American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The latest official to throw cold water on the MSNBC-led circus is President Obama’s former acting CIA chief Michael Morell. What makes him particularly notable in this context is that Morell was one of Clinton’s most vocal CIA surrogates.

President Donald Trump has received the first formal pushback to his desire, stated on the campaign trail, to explore the possibility of working with Russia to combat Islamic extremist movements in the Middle East.

What to make of the ongoing ceasefire violations and the constant remobilization and deployment of Russian forces along the border? Some have suggested that the same mindset that pushed for the rapid annexation of Crimea will inform the suggestion that Russia needs to consolidate the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine now before Ukraine has the ability to field better military forces.

If you recall the allegations against Russia and Syria during the Aleppo battle, they were largely to do with motive. Civilians allegedly died because they were targeted, hospitals and aid convoys, likewise, were hit because the Russians or Syrians were deliberately seeking to hit them.

This December, the world will witness the 70th anniversary of a publication best known for tracking the end of the world.  Founded in 1945 by veterans of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was launched in the wake of the devastating nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the goal of informing the public about nuclear policy. But since 1947, it has been known largely for a metaphorical device it introduced in June of that year: the Doomsday Clock, which measures how close humanity is to extinction.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War.  Cohen deeply regrets that the discussion must begin again with neo-McCarthyism, but it has become perhaps the most important factor in today’s American political-media establishment, and it is growing by the week.

Last week, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland opened a can of worms by dismissing references to her family’s World War II history as Russian disinformation. That wasn’t entirely true, and in the current climate, history is politics.

In 2014, history returned to Europe with a vengeance. The crisis over Ukraine brought back not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the 100th anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war. The great powers lined up, amid a barrage of propaganda and informational warfare, while many of the smaller powers made their contribution to the festival of irresponsibility.

AFTER THE Soviet Union collapsed, Richard Nixon observed that the United States had won the Cold War, but had not yet won the peace. Since then, three American presidents—representing both political parties—have not yet accomplished that task. On the contrary, peace seems increasingly out of reach as threats to U.S. security and prosperity multiply both at the systemic level, where dissatisfied major powers are increasingly challenging the international order, and at the state and substate level, where dissatisfied ethnic, tribal, religious and other groups are destabilizing key countries and even entire regions.

Democrats and liberals have climbed into bed with the neocons to push the “Russia-did-it” conspiracy theory as a way to “get Trump,” but this New McCarthyism has grave dangers, writes Robert Parry.

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

What’s surprising is how far back America’s evangelizing approach to Russia goes — and how it continues to distort our thinking today.