American Committee for US-Russia Accord

Professor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new Cold War. This week they look at the new McCarthyism in the US political-media establishment, with Batchelor reporting on attempts in Congress to recreate a version of the McCarthy-era House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which conducted a witch-hunt that ruined many lives and chilled public discourse for years.

Working together in Syria should be only the beginning of broader cooperation in stabilizing the Middle East. Both Russia and the new US administration have proclaimed that fighting “jihadist terrorism” is their top priority. But there is a long way to go to reach a minimal common understanding of the targets in this fight.

When the Soviet Union came apart at the end of 1991, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the USSR had ended, a negotiated peace that benefited all parties had replaced the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain that divided Europe had vanished. We seemed to be on the threshold of a new Europe.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has stated his intention to work with Russia and Mr. Assad to defeat the Islamic State. The sooner America reaches out to Russia, ideally before January’s handover of administration, the better.

It should be a priority for the incoming Donald Trump administration to reexamine America’s role in the Ukraine crisis. Over the past year, Washington has focused solely on Kiev’s failure to tackle Ukraine’s endemic corruption, while ignoring another fundamental obstacle to Ukraine’s democracy: the country’s far-right forces.

Though there exists room for debate, Trump has staked out a few (surprisingly) reasonable policy positions: ‘spreading democracy’ through exercises in nation-building is not in our national interest; free-riding NATO allies should take on more of the collective burden; de-escalating tensions with Russia is to our benefit. Obviously, there are also numerous grounds for alarm, as well.

‘Extremists turn to a leader to protect Western values: Vladimir Putin’. So screams the headline of an article in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times. The article takes up an entire page, an indication that the newspaper’s editors consider its message to be of great importance.

After publishing a McCarthyistic “black list” that smears some 200 Web sites as “Russian propagandists,” The Washington Post refuses to apologize — and other mainstream media outlets pile on, writes Norman Solomon

The story of PropOrNot should serve as a cautionary tale to those who fixate on malignant digital influences as a primary explanation for Trump’s stunning election.

The current panic over propaganda led by the American media and the government is only the old panic in a new guise with social media and non-mainstream news outlets taking the bulk of the beating. I wonder if Russian propaganda would be Topic A had Hillary Clinton beaten Donald Trump.

While Trump and Putin may share the wish to repair ties between their countries, doing this will likely be a difficult and delicate process.

Like Wile E. Coyote running past the end of the cliff into thin air, NATO’s missile defense project keeps going even as its grounds disappear: in May, construction of a new missile defense site began in Poland, with the purpose of extending the capacity against the nonexistent threat of intermediate-range missiles.

The most important foreign policy task President-elect Donald Trump will face when he is inaugurated will be to restore cooperation with Russia to reduce the danger to the world posed by nuclear weapons, writes Amb. Jack F. Matlock, Former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Labelling the current tensions between Russia and the West as ‘war’ creates an unproductive, even dangerous, security mentality, and results in undesirable policies. One can see this process at work in the discussions about ‘Russian propaganda’ and Russian ‘information war’.

The crux of my advice to President-elect Trump was this: we must end this ill-conceived, counterproductive regime-change war immediately.

Our election system is embarrassing not for anything Putin allegedly did. In the “world’s strongest democracy,” this is the second presidential election in the past five in which the winner of the popular vote has lost.

Nation Contributing Editor Stephen F. Cohen and John Batchelor continue their weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. Cohen laments the escalation of neo-McCarthyism as exemplified by a November 25 Washington Post front-page article alleging that an array of American Internet sites have been propagating Russian-inspired “fake news.”

The point: not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War is over. We are living in a changed and changing world. Regimes are falling. Old parties are dying, new parties rising. Old allegiances are fraying, and old allies drifting away.

Even more disurbing than the Post’s shoddy journalism in this instance is the broader trend in which any wild conspiracy theory or McCarthyite attack is now permitted in U.S. discourse as long as it involves Russia and Putin – just as was true in the 1950s…

A shady website that claims “Russia is Manipulating US Opinion Through Online Propaganda” has compiled a blacklist of websites its anonymous authors accuse of pushing fake news and Russian propaganda.