American Committee for US-Russia Accord

ACURA and the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven writes, “The ghastly bombings at Kabul airport Thursday resulting in the deaths of 12 U.S. Marines and as of this writing, 60 civilians, are the latest in a series of especially savage terrorist attacks reportedly by the Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), the local affiliate of the Islamic State of the Middle East. The growth of ISKP faces the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan with both a threat and an opportunity.”

Seen from a Russian perspective, Merkel’s record is rich but mixed. The fundamental reality is this: under Merkel’s leadership German foreign policy has become firmly embedded in collective policy-making within the NATO alliance (read: following the US’s guidance) and the European Union (read: taking account of the interests of the new members of the EU).

The lesson for would-be scholars: why bother trying to cultivate expertise in this area if it will only serve to disqualify you in the Blob?

Realists argued that left unchecked, NATO expansion would lead to an increasingly revanchist Russia and prove to be unsustainable. Its sustainability would be questioned as more and more small states sought out NATO’s umbrella to save them from increasing Russian revanchism, which would prove to be a burden on the alliance. No one even remotely sensible can argue that having Montenegro in NATO does anything for burden-sharing. NATO was supposed to be an alliance of equals based on a similar threat, not a protection racket or club to defend small satellites in faraway regions, or a club to spread liberal institutions.

The US and its allies cannot realistically protect Ukraine, which has a 1,200-mile land border with Russia. Making a pledge to defend Ukraine when it isn’t possible all but invites a challenge from Russia.

Something important, perhaps even portentous, has shifted in the geopolitical axis between Moscow, Ukraine, and the West.

Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies offers the tried and true Cold War theme of an essentially good and free West against an essentially bad and unfree East. This makes it all the more jarring when one of Dreher’s Hungarian interlocutors observes that thirty years of freedom had destroyed more cultural memory in Hungary than any previous era. “What neither Nazism nor Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” a Hungarian teacher tells him. The Western liberal idea resulted in a more complete uprooting of the person from “the past and its traditions, including religion” than even the Communist era had managed.

More than three and a half decades have passed since the start of the process of change in the Soviet Union known throughout the world as perestroika. The debate about its meaning and its legacy continues with undiminished intensity. All these years, perestroika has been in my thoughts. I have been trying to find answers to the questions put to me by scholars, journalists and ordinary people in the letters that I receive. They want to understand perestroika—and that means it has not been relegated to the past. The experience and the lessons of perestroika remain relevant today, both for Russia and for the world.