President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s incoming national security adviser said on Sunday that the new administration would move quickly to renew the last remaining major nuclear arms treaty with Russia, even while seeking to make President Vladimir V. Putin pay for what appeared to be the largest-ever hacking of United States government networks.
Politico: Biden to tap more Obama vets to fill key national security roles
Victoria Nuland, will be nominated for the role of under secretary of State for political affairs…Nuland also previously served in the Obama administration, as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs.
Dan DePetris: Pompeo’s ‘swagger’ can’t hide embarrassing tenure as top diplomat
After reading Mike Pompeo’s glowing assessment of himself, one has to question whether it is he who is living in a fantasy world.
Times of Israel: Hundreds march in Ukraine in annual tribute to Nazi collaborator
Stepan Bandera led the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought alongside Nazi Germany during the Second World War, killed thousands of Jews and Poles.
Carnegie Endowment: Why the Baltics Behave As They Do Toward Russia
The Baltic crusade to democratize Russia by means of criticism will have to be wound down…
David Swanson: 10 Questions for Antony Blinken
The U.S. and Russian governments are loaded up with nuclear weapons. The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever before. What will you do to scale back the new Cold War, re-join disarmament agreements, and move us away from nuclear apocalypse?
Robert Wright: What is Progressive Realism?
Recently Michael McFaul, ambassador to Russia under President Obama, expressed puzzlement about a term he had been hearing-a label adopted by some people on the left who aren’t happy with the emerging outlines of the Biden administration. “In the debate about the future Biden foreign policy I’m seeing people self-identify as ‘progressive realists’
Norman Solomon: Neera Tanden and Antony Blinken Personify the ‘Moderate’ Rot at the Top of the Democratic Party
On a range of foreign-policy issues, Tanden has shown dedication to militarism again and again and again.
Michael Lind: Will Biden’s Administration Simply Represent a Third Obama Term?
Democratic foreign policy elites are much more Europhile and Russophobic than their Republican counterparts. In part this is a projection of domestic politics. In the demonology of the Democratic Party, Putin stands for nationalism, social conservatism, and everything that elite Democrats despise about the “deplorables” in the United States who live outside of major metro areas and vote for Republicans. The irrational hostility of America’s Democratic establishment extends beyond Russia to socially-conservative democratic governments in Poland and Hungary, two countries that Biden has denounced as “totalitarian.”
Marlene Laurelle: Memory Wars: The Question of Russian ‘Fascism’
With memory wars between Central and Eastern European states and Russia, the Second World War has become a useable past instrumentalized as a currency for legitimacy on the international scene.
John Kendall Hawkins: Doomsday ex Machina: Daniel Ellsberg and the Nuclear Gang
In The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg paints a doom and boom picture of the future, unless we immediately engage in negotiations with other nuclear armed nations to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and begin the dismantling of the Doomsday Machine that is programmed to destroy as much life as possible on the planet once global nuclear war begins – a perilously close possibility under the current postures and protocols of nuclear-armed governments.
VIDEO: Conversations with Gorbachev: Stephen F. Cohen and Mikhail Gorbachev
To close out the year, I thought it appropriate to pay tribute to the Committee’s late and much missed founder, Professor Stephen F. Cohen, by posting this documentary film from 1994 by Rosemarie Reed featuring conversations between Professor Cohen and Mikhail Gorbachev. [Read more…] about VIDEO: Conversations with Gorbachev: Stephen F. Cohen and Mikhail Gorbachev
VIDEO: John J. Mearsheimer: US Foreign Policy under President Biden
In a lecture to Ireland’s IIEA,Professor Mearsheimer discusses the foreign policy agenda of the President Biden administration. He shares his insights on the likely continuities as well as differences between the Biden administration’s policies and the policies pursued by President Trump over the past four years.
PODCAST: Thaddeus Russell Talks with James Carden
Russell and Carden discuss Trump, Biden and US-Russia relations and try to get at the root of our current predicament. They discuss the current hysteria with regard to Russia as well as the series of missteps and misunderstandings (on both sides) which have led to the current moment.
David Bromwich: The Demise of American Exceptionalism
The new Cold War with Russia was dragged onto center stage in 2013–2014. The process began at the Sochi Olympics and was locked in by the American reaction to the Russian reaction to the coup in Ukraine. The neoliberal elite is deciding, at this moment, whether to prefer Russia or China as the number-one U.S. enemy on the horizon. But must we have one?
George Beebe: Why America’s Cyber Strategy is Failing
Cyber technology is blurring the lines that once separated espionage and warfare.
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting: A CIA Officer Has a Headache. Media Blame Russia.
A 9,000-word story for GQ (10/20/20) by Julia Ioffe about the mystery ailment of a CIA officer in Moscow has become the unlikely subject of a weeks-long media storm…The GQ article includes official denials of the existence of a mystery weapon from both Russia and the CIA, who made clear that many of Ioffe’s claims were “simply not true”; Polymeropoulos claims that the agency flatly told him he was “making it up.”
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays From The American Committee for East-West Accord.
We will return on Monday December, 28.
Peter Rudolph: U.S. Geopolitics and Nuclear Deterrence in the Era of Great Power Competitions
In the U.S. security policy discourse, strategic competitions with a rising China and a resurgent Russia have moved into the spotlight.
Joe Cirincione: Nuclear Weapons Are Out of Control. But Biden Can Make the World Safer.
Obama’s ambitious nuclear agenda was blocked in part by the resistance of the nuclear bureaucracy, including some of his own appointees. If Biden wants to transform policy, he must appoint transformers.