American Committee for US-Russia Accord

The Russia narrative dominates national discourse, as it has for months, and becomes progressively more removed from evidence.

Since the United States, in Legvold’s view, holds a “vastly stronger hand” than Russia, it has less to lose from attempting to build sustained cooperation on what Legvold sees as the defining issues of global security today.

The Russia hysteria that is sweeping Washington, DC must end before severe and irreversible damage is done both to American domestic politics and U.S. international standing.

When viewed in the alarming context of deteriorating political relations between Russia and the West, and the threats and counter-threats that are now becoming the norm for both sides in this evolving standoff, it may well be that the danger of an accident leading to nuclear war is as high now as it was in periods of peak crisis during the Cold War.

During the current crisis period in US-Russian relations (which began in roughly 2012), not a single outside voice or dissenter from the Washington foreign-policy community’s consensus view of Russia has appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Judis: Hillary Clinton’s argument was that if we had armed the so-called moderate rebels in 2012, as she and David Petraeus advocated, the results would have been different.

Landis: Syrian rebels were going to radicalize regardless of American largesse or arms.

Overall, Huntsman’s record suggests someone who is more of a political chameleon than a foreign-policy figure who is on Trump’s wavelength. Centrist? Realist? Neocon?

Our press seems to be in a feeding frenzy regarding contacts that President Trump’s supporters had with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak and with other Russian diplomats.

With most Russia-related stories these days, especially ones in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the best initial reaction is heavy skepticism.

Trump/Putin theories are increasingly the top concern that plugged-in “Resistance” types bring up at the highly-charged town hall meetings that have received so much attention of late.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy is preparing a list of websites that “undermine Ukrainian sovereignty” as part of an effort to uphold the country’s new information security doctrine, signed on February 25 by President Petro Poroshenko.

Pietro A. Shakarian, a PhD Candidate in Russian History at The Ohio State University, spoke to John Batchelor about the recent clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh. In their conversation, Shakarian and Batchelor discuss what lies behind the latest fighting in the region, Armenia’s relations with the EU and Russia, and much else besides. A must listen for anyone trying to understand the complex dynamics at play in the Caucasus.

Several Trump campaign advisers had business ties to Russia, so that must be nefarious, right? [Read more…] about What’s Behind the Putin Fantasies (Wall St. Journal)

TYT Politics reporter Michael Tracey, interviews Nation contributing editor and professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University Stephen F. Cohen. Michael and Dr. Cohen discuss Donald Trump and Russia among other things.

A large bulk of the article is devoted to what has now become standard – and very profitable – fare among East Coast news magazines: feeding Democrats the often-xenophobic, hysterical Russia-phobia for which they have a seemingly insatiable craving.

Is Putin’s Russia an enemy, as McCain seems to believe?

Before we can answer that question, we need to know what the new world struggle is about, who the antagonists are, and what the threats are to us.

With a resurgence in ultra-nationalist violence in Kiev and a rise of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and the Balts, we revisit the below piece from The New Republic which lauded, “the tiny group of nationalists in Ukraine” who “represent the country’s only hope of escaping apathy, rapacious corruption, and, eventually, dismemberment.”