Not only are today’s Clintons, Trumps, Democrats and Republicans implicated in American corruption hand-in-hand with Russians, but the Clinton administration and American elite and Russia-policy community are deeply implicated in the emergence of Russian corruption and oligarchs going back to the early 1990s…
VIDEO: Could a NATO build-up in Europe reignite the Cold War? (Featuring Amb. Jack Matlock)
It’s been a generation since the Cold War ended, a standoff that dominated much of the 20th century.But now echoes of that conflict are sounding again, as the U.S. and its allies encounter a resurgent Russia.
Chief foreign affairs correspondent for the PBS Newshour Margaret Warner reports.
Paul Robinson: Taking the Offensive
I won’t make any predictions for 2018. In the meantime, all of us who care about making the world a safer place should all do our own tiny little bit to calm people down and restore a bit of sanity.
The Right Way to Think About the Syria Talks (Samuel Charap, Jeremy Shapiro)
The Geneva talks may be formally described as an effort to bring together the Syrian parties, but the most they can actually accomplish is getting key external actors involved in the civil war, namely the United States and Russia, on the same page.
Holman W. Jenkins: A Year in Trump-Russia Hysteria
The Obama Administration Recklessly Escalates Confrontation With Russia (Stephen F. Cohen)
The Obama administration has just recklessly escalated its military confrontation with Russia. The Pentagon’s announcement that it will more than quadruple military spending on the US-NATO forces in countries on or near Russia’s borders pushes the new Cold War toward actual war—possibly even a nuclear one.
The move is unprecedented in modern times.
Stephen F. Cohen: As Russian Election Begins, Will Russiagate End?
Russian politician Alexi Navalny is calling for a boycott of next year’s presidential election after being barred from running over corruption charges. The Real News Network speaks to Professor Stephen F. Cohen about Navalny, the Russian election, and how Russians are viewing the never-ending Russiagate controversy in the US
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: 4 Distinguished Americans Join The American Committee for East-West Accord’s Board of Directors
The American Committee for East-West Accord is pleased to announce that former United States Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel; former United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Donald McHenry; Board Chair of the Roosevelt Institute, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt; and the Director for US Global Engagement at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, David Speedie, have joined the Committee’s Board of Directors.
Chuck Hagel was the 24th U.S. secretary of defense and a two-term Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska. Secretary Hagel was elected U.S. senator from Nebraska in the 1996 and 2002 elections and served from 1997 to 2009. While in the Senate, Hagel served on the Committee on Foreign Relations; the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; the Selection Committee on Intelligence; and the Committee on Rules and Administration. Hagel served as a U.S. Army infantry squad leader during the Vietnam War from 1967 to 1968 and was awarded two Purple Hearts
Donald F. McHenry served as Ambassador and United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1979 to 1981. Ambassador McHenry was Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 1981 to 2014. Prior to his appointment as UN Ambassador, Amb. McHenry served as United States Deputy Representative to the United Nations Security Council and also served as a member of President Carter’s transition staff at the Department of State before joining the United States Mission to the United Nations.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt is the President and CEO of Goodwill Industries of Northern New England and chairs The Roosevelt Institute in New York. Prior to joining Goodwill, Ms. Roosevelt held the position of Vice President, Global Corporate Citizenship for The Boeing Company. Previously, she served as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Program Development for the City of Chicago, as executive director of The Brain Research Foundation, an affiliate of The University of Chicago, and as State Director and then campaign manager for Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois.
David C. Speedie is Director for U.S. Global Engagement at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. In 2007–2008, Speedie was a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. David Speedie joined the Carnegie Corporation as a program officer in the cooperative security program and was appointed program chair in March 1993, a position he held for almost 12 years.
James Carden: Russiagate Is Devolving Into an Effort to Stigmatize Dissent
Fourteen former diplomats and intelligence officials branch off into new territory in their attempt to characterize journalism and political speech with which they disagree as acts of subversion on behalf of a foreign power.
Dutch ‘no’ on Ukraine pact would force rethink, minister says (Reuters)
The Dutch government would be obliged to reconsider its position on an EU pact establishing closer ties with Ukraine if it loses an upcoming referendum on the issue, the country’s foreign minister said, but he stopped short of saying a “no” vote would scupper the treaty.
Philip Bump: There’s still little evidence that Russia’s 2016 social-media efforts did much of anything
As it stands, the public evidence doesn’t support the idea that the Russians executed a savvy electoral strategy on social media to ensure Trump’s victory.
Clinton Stokes Fears Of Russians Coming To The Baltics, When They’re Actually Leaving (Kenneth Rapoza)
For the past year, there has been a debate in Washington as to whether or not the Russians were going to roll tanks into the Baltics. They took over Crimea “at gun point,” the saying goes, so their ex-Soviet enclaves along the Baltic Sea were surely next. It is no surprise then that presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated that concern during Thursday’s debate with Bernie Sanders.
Matthew Walther: The most respectable conspiracy theory in Washington
The Russia thing is a tedious and lurid spectacle, a shooting match, like Whitewater before it, in which armed participants are allowed to circle endlessly, at taxpayers’ expense, around invisible targets that they mysteriously never manage to hit but whose existence is as obvious to one group of partisan onlookers as it is unthinkable to the other.
Why Russian-Turkish Hostility Makes Sense (George Friedman)
STARTFOR’s George Friedman writes “Turkey and Russia are now both at critical points. Russia is trying to maintain its balance economically and strategically. Turkey is intersecting, simply by geography, with four destabilizing regions: Europe, Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia. Both countries have profound vulnerabilities and are therefore hyper-sensitive to the moves of the other.”
Andrew McCarthy: Was the Steele Dossier the FBI’s ‘Insurance Policy’?
While there is a dearth of evidence to date that the Trump campaign colluded in Russia’s cyberespionage attack on the 2016 election, there is abundant evidence that the Obama administration colluded with the Clinton campaign to use the Steele dossier as a vehicle for court-authorized monitoring of the Trump campaign.
Thousands flee as Russian-backed offensive threatens to besiege Aleppo (Reuters)
Tens of thousands of Syrians fled an intensifying Russian assault around Aleppo on Friday, and aid workers said they feared the major city could soon fall under a full government siege.
Nadezhda Azhgikhina: The Abyss Between Russian and US Media Just Got Wider
Hasty decisions made on both sides of the Atlantic are causing irreparable damage to journalism as a whole.
POPE, RUSSIAN ORTHODOX PATRIARCH TO MEET IN HISTORIC STEP (AP)
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis and the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church will meet in Cuba next week in a historic step to heal the 1,000-year-old schism that divided Christianity between East and West, both churches announced Friday.
Doug Bandow: Donald Trump Prepares to Escalate Confrontation with Russia over Ukraine
Most Americans were told Donald Trump won the presidential election last year. But his policy toward Russia looks suspiciously like what a President Hillary Clinton would have pursued.
New RAND Report Claims If Russia Started a War in the Baltics, NATO Would Lose (FP)
If Russian tanks and troops rolled into the Baltics tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days. That’s the sobering conclusion of war games carried out by a think tank with American military officers and civilian officials.