting suggesting that Trump wants to conduct a “transactional” foreign policy, the reality is that the Kremlin is quite clear in its insistence that it will do nothing on credit and vague assurances of future American goodwill. This may explain why the promise of a Tillerson-Putin meeting, although never formally scheduled, now appears to have been revoked.

As the crisis in Ukraine approaches the year and a half mark, policymakers ought to be on guard against repeating the same mistakes that led to the crisis in the first place. With that in mind, we will occasionally be running articles aimed at shedding light on other potential areas of conflict between East and West with a focus on the several ‘frozen conflicts’ that dot the landscape of the post-Soviet space. The first in this occasional series is by a young scholar of Russia and the Caucasus, Pietro Shakarian.

Strategy, Clausewitz said, is about applying means to achieve ends. It follows that good strategy requires one first to select sensible and achievable ends, and second to ensure that one actually apply one’s resources in such a way as to advance towards those ends.

Jeffrey Carr, an international cybersecurity consultant, discusses the low evidentiary standard the US government and media has used to make very serious accusations about Russian hacking of Ukrainian military software and, by extension, the DNC emails. Carr says that CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity report – the basis for all these accusations – is the worst he has ever read.

In the decades since Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan began working together to end the Cold War, much has changed. Science and technology have reshaped global communication, finance, and culture. Terrorism and violent extremism threaten global stability, while climate change threatens the planet itself. But one grim element of the old order war remains a constant: Mankind still possesses the knowledge and means to destroy itself with nuclear weapons…

In aggressively asserting his country’s strength, Putin wants Russia to regain its status among the great nations contesting power and wealth with one another.

The events of this week have extinguished any glimmer of hope that may have been sparked by John Kerry’s diplomatic parley with the Russians in Sochi this past May. All the while, the administration, aided and abetted by a compliant Congress and a complacent media, stands idly by as the war parties on both sides of the Atlantic march on, unencumbered and virtually unopposed.

On MSNBC, Brian Williams was almost teary-eyed, waxing lyrical about the beauty of it all. On CNN, Fareed Zakaria hailed Trump’s moral awakening, arguing: “I think Donald Trump became the president of the United States” that night.

Throughout the Cold War, the superpowers were careful to avoid any such direct engagement with each other, however much they sponsored and equipped armed proxies. That was part of why Carter did not get into a direct military fight in Afghanistan. It would be most unwise to throw away such caution where the Russians are involved today.