War with Russia?: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate

Secret Diplomacy On Ukraine

DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITY BY WASHINGTON, PARIS, GERMANY, Moscow, and Kiev since early January, largely unreported in the American media, may be the last, best chance to end the Ukrainian crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed two trusted and experienced associates as his personal representatives to Kiev and to the anti-Kiev rebels in Donbass. A few days later, on January 13, President Barack Obama placed a call to Putin, the man he had vowed to “isolate” in international affairs, with Ukraine a priority of their discussion. Two days later, a leading American and Russian opponent of negotiations, Victoria Nuland and Vyacheslav Surkov, met privately in a remote Russian enclave. On January 18–19, representatives of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande met with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev.

At issue were two essential elements of the Minsk Accords, drafted by Merkel and Hollande and ratified by Putin and Poroshenko but resisted for many months by Poroshenko: constitutional legislation in Kiev granting the rebel regions a significant degree of home rule; and the legitimacy of forthcoming elections in those regions. All sides reported significant progress, though Poroshenko said he lacked sufficient votes in the Ukrainian Parliament, a tacit admission he fears the possibility of a violent backlash by armed ultranationalist forces.

Dire problems at home have compelled all of these leaders to undertake the intense negotiations, problems ranging from Europe and Syria to Russia’s economic woes, as well as their own political standing at home. In this context, the US media-political narrative is wrong about what Putin wants in Ukraine: not a permanently destabilized country, as is incessantly reported, but a peaceful neighbor that does not threaten Russia’s vital economic or security interests—or permanently divide millions of inter-married Russian-Ukrainian families.

These negotiations face many obstacles—in particular, powerful opposition in Washington and NATO. But the secret diplomacy represents a possible turning point, a fork in the road, one that will test the qualities of the leaders involved and could shape their historical reputations, first and foremost those of Presidents Obama and Putin.

The Obama Administration Escalates Military Confrontation With Russia

THE PENTAGON HAS ANNOUNCED IT WILL quickly quadruple the positioning of US-NATO heavy weapons and troops near Russia’s western borders. The result will be to further militarize the new Cold War, making it more confrontational and more likely to lead to actual war.

The move is unprecedented in modern times. Except for Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, Western military power has never been positioned so close to Russia, thereby making the new Cold War even more dangerous than was the preceding one.

Russia will certainly react, probably by moving more of its own heavy weapons, including new missiles, to its Western borders, possibly along with tactical nuclear weapons. This should remind us that a new and more dangerous US-Russian nuclear arms race has also been under way for several years. The Obama administration’s decision can only intensify it. The decision will have other woeful consequences, undermining ongoing negotiations by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for cooperation on the Ukrainian and Syrian crises and further dividing Europe, which is far from united on Washington’s increasingly hawkish approach to Moscow.

We can only despair that these ongoing developments have barely been reported in the US media and publicly debated not at all, not even by current American presidential candidates or raised by moderators of their “debates.” Never before has such a dire international situation been so ignored in a US presidential campaign. The reason may be that everything which has happened since the Ukrainian crisis erupted in 2014 has been blamed solely on the “aggression” of Russian President Putin—a highly questionable assertion but an orthodox media narrative.

Another Turning Point in the New Cold War

UKRAINE REMAINS THE POLITICAL EPICENTER OF the new Cold War, but Syria is where it may become a hot war. The Syrian ceasefire agreement—brokered by Secretary of State Kerry and his Russian counterpart Lavrov, and emphatically endorsed by Russian President Putin but less so by President Obama—offers hope on several levels, from the suffering Syrian people to those of us who want a US–Russian coalition against the Islamic State and its terrorist accomplices, and thus the possibility of diminishing the new Cold War.

The actual chances of a successful ceasefire are slim, due partly to the number of combatants and lack of a monitoring mechanism, but mainly to powerful forces opposed to the ceasefire both in Washington and Moscow. American opposition is already clear from statements by leading politicians, from Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s clear dissatisfaction with Kerry’s negotiations with Moscow and from anti-ceasefire reports and editorials in the establishment media.

At the same time, Putin’s unusual personal ten-minute announcement of the ceasefire on Russian television suggests that some of his own military-security advisers are opposed to the agreement, for understandable reasons. They want to pursue Moscow’s military success in Syria achieved since it intervened in September 2015. The ceasefire is now Putin’s own diplomatic policy, leaving him vulnerable to the commitment of President Obama, who has previously violated agreements with the Kremlin, most recently and consequentially by disregarding his pledge not to pursue regime change in Libya.

In Ukraine, President Poroshenko continues to demonstrate that he is less a national leader than a compliant representative of domestic and foreign political forces. Having again promised Germany and France that he would implement the Minsk Accords for ending Ukraine’s civil war, which they designed, he promptly reneged, bowing to Ukrainian ultra-right movements that threaten to remove him. And having called for the ouster of his exceedingly unpopular Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk—“our guy,” as the US State Department termed him in 2014 and still views him—Poroshenko then instructed members of his party to vote against the parliamentary motion, leaving Yatsenyuk in office, at least for now.

With Washington, and Vice President Joseph Biden in particular, widely seen to be behind this duplicity, Poroshenko increasingly resembles a pro-consul of a faraway great power. At the same time, on the second anniversary of the violent Maidan protests that brought to power the current US–backed government, the State Department hailed the “glories” of what is now becoming a failed Ukrainian state and ruined country.

The Obama Administration Attacks Its Own Syrian Ceasefire

THE US-RUSSIAN-BROKERED CEASEFIRE IN SYRIA PRESENTS an opportunity to deal a major blow to the Islamic State, greatly diminish the Syrian civil war, and generate cooperation between Washington and Moscow elsewhere, including in Ukraine. The agreement is, however, under fierce attack on many fronts. US “allies” Turkey and Saudi Arabia are threatening to disregard the ceasefire provisions by launching their own war in Syria. In Washington, Secretary of Defense Carter and his top generals informed the White House and Congress that Secretary of State Kerry’s agreement with Moscow is a “ruse,” and that Putin’s Russia remains the “No. 1 existential threat” to the United States—charges amply echoed in the American mainstream press.

Much is at stake. The “Plan B” proposed by Carter apparently means a larger US military intervention in Syria to create an anti-Russian, anti-Assad “safe zone” that would in effect partition the country. Viewed more broadly, this would continue the partitioning of political territories that began with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s and now looms over Syria, Ukraine, and possibly even the European Union.

Moreover, though today’s severe international crises get scant attention in the ongoing US presidential campaigns, candidate Hillary Clinton has a potentially large and highly vulnerable stake in the Syrian crisis. As documented by a two-part New York Times investigation, then-Secretary of State Clinton played the leading role in the White House’s decision to topple Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. That folly led to a terrorist-ridden failed state and growing bastion of the Islamic State. Clinton’s campaign statements suggest that she does not support Kerry’s initiatives but instead a replication of the Libyan operation in order to remove Syrian President Assad—a version, it seems, of Carter’s “Plan B.”

Meanwhile, there is the familiar (and meaningless) accusation that Putin has “weaponized information,” including about Syria. A critical-minded reader should ask whether US mainstream information is any more reliable than Russia’s.

Was Putin’s Syria Withdrawal Really a “Surprise”?

WHY HAVE PURPORTED US EXPERTS BEEN repeatedly surprised by what President Vladimir Putin does and does not do? Clearly, they do not read or listen to him.

When Putin began the air campaign in Syria in the fall of 2015, he announced that it had two purposes. To bolster the crumbling Syrian Army so it could fight terrorist groups on the ground and prevent the Islamic State from taking Damascus. And thereby to bring about peace negotiations among anti-terrorist forces. Putin said he hoped to achieve this in a few months.

In short, mission, in Putin’s words, now “generally accomplished,” though you would not know it from American media reports. US policy- makers and pundits seem to believe their own anti-Putin propaganda, which for years has so demonized him that they cannot imagine he seeks anything other than military conquest and empire building. Nor can they concede that Russia has legitimate national security interests in Syria.

They similarly do not understand what Putin hopes to achieve: a de-militarization of the new Cold War. In particular, if the end of Russia’s Syrian bombing campaign abets peace negotiations under way in Geneva or anywhere else, the diplomatic process could spread to Ukraine, another militarized conflict between Washington and Moscow.

Also unnoticed, Putin’s decision to withdraw militarily from Syria, even though only partially, exposes him to political risks at home, where he is, we need to recall, considerably less than an absolute dictator. Hard-liners in the Russian political-security establishment—de facto allies of Washington’s own war party—are already asking why he stalled the achieved Russian-Syrian military advantage instead of taking Aleppo, pressing on toward the Syrian-Turkish border, and inflicting more damage on ISIS. Why, they ask, would Putin again seek compromise with the Obama administration, which has repeatedly “betrayed” him, most recently in Libya in 2011 and by its anti-Russian coup in Kiev in 2014? And why, they also ask, if Washington perceives the Syrian withdrawal as “weakness” on Putin’s part, will the United States not escalate its “aggression” in Ukraine?

All this comes as Russia’s economic hardships have enabled Putin’s political opponents at home, the large Communist Party in particular, to try to mount a new challenge to his leadership. But the gravest threat to his clear preference for diplomacy over war is less his domestic critics than the Obama administration, which seems not to have decided which it prefers.

Trump vs. Triumphalism

WHATEVER ELSE ONE MAY THINK ABOUT Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, his foreign policy views expressed, however elliptically, in a Washington Post interview this week should be welcomed. They challenge the bipartisan neocon/liberal interventionist principles and practices that have guided Washington policy-making since the 1990s—with disastrous results.

That policy-making has involved the premise that the United States is the sole, indispensable superpower with a right to intervene wherever it so decides by military means and political regime changes. In the process, Washington has used select NATO members (“coalitions of the willing”) as its own United Nations and rule-maker. In recent years, from Iraq and Libya to Ukraine and Syria, the results have been international instability, wars (unilateral, proxy, and civil), growing terrorism, failed “nation building,” mounting refugee crises, and a new Cold War with Russia.

Trump seems to propose instead diplomacy (“deals”) toward forming partnerships, including with Russia; rethinking NATO’s mission; urging Europe to take political and financial responsibility for its own crises, as in Ukraine; and perhaps diminishing America’s military footprint in the world. In effect, a less missionary and militarized American national-security policy.

Trump may be calling on an older Republican foreign policy tradition. In any event, he appears to be advocating two realist perspectives. The world is no longer unipolar, pivoting around Washington; and the United States must share and balance power with other great powers, from Europe to Russia and China.

The orthodox bipartisan establishment, Republicans and Democrats alike, have reacted to Trump’s proposals as though he is the foreign policy anti-Christ, leveling all-out assaults on his remarks. It is possible that this confrontation might lead, if the mainstream media do their job, to the public debate over US foreign policy that has been missing for twenty years, certainly during the 2016 presidential campaign.

A Fragile Mini-Détente In Syria

BY REGAINING CONTROL OF PALMYRA, A major and ancient city, the Syrian army and its ground allies, backed by Russian air power, have dealt ISIS its most important military defeat. The victory belies the US political-media establishment’s allegations that President Putin’s six-month military intervention was a sinister move designed to thwart the West’s fight against terrorism. Instead, it has gravely wounded the Islamic State, whose agents were behind recent terrorist assaults on Paris and Brussels.

This comes in the context of fledgling US–Russian cooperation in Syria, a kind of mini-détente brokered by Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. Not surprisingly, these positive developments are being assailed by the US policy-media war party, which has redoubled its vilification of Putin. Preposterously, for example, he is accused of “weaponizing the migration crisis” in Europe, even though the crisis began long before Russia’s intervention in Syria. (If the intervention continues to be successful, it might eventually diminish the number of immigrants fleeing that war-torn, terror-ridden country.)

Putin is clearly behind Lavrov’s initiatives, even meeting with Kerry several times. Obama’s position, however, remains unclear. And neither he nor the US commander of NATO congratulated or otherwise applauded the Russian-Syrian victory in Palmyra, while Obama again went out of his way to insult Putin personally (twice).

With White House backing, the Kerry-Lavrov mini-détente might extend to the political epicenter of the new Cold War, Ukraine. Instead, Washington is seeking to make the US-born Natalie Jaresko prime minister of Ukraine, putting an American face on the ongoing Western colonization of the Kiev government. Jaresko is also the candidate of the US-controlled IMF, on which Kiev is financially dependent but whose demands for austerity measures and “privatization” of state enterprises will almost certainly further diminish the government’s popular support, abet the rise of ultra-right-wing forces, and worsen Kiev’s conflict with Russia.

Donald Trump has emerged as the only American presidential candidate to challenge the bipartisan policies that contributed so greatly to this new Cold War. Predictably, the US national security establishment has reacted to Trump with a version of the preceding Cold War’s red-baiting. Thus, Hillary Clinton charged that Trump’s less militarized proposals would be like “Christmas in the Kremlin.” The mainstream media have taken the same approach to Trump, thereby continuing to deprive America of the foreign policy debate it urgently needs.

“Information War” vs. Embryonic Détente

THE KREMLIN IS CHARGING THAT A spate of Western news allegations against President Putin are designed to disrupt US-Russian relations at a critical point. The allegations include not only the Panama Papers investigation of Kremlin offshore investments but also apartments purchased for Putin’s daughters, his “suspected” involvement in the Washington death of a former top Russian official, and even a rumored romance between the Russian president and Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife.

Whether or not this is an organized “information war” is unclear, but similar anti-Kremlin “news” appeared regularly during the preceding 40-year Cold War when relations seemed headed toward détente. This is such a moment in the new Cold War, as negotiations between Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov suddenly seem promising, especially in regard to the Syrian ceasefire and possibly even Ukraine.

Why, then, in the aftermath of the Syrian-Russian victory over the Islamic State at Palmyra and elsewhere, are “moderate oppositionists” backed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey violating the ceasefire agreement by attacking Syrian forces? And why the sudden spate of news reports, apparently inspired by the Obama administration, about Putin’s alleged personal “corruption?” They can only be intended to present him as an unfit US ally in Syria or anywhere else.

But the Panama Papers did more political damage to Petro Poroshenko, president of the Washington-backed government in Kiev. They revealed that he had personally established offshore accounts and, still worse, while his Ukrainian army was suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine in August 2014. (Unlike Putin, Poroshenko and his offshore accounts were named in the investigation.)

With the Kiev government already in deep political and economic crisis, this is a further blow to Poroshenko’s standing with the Ukrainian elite and people. There are already calls for his impeachment. How will the Obama administration deal with this latest crisis of its “Ukrainian project,” as it is sometimes derisively termed, which has all but wrecked Washington’s relations with Moscow?

Among the current American presidential candidates, only Donald Trump continues to say anything meaningful and critical about US bipartisan foreign policy. In effect, he has asked five fundamental (and dissenting) questions. Should the United States always be the world’s leader and policeman? What is NATO’s proper mission today, 25 years after the end of the Soviet Union and when international terrorism is the main threat to the West? Why does Washington repeatedly pursue a policy of regime change—in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and now in Damascus, even though it always ends in “disaster”? Why is the United States treating Putin’s Russia as an enemy and not as a security partner? And should US nuclear-weapons doctrine adopt a no–first use pledge?

Trump’s foreign policy questions are fundamental and urgent. Instead of engaging them, his opponents (including President Obama) and the mainstream media dismiss them as ignorant and dangerous. Some of his outraged critics are even branding him “the Kremlin’s Candidate”—thereby anathematizing alternative views and continuing to shut off the debate our country so urgently needs.

The Crisis of the US “Ukrainian Project”

UKRAINE REMAINS THE POLITICAL EPICENTER OF a new Cold War that prevents Washington and Moscow from cooperating on issues of vital national security, most recently mounting threats of terrorism, potentially nuclear terrorism, in Europe and, soon no doubt, elsewhere.

Petro Poroshenko, president of the US-backed Kiev government, has suffered a recent succession of political blows, including right-wing and “liberal” threats to overthrow him; an inability to appoint a new prime minister; a Dutch referendum vote against giving his government the European Union partnership he wants; the Panama Papers revelations about his personal offshore accounts; and more. The US political-media establishment blames Poroshenko’s problems on Ukraine’s rampant financial corruption and on the “aggression” of Russian President Putin, but the underlying cause is the real political history of Poroshenko’s “Maidan Revolution” regime.

As the second anniversary of Ukraine’s civil war (and US-Russian proxy war) approaches, we need to recall some of the disgraceful episodes of the proclaimed “Revolution of Dignity.” That history includes the following episodes:

• The violent overthrow of Ukraine’s constitutionally elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014.

• Kiev’s refusal to seriously investigate the “Maidan snipers,” whose killings precipitated Yanukovych’s ouster, assassins who now seem to have been not his agents, as initially alleged, but those of right-wing Maidan forces.

• The new government’s similar refusal to prosecute extreme nationalists behind the subsequent massacre of pro-Russian protesters in Odessa shortly later in 2014.

• And the new Maidan government’s unwillingness to negotiate with suddenly disenfranchised regions of Eastern Ukraine, which had largely voted for Yanukovych, and instead to launch an “anti-terrorist” military assault on them.

• Even Poroshenko’s subsequent election as president was questionably democratic, opposition regions and parties having been effectively banned.

All this was done, and not done, officially in the name of “European values” and in order to “join Europe,” and with the full support of the West, particularly the Obama administration. Two years later, the Ukrainian civil war has taken nearly 10,000 lives, created perhaps 2 million refugees, empowered armed quasi-fascist forces that threaten to overthrow Poroshenko, and left the country in near economic and social ruin.

The Dutch referendum was not the first sign that the European Union is wearying of the disaster it helped to create. Two of its top officials had already stated that Kiev actually had no chance of joining the European Union for “20 to 25 years.” More and more Europeans are asking why their leaders forced Kiev in 2013 to choose between the EU and its traditional trading partner, Russia, instead of embracing Putin’s proposal for a three-way economic arrangement that would have included Russia.

In Cold-War Washington and its media, the question as to why the Obama administration also imposed the choice on Ukraine is not even raised. There is only more blaming of “Putin’s Russia” for a tragedy that continues to unfold. For a truer understanding, look back to its origins.

Is War With Russia Possible?

DURING THE PAST TWO WEEKS, THE Obama administration appears to have been undermining cooperation with Moscow on three new Cold War fronts.

It has refused to accept President Putin’s compelling argument that the Syrian army and its allies are the only “boots on the ground” fighting the Islamic State effectively, currently around the pivotal city of Aleppo. Instead, Washington and its compliant media are condemning the Syrian-Russian military campaign against “moderate” anti-Assad fighters in the area, many of them actually also jihadists. At risk are the Geneva peace negotiations brokered by Secretary of State Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov.

Regarding the confrontation over Ukraine, where Kiev’s political and economic crisis grows ever worse, the best hope for ending that civil and proxy war, the Minsk Accords, was virtually sabotaged at the UN, where US Ambassador Samantha Power claimed the accords require Russia returning Crimea to Ukraine. In fact, Crimea is not even mentioned in the Minsk agreement.

And in Europe, where opinion mounts favoring an end to the economic sanctions against Russia—as evidenced by the Dutch referendum against admitting Ukraine to the European Union and by the French Parliament’s vote in favor of ending the sanctions—the Obama administration (not only Ambassador Power but President Obama himself) is lobbying hard against such a step when the issue comes up for a vote this summer.

Meanwhile, US-led NATO continues to increase its land, sea, and air build-up on or near Russia’s borders. Not surprisingly, Moscow responds by sending its planes to inspect a US warship sailing not far from Russia’s military-naval base at Kaliningrad. Preposterously, having for two decades steadily moved NATO’s military presence from Berlin to Russia’s borders, and now escalating it, Washington and Brussels accuse Moscow of “provocations against NATO.” But who is “provoking”—“aggressing” against—whom? The NATO buildup can only stir in Russians memories of the Nazi German invasion in 1941, the last time such hostile military forces mobilized on the country’s frontier. Some 27.5 million Soviet citizens died in the aftermath.

Though not reported in the US media, an influential faction in Kremlin politics has long insisted, mostly but not always behind closed doors, that the US-led West is preparing an actual hot war against Russia, and that Putin has not prepared the country adequately at home or abroad. During the past two weeks, this conflict over policy has erupted in public with three prominent members of the Russian elite charging, sometimes implicitly but also explicitly, that Putin has supported his “fifth column” government headed by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. Critics are not seeking to remove Putin; there is no alternative to him and his public approval ratings, exceeding 80 percent, are too high.

But they do want the Medvedev government replaced and their own policies adopted. Those policies include a Soviet-style mobilization of the economy for war and more proactive military policies abroad, especially in Ukraine. In this context, we should ask whether US and NATO policy-makers are sleepwalking toward war with Russia or whether they actively seek it.

Stalin Resurgent, Again

IN ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF UNINFORMED COVERAGE of Russia, American media are misrepresenting the current upsurge of pro-Stalin sentiments as unique to the Putin era. In public opinion surveys, nearly 60 percent of Russians asked now view the despot as a positive figure in their country’s history.

Having studied and written about the Stalin era and its legacy for many decades, most recently in my book The Victims Return, I have often explained that Russia has been deeply divided over Stalin’s historical role ever since his death in 1953, 63 years ago.

Looking back, Russians see two towering mountains, each informed by contested history. On one side, a mountain of Stalin’s achievements in the form of industrialization and modernization in the 1930s, however draconian, that prepared the county, they insist, for the great victory over Nazi Germany in 1941–1945. And on the other, a mountain of human victims resulting from Stalin’s brutal forced collectivization of the peasantry and Great Terror with its Gulag of torture prisons, mass executions, and often murderous forced labor camps, both of which killed millions of people.

Russian and Western historians, with access since the 1990s to long closed archives, are still trying to strike a scholarly balance, but for ordinary Russians the balance is more directly affected by their perceptions of their own well-being at home and of Russia’s national security. Positive views of Stalin do not mean they want a new Stalin in the Kremlin or a recapitulation of Stalinism, but that the despot is for many a historical, and still relevant, symbol of a strong state, law and order, and national security.

These conflicts over Stalin’s reputation began publicly long ago, in the 1950s under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who assailed the personal cult created by Stalin. They continued under Leonid Brezhnev when the disputes were muffled by tightened censorship. They burst fully into the open during Gorbachev’s attempted anti-Stalinist reformation known as glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and during the Yeltsin 1990s, when economic and social hard times afflicted most Russian citizens and caused Stalin’s popular ratings to surge again. And, of course, they continue under Putin.

There are three American media misrepresentations regarding the most recent resurgence of pro-Stalin sentiments. Under Putin, the Stalinist past is not again being censored. Anti-Stalinist historians, journalists, filmmakers, TV producers, and others continue to present their work to the public. Today, the horrors of the Stalin era are widely known in Russia. Second, nothing remotely akin to historical Stalinism is present or unfolding in Russia today, contrary to assertions by several leading US newspapers.

And third, Putin, who has had to try politically to straddle and unite profoundly conflicting eras in Russian history—Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet—is not himself, in words or deeds, a Stalinist. To the contrary, due to his personal support there is now in Moscow a large, modern State Museum of the History of the Gulag and currently under construction a national monument memorializing Stalin’s victims, first called for by Khrushchev in 1961, but never even begun under any of Putin’s predecessors. (For perspective, note that in Washington there is still no national monument dedicated to the victims of American slavery.)

Nor is Stalin merely an historical issue in Russia. Intensified moments during the preceding Cold War always inflated pro-Stalin sentiments in Soviet Russia. This is happening again today in response to NATO’s perceived military encirclement of Russia, from the Baltics to Ukraine and Georgia, and in response to the Western sanctions that have contributed to economic hardships for many Russians. How this will affect Putin’s leadership and own popular support (still well above 80 percent) remains to be seen. But it is worth noting that the Russian Communist Party, the second largest in the country and itself somewhat divided over the Stalinist past, has decided to put Stalin’s image on its campaign materials for the forthcoming parliamentary elections in September.

Has Washington Gone Rogue?

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE recent escalation of Washington’s anti-Russian behavior? Consider only its growing NATO military buildup on Russia’s western borders, refusal to cooperate with Moscow against the Islamic State in Syria, and the Obama administration’s unwillingness to compel the US-backed government in Kiev to implement a negotiated settlement of the Ukrainian civil war. Is an undeclared US war against Russia already underway? Given that many US allies are unhappy with these developments, has Washington gone “rogue”? And does the recent spate of US warfare “information” reflect this reality?

Undoubtably, there is some alarming evidence. NATO’s “exercises” on Russia’s borders on land, sea, and in the air are becoming permanent. The Obama administration refuses to separate its “moderate oppositionists” in Syria from anti-Assad fighters who are affiliated with terrorist groups, despite having promised to do so. There is the unprecedented public demand by 51 State Department “diplomats” that Obama launch air strikes against Assad’s Syrian army, which is allied with Moscow, even if it might mean “military confrontation with Russia.” And we have the questionable allegation that the Kremlin hacked files of the Democratic National Committee followed by a NATO statement that hacking a member state might now be regarded as war against the entire military alliance, requiring military retaliation.

Some of Washington’s European and other allies clearly are unhappy with these developments, even opposed to them. The German Foreign Minister, for example, denounced NATO’s ongoing buildup as “war-mongering.” Several major European countries, which (unlike the United States) are suffering the reciprocal costs of economic sanctions on Russia are expressing discontent with them. There is the relative success of Russia’s international economic conference in St. Petersburg last week, hosted by President Putin personally, whom the Obama administration continues to try to “isolate.” There is even a growing political and security relationship between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Russian president.

Whether or not Washington’s behavior constitutes undeclared war, Putin warned, at the international conference, that if such US conduct continues it will mean “war.” As a result, Moscow is preparing for the worst, bringing the two nuclear superpowers closer to their worst confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Some American pundits think warlike steps by Washington will benefit Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. She has long and clearly associated herself with hardline US policies toward Russia, but the question is larger. Even though a presidential election is supposed to feature the best aspects of American democracy, including full public discussion of foreign policy, the mainstream media have largely deleted these vital questions from their election coverage. Given full coverage, including of Donald Trump’s foreign-policy views, which are significantly unlike those of Clinton, especially regarding Russia, we might learn two important things. Would Trump’s less hawkish positions appeal to American voters? And will those voters see through and reject establishment media cheerleading for, in effect, Washington’s rogue-like flirting with war with Russia?

Blaming Brexit on Putin and Voters

FOR YEARS, I AND OTHERS HAVE pointed to the gradual disintegration of what Washington calls “the post–Cold War world order,” even though Russia, the world’s largest territorial country, was excluded by the expansion of NATO and the (in effect) US-led European Union. And even though multiple crises of this US-led “order”—from economic inequality and Europe’s refugee crisis to the Ukrainian civil war—were abetted by Washington’s own policies. Brexit is the most recent manifestation of this ongoing historic process.

But instead of reconsidering Western policies, the US political-media establishment is blaming Brexit on Putin for “ruthlessly playing a weak hand,” as did a New York Times editorial on June 26, and on “imbecilic” British voters, as did Times columnist Roger Cohen on June 28. In fact, Putin took a determinedly neutral stand on Brexit throughout, partly because Moscow, unlike Washington, is hesitant to meddle so directly in elections in distant countries. But also because the Kremlin was—and remains—unsure as to whether Brexit might be on balance a “plus or minus” for Russia.

Judging by the debate still under way in Russian media, Moscow worries Brexit will be a “minus” due to adverse economic consequences for Russia. In addition, the Kremlin worries that with the UK soon to be outside the EU, the United States and its traditionally Russophobic British partner will now increase NATO “aggression” against Russia, as indeed a Washington Post editorial urged on June 27. Therefore, contrary to the legion of American cold warriors, Brexit evoked no “celebration in the Kremlin,” only wait-and-see concern.

The denigration of British voters, who mostly voted their working and lower-middle class economic and social interests, as they saw them, is perhaps even more shameful. It reveals Western elite attitudes toward democracy and “imbecilic” citizens. Not surprisingly, the UK establishment, with US encouragement, is desperately seeking a way to reverse the Brexit referendum, much as the Republican establishment is trying to deprive Donald Trump of the presidential nomination he won democratically in the primaries.

This is not the first time ruling elites have shown their contempt for democratic process. Twenty-five years ago, in 1991, the Soviet nomenklatura, in pursuit of state property, disregarded a national referendum that by a much larger majority than in the Brexit case favored preserving the Soviet Union.

There’s also some irony here. During the week that Brexit furthered the disintegration of the EU, Putin was further integrating Russia’s economy and security with China and with the multinational Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which may soon include India and Pakistan. Considering the size of those economies and of their populace, who is being “isolated”—Putin or the American president who announced his determination “to isolate” him?

Considering the largely negative US role in world affairs since the end of the Soviet Union, not the least of which is its new Cold War against Russia, it may be time for an American Exit (Amexit) from Washington’s ceaseless quest for international hegemony.

The Imperative of a US-Russian Alliance vs. Terrorism

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S GENERALS HAVE REPEATEDLY INSISTED that Russia under Vladimir Putin is the “number-one existential threat” in the world today. This is a virtually impeachable misconception of national security.

The evidence cited is mostly bogus—for example, that Putin is planning a military takeover of the three small Baltic states, perhaps also Poland, and that he seeks to break up the European Union. In reality, Putin needs a stable and prosperous EU as an essential Russian trading partner. And he wants security guarantees for Russia, instead of NATO’s ongoing buildup, from the Baltics to the Black Sea, which will be ratified and made permanent at NATO’s Warsaw summit on July 6-7. Any actual Russian threats today are primarily of the West’s own making—reactions to US-led policies in recent years.

The real “number-one” threat, from the Middle East and Europe to the American homeland, is international terrorism. Today’s terrorist organizations are a new phenomenon, no longer loners or tiny groups with a gun or a bomb, but a highly organized menace with state-like funding, armies, technology, modern communications, and a capacity to recruit adherents. Still worse, they are in search of radioactive materials to enrich their already highly destructive explosives, which could make areas they strike uninhabitable for many years. Imagine the consequences if the planes of 9/11 had had such materials aboard.

Russia—because of decades fighting terrorism at home and abroad and its geopolitical location both in the West and in the Islamic world—is America’s essential partner in the struggle against this new terrorism. Moscow has experience, intelligence, and other assets that Washington and its current allies lack. It should be enough to remember that Moscow informed Washington about the Boston Marathon bombers months before they struck, but the warning was disregarded.

And yet, Washington has steadfastly excluded a willing Kremlin from its own ineffectual and often counter-productive “war against terrorism,” refusing systematic cooperation with Moscow. For their part, mainstream media “analyses” about what to do, after each new terrorist act, rarely if ever even mention a role for Russia. This despite the considerable damage inflicted on the Islamic State in Syria by Putin’s air campaign allied with Syrian Army and Iranian “boots on the ground”—an achievement only denigrated, when noted at all, by the US political-media establishment. It does so partly because of its Cold War against Russia, reflected in NATO’s provocative build-up on Russia’s Western borders, and because of Washington’s self-defeating obsession with overthrowing Syrian President Assad.

There may be, however, a positive development. According to sources close to Obama, the president now wants at least a partial rapprochement with Russia before leaving office as part of his presidential legacy, beginning in Syria. Related reports were published by the Washington Post, though only to express strong opposition, inspired, it seems, by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, to any kind of détente with Putin.

American Cold Warriors understand that cooperation in Syria could spread to resolving the Ukrainian crisis and other US-Russian conflicts—that is, to ending or at least winding down the new Cold War. For his part, Putin recently made several public statements expressing his readiness for large-scale cooperation with Obama—“We do not hold grudges,” he remarked—and in particular for a “broad anti-terrorism front.”

The same sources also report that in this regard Obama is virtually alone in high-level Washington circles, even among his own White House security advisers. If so, there is yet another irony: Obama, who once vowed to “isolate” Putin—probably the world’s busiest international statesman in recent months—may now find himself isolated in his own administration.

The Friends and Foes of Détente

IN RECENT WEEKS, THERE HAS BEEN a behind-the-scenes diplomacy on behalf of full US-Russian military cooperation against the Islamic State in Syria. With Secretary of State Kerry’s visit to Moscow last week, the proposal became public. Understanding that a mini-détente in Syria could spread to US-Russian conflicts elsewhere—particularly to the NATO buildup on Russia’s border, the conflict over Ukraine, and nuclear-weapons policies—political forces in the American establishment escalated their opposition. They further demonized Putin, charging Obama with “appeasement,” and threatened to ban Russia from the upcoming Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro.

The failed coup in Turkey may be an important factor in this struggle, though as with the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 25 years ago, in August 1991, we may not learn the full story for some time. Nonetheless, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, increasingly alienated from the EU and fellow members of NATO, is likely now to resume his previously close relationship with Moscow. If so, he may end his obstruction of the proposed alliance against the Islamic State in Syria.

At the same time, Obama’s formal condemnation of the coup has unnerved the US-backed government in Kiev, which came to power in 2014 by overthrowing a president who had also been popularly elected. In response, there is some evidence that Ukraine’s current president, Petro Poroshenko, is escalating his military attacks on rebel Donbass, presumably to revive his fading political support in the West.

Meanwhile, at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Trump representatives rejected an attempt by cold warriors to write into the party platform a promise to increased US military aid to Kiev—Obama has long refused to do so despite considerable public and private pressure—reinforcing earlier statements by Trump that he, unlike Hillary Clinton, is pro-détente. In response, cold warriors confirmed that there is indeed a new Cold War by echoing an ugly feature of the preceding one—McCarthyism. They accused the Trump campaign of being in cahoots with Putin, even having received money from Moscow.

I have argued for more than 10 years that Washington policy was leading to a renewed Cold War with Moscow. The return of Cold-War Olympic politics and McCarthy-like slurs should eliminate any doubt about the nature of today’s US-Russian relations and the vital importance of a new détente.

Neo-McCarthyism

HAVING ENTERED ACADEMIC RUSSIAN STUDIES IN the 1960s, I recall that even then the field was still afflicted by remnants of the self-censorship bred by the McCarthyism of the 1940s and 1950s. Cold War brings with it this kind of limitation on free speech, so I am not surprised that it may be happening again as a result of the new Cold War with “Putin’s Russia.” This time, however, it is coming significantly from longstanding liberals who purported to protect us against such civil liberties abuses.

Many liberals and their publications have recently branded Donald Trump as Putin’s “puppet” (Franklin Foer), “de facto agent” (Jeffrey Goldberg), “Kremlin client” (Timothy Snyder). New York Times columnist Paul Krugman spells out the implication that Trump “would, in office, actually follow a pro-Putin foreign policy, at the expense of America’s allies and her own self-interest.” These disgraceful allegations are based on little more than a mistranslation of a casual remark Putin made about Trump, Trump’s elliptical suggestions that he may favor détente with Moscow, his tacit endorsement of Obama’s refusal to escalate the military conflict in Ukraine, and Russian business relations of Trump’s “associates” of the kind eagerly sought since the late 1980s by many American corporations, from ExxonMobil to MacDonald’s.

This is, of course, an ominous recapitulation of McCarthy’s accusations, which seriously damaged American democracy and ruined many lives. Still worse, this Kremlin-baiting of Trump is coming from the Clinton campaign, which most of the liberals involved support, as reflected in a page-one Times story headlined “A Trump-Putin Alliance.” Clinton apparently intends to run against Trump-Putin. If so, the new Cold War can only become more dangerous, especially if she wins and if this neo- McCarthyite tactic reflects her hawkish views on “Putin’s Russia.”

Perhaps not unrelated, Obama’s proposal for a US-Russian alliance against the Islamic State in Syria, with its potential for easing the conflict in Ukraine and NATO’s buildup on Russia’s borders, is now being openly opposed by Secretary of Defense Carter. As a result, it seems, the original proposal to Putin was withdrawn for one that would compel Moscow to accept the longstanding US policy of removing Syrian President Assad. Not surprisingly, it was rejected by Putin, though Secretary of State Kerry has resumed negotiations with his Russian counterpart Lavrov. Where the silent President Obama stands on this vital issue—as Russian and Syrian forces stand ready to take the crucial city of Aleppo, long held by jihadists—is unclear.

Cold-War Casualties From Kiev to the New York Times

THE PRECEDING 40-YEAR COLD WAR WAS accompanied by intense high-level factional politics for and against US-Soviet Cold War relations. Sometimes the politics played out behind the scenes, sometimes openly, if obliquely, in the media. It is happening again, perhaps more dangerously and disgracefully.

Last week’s still somewhat mysterious episode in Crimea was an important example. Russian President Putin declared that Kiev had sent agents with terrorist intent to (now) Russia’s Crimean peninsula. They were captured and one or more Russian security agents killed. Putin said the episode showed that Kiev had no real interest in the Minsk peace talks and that he would no longer participate in them, the other participants being the leaders of Germany, France, and Ukraine. Kiev said the episode was a Russian provocation signaling Putin’s intent to launch a large-scale “invasion” of Ukraine.

As must always be asked when a crime is committed, who had a motive? Putin had none that are apparent. Kiev, on the other hand, is in a deepening economic, social, and political crisis and losing its Western support, especially in Europe. It is fully possible that Kiev staged the episode to rally that flagging support by (yet again) pointing to Putin’s impending “aggression.” Washington seemed to support Kiev’s version, raising the question as to whether a faction in the Obama administration was also involved, especially since Europe, particularly Germany, openly doubted Kiev’s version. If Putin is serious about quitting the Minsk negotiations, a larger war is now the only way to resolve the Ukrainian civil and proxy war—a way apparently favored by some factions in Washington, Kiev, and possibly in Moscow.

Factional politics were even clearer regarding Syria, where President Obama had proposed military cooperation with Russia against the Islamic State—in effect, finally accepting Putin’s longstanding proposal—along with important agreements that would reduce the danger of nuclear war. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post had reported strong factional opposition to both of Obama’s initiatives—in effect, a kind of détente with Russia.

Both initiatives have been halted, whether temporarily or permanently is unclear. We may soon know because Putin needs a decision by Obama now, as the crucial battle for Aleppo intensifies. Under his own pressure at home, Putin seems resolved to end the Islamic State’s occupation of Syria, Aleppo being a strategic site, without or with US cooperation, which he would prefer to have.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to make its own factional contributions to the new Cold War, and to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, at the expense of its own journalistic standards. Consider its recent article about Paul Manafort, in effect Donald Trump’s campaign manager. It alleges that Manafort committed pro-Russian and corrupt dealings on behalf of Ukraine’s now deposed President Viktor Yanukovych when Manafort served him as a well-paid political adviser. The Times has already printed a number of neo-McCarthyite articles against Trump and his associates, labeling them Putin’s “agents.”

The Manafort article is another telling example. It violates several journalistic standards. Its source for Manafort’s financial corruption in Ukraine came from Kiev’s “Anti-Corruption Committee,” which even the IMF regards as an oxymoron and a reason the funding organization has not released billions of dollars pledged to Kiev. Even if Manafort was corrupt, The Times must have known the questionable nature of the source when it received the “documents,” but readers were not told.

More important politically, when working to rebrand Yanukovych as a presidential candidate after his earlier electoral defeat, Manafort was hardly “pro-Russian.” Putin profoundly distrusted and personally disliked Yanukoyvch at that time.

One reason was fundamental. Manafort urged Yanukovych, in order to broaden his appeal from his electoral base in southeast Ukraine, to strike a pro-Western economic arrangement with the European Union instead of with Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union. Yanukovych tried to do so and almost succeeded. (The last-minute collapse of EU negotiations detonated the Ukrainian crisis in November 2013.) Assuming the Times knew this well-known history—admittedly an assumption when it involves Times coverage of Russia—this too it did not tell its readers.

The paper’s expose of Manafort was also highly selective. However financially corrupt he may have been, Manafort did no more politically in Ukraine, indeed considerably less, than had other well-paid American electoral advisers in other countries. All we need do, though the Times did not, is recall the 1996 reelection campaign of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

So desperate was the Clinton administration to save the failing but compliant Yeltsin from his Communist Party opponent, it arranged for American election operatives to encamp in Moscow to help manage his campaign. (The administration also arranged for billions of IMF dollars to be sent to enable Yeltsin to pay pensions, wages, and other arrears, some of which was stolen by Yeltsin’s associates and diverted to a New York bank.) So large was the role of the American “advisers” in Yeltsin’s (purported) victory that Time magazine bannered it, “Yanks to The Rescue,” on its July 15, 1996 cover and ShowTime made a feature film, “Spinning Boris,” about their heroic exploits as late as 2003. No one asked, as we should, whether any Americans should be so intimately involved in any foreign elections.

Finally, the revelation that Manafort had financial dealings with Russian “oligarchs” is ludicrous—and also highly selective. Which of the scores of American corporations doing business in Russia and neighboring countries, from ExxonMobil to McDonald’s and Ford, have not, given Russia’s oligarchic economic system?

The degradation of the Times—in effect, announced on its front page last week in a declaration that it would suspend its own journalistic standards in covering Trump and his presidential campaign—is especially lamentable. In the past, the Times set standards for aspiring young journalists. Judging by the growing number of young “journalists” who assail critics of US policy toward Russia as Kremlin “apologists,” “stooges,” and “useful idiots,” rather than actually study the issues and report disagreements even-handedly, the Times is no longer an exemplar. Unprofessional, unbalanced journalism remains another casualty of this new Cold War.

More Lost Opportunities

THREE SIGNIFICANT BUT LITTLE-NOTED DEVELOPMENTS OCCURRED at the G20 meeting in China last week.

Following a private meeting with Russian President Putin, President Obama retreated from their agreement for joint military action against the Islamic State in Syria. Obama blamed a lack of trust in Putin, but clearly he had capitulated to powerful opposition in Washington to any rapprochement with Moscow. Obama said talks would continue, but yet another lack of resolve on his part was more likely to reinforce Putin’s lack of trust in the American president and make it harder for him to sell any such agreement to his own political elite in Moscow.

At the same time, Obama also withdrew his own proposals that would have made nuclear war considerably less likely. They entailed a mutual US-Russian declaration of a doctrine of no-first-use of nuclear weapons; and taking nuclear warheads off high-alert, giving both sides more than the current 14 minutes or so to determine whether or not the other had actually launched a nuclear attack and to decide whether or not to retaliate. Obama was said to have been persuaded by Strangelovian arguments by advisers that such a wise decision, long called for by experts, would undermine US national security.

And in Kiev, President Poroshenko unilaterally reversed the order of steps spelled out in the Minsk Accords to end the Ukrainian civil and proxy war. He declared that returning control of the Eastern border with Russia to Kiev had to be the first step of implementation, not the final step as spelled in the Minsk agreements. In effect, Poroshenko’s announcement betrayed German Chancellor Merkel and French President Hollande, who had brokered the Minsk agreements.

Unless Poroshenko relents, he has ended the only existing option for negotiating an end to the Ukrainian conflict. It is hard to imagine that Poroshenko took this step without the permission of the Obama administration, particularly of Vice President Joseph Biden, who has been in charge of the “Ukrainian project” at least since 2014.

There was other largely unreported news at the G20 meeting. Two years ago, Obama declared his intention to “isolate” Putin in world affairs. At the G20 meeting, the Russian president was the most sought-after leader by other world leaders. Obama, on the other hand, seemed marginalized apart from the formal ceremonies. Whether this was because he is a “lame duck” president or is no longer taken seriously as a foreign-policy leader, or both, is a matter of interpretation.

Unlike in the American political-media establishment, there was little evidence at the G20 meeting of the demonization of Putin, which has been a central feature of US policy toward Russia for several years. In this regard, America under Obama hardly seems to be the “leader of the free world.” Despite their pro-forma stances, other countries, including European ones, may continue to drift away from Washington in their actual relations with Russia.

As for the current US presidential campaign, there was little evidence at the G20 meeting that other capitals took seriously Washington charges (all without actual evidence) that Putin’s Kremlin was trying to disrupt or decide the outcome of the election. In Europe, for example, a full debate is under way about relations with Russia, while in the US establishment anyone who proposes better relations, particularly Donald Trump, is subjected to neo- McCarthyite charges of being a “Kremlin client” or “Putin puppet.”

Undeterred, Trump renewed his call for what once meant “détente,” arguing that it would be better to have “friendly” relations with Russia, even a partnership, than today’s exceedingly hostile relationship. In effect, Trump has become the pro-détente candidate in the 2016 presidential election, a position previously also taken by other Republican presidents—Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. The pro–Cold War party’s refusal to engage Trump on these vital issues, instead of Kremlin-baiting him, continues to be detrimental to US national security and to American democracy.

Another Endangered Chance to Diminish the New Cold War

TWO POSSIBLE DIPLOMATIC BREAKTHROUGHS, INVOLVING SYRIA and Ukraine, might end or substantially reduce the US-Russian proxy wars in those countries and thus the new Cold War itself.

Representing their respective bosses, Presidents Obama and Putin, Secretary of State Kerry and Foreign Minister Lavrov have announced a plan that, if implemented in the next seven days, would lead to joint US-Russian operations against the terrorist organizations ISIS and Al-Nusra in Syria. If so, the result could be an American-Russian military alliance, the first since World War II, that might end both the war in Syria and the dangerous escalation of the new Cold War elsewhere.

The nearly simultaneous announcements of a unilateral cease fire by Donbass rebels and of a willingness to move on home-rule legislation for Donbass by Ukrainian President Poroshenko, which he has previously refused to do, strongly suggested that this possible diplomatic breakthrough, in effect implementing the Minsk peace accords, was timed to coincide with the one regarding Syria. Given the vital role of Syria and Ukraine in the Cold War, this two-front détente diplomacy represents a fateful opportunity, to be seized or lost as were previous ones.

But opposition to the Obama-Putin Syrian diplomacy is fierce, especially in Washington. It is openly expressed by Department of Defense Secretary Carter and faithfully echoed in leading media, particularly the Washington Post, the New York Times, and MSNBC. The primary tactic is to further vilify Putin as an unworthy American partner in any regard—an approach driven by years of Putin-phobia and now by an awareness that cooperation in Syria would mark Russia’s full return as a great power on the world stage.

Much now depends on whether or not Obama will fight for his own anti–Cold War diplomacy, as President Reagan did in the 1980s but as Obama repeatedly has failed to do. His foreign-policy legacy is at stake, as are international relations.

Opposition to a diplomatic breakthrough in Ukraine is also fierce and potentially dangerous for Poroshenko. Heavily armed ultra-right Ukrainian forces continue to threaten to overthrow him if he yields to European pressure to grant more home rule to rebel Donbass. Under pressure from France, Germany, and possibly the White House, Poroshenko may now think he has no choice, or he may be playing for time, as some observers think. Either way, the Ukrainian conflict is at a turning point, for better or worse, as is the one in Syria.

Unavoidably, these developments are spilling over into the American presidential campaign. However ironically, Donald Trump has, in his own way, like Obama, called for US-Russian military cooperation in Syria. Certainly, his position in this regard is considerably closer to that of President Obama (no matter what the latter unwisely continues to say publicly about Putin) than is that of Hillary Clinton, who thus far has maintained her considerably more hawkish positions both on Russia and Syria.

A full debate on these fateful issues is long overdue in American politics, especially in a presidential electoral year. The mainstream media has all but banned it with neo-McCarthyite allegations against Trump. Will the mainstream media now play their obligatory role or continue to promote the new Cold War?

Who’s Making US Foreign Policy?

THE PRECEDING 40-YEAR COLD WAR WITNESSED many instances of high-level attempts to sabotage détente policies of US and Soviet leaders. It is happening again in the new Cold War, as evidenced when American war planes unexpectedly attacked Syrian Army forces.

The attack blatantly violated preconditions of the Obama-Putin plan for a US-Russian alliance against terrorist forces in Syria. Considering that US military intelligence knew the area very well and that the Department of Defense, headed by Ashton Carter, had openly expressed opposition to the Obama-Putin plan, the attack was almost certainly not “accidental,” as DOD claims and as American media similarly reports.

If the attack was intentional, we are reminded of the power of the American war party, which is based not only in DOD but in segments of the intelligence agencies, State Department, Congress, and in the mainstream media, notably the Washington Post. Judging by Ambassador Samantha Power’s tirade against Russia at the UN, not even Obama’s own team fully supports his overtures to Moscow, undertaken in part perhaps to enhance his desultory foreign policy legacy.

Why is the war party so adamantly opposed to any cooperation with Russia anywhere in the world when it is manifestly in US interests, as in Syria? Several considerations play a role. Among them, only Russian President Putin, of major foreign leaders, has politically opposed the neocon/liberal interventionist aspiration for a US-dominated “world order.” Hence the incessant demonizing of Putin.

Still more, Russia’s return as an international great power, 25 years after the end of the Soviet Union, contradicts and offends the ideological premises of this aspiration. Another but little-noted example is Moscow’s recent plan to mediate the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a diplomatic initiative based on increasingly warm relations between Putin’s government and Israel. Any cooperation with Moscow would therefore validate the “resurgent Russia” phenomenon so resented by the American war party.

One way American cold warriors challenge Russia’s role in world affairs today is to denigrate its elections, as though they are mere replicas of Soviet-era charades. Several little-noted results of the September Russian parliamentary (Duma) elections are therefore worth emphasizing.

The elections were relatively “free and fair.” (As everywhere, such judgments should be in the context of a country’s own history, not our own.) This said while understanding that going back to the “democratic” Yeltsin years, the Kremlin has regularly redistributed some 5 to 10 percent of the votes to its own party or to other parties it wishes to play a minority role in the Duma.

This time those votes seem to have been taken from the only real nation-wide opposition party, the Communist Party, which probably received closer to 20 percent of the votes than the just over 13 percent registered, and given to the Kremlin party and to a minority party. (The latter, unlike the Communists, habitually votes for the Kremlin’s economic and social legislation.) Contrary to most preelection polling, the Kremlin party got 54 percent, a “constitutional majority,” as it is called, suggesting that the Putin leadership may be planning major policy changes at home.

One other result should be emphasized. The several “liberal,” pro-Western parties, without any help or harm by the Kremlin, garnered a total of barely 4 percent of the vote. This may be the most authentic result of the election: there is no longer any electoral base for such politics in Russia.

Most American commentators blame the outcome on Putin’s repression, but a much larger factor has been US Cold War policies, which are deeply resented by a large majority of Russians. Indeed, a number of independent Russian commentators concluded that the electoral results were a reaffirmation of popular support for Putin and against US-led assaults on his leadership and reputation.

Slouching Toward War?

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HAS TERMINATED MONTHS-LONG negotiations with Moscow for a joint US-Russian campaign against jihad terrorist forces in Syria. Cooperation in Syria would have been the first major episode of détente in the new Cold War, indeed the first US-Russian military alliance since World War II. Its spirit might have spread to the dangerous conflicts in Ukraine and on Russia’s border with Eastern Europe, where NATO continues to build up its forces.

The Syrian agreement was sabotaged not by Russia, as is alleged in Washington and by the mainstream media, but by American enemies of détente, first and foremost in the Department of Defense. DOD’s opposition was so intense that one of its spokesmen told the press it might disobey an Obama presidential order to share intelligence with Moscow, as called for by the agreement.

It was a flagrant threat to disregard the US constitution. A New York Times editorial not only failed to protest the threat but appeared to endorse it. Other major media seemed not even to notice the possibility of a constitutional crisis, another indication of how badly the new Cold War, and the demonization of Russian President Putin, has degraded the US political-media establishment.

The consequences of thwarted diplomacy in Syria are already evident. American politicians and media are calling for military action against Russian-Syrian forces, in particular, imposition of a “no-fly zone,” which would almost certainly lead to war with Russia. Others call for more economic sanctions against Russia, perhaps to ward off growing West European attitudes favoring an end to existing sanctions.

In any event, developments in Syria have now deepened the new Cold War in words and deeds. This is the case in Moscow as well. Putin, who has long pursued negotiations with the West over the objections of his own hardliners, now seems resolved to destroy the jihadist forces encamped in Aleppo without the American partner he had hoped for. Meanwhile, talk of war also fills Russian media, and the Putin government has just begun a highly unusual nation-wide “civil defense” exercise to prepare the country for that eventuality.

In short, the collapse of diplomacy in Syria has fully remilitarized US-Russian relations and brought the countries closer to war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unlike during the preceding Cold War, none of this is being discussed critically in establishment American media. The New York Times and the Washington Post, for example, publish articles and editorials, one after the other, declaring Putin to be an “outlaw” and “rogue” leader unfit to be an American partner on any front. In the mainstream, no one proposes or is permitted to propose any rethinking of US policies that may have contributed to this dire situation.

No one asks, for example, if the Kremlin might be right in insisting that the overthrow of the Assad government, the primary US goal, would only strengthen terrorist forces in Syria, whose defeat is Moscow’s primary objective. In this connection, Moscow charges that détente in Syria failed in large part because Washington and its allies continue to arm and coddle, directly or indirectly, Syrian terrorists and their “moderate” anti-Assad abettors.

This factor, for which there is considerable evidence, also is not explored or discussed in the US media, even in a presidential election year. Instead, CBS News’ 60 Minutes, which, like the Times, was once a gold standard of professional American journalism, recently broadcast a nuclear warmongering segment giddily marveling that the United States would soon have more “usable” nuclear weapons to deploy against Russia.

Again, where was the publicly silent President Obama while his proposed détente was being killed by members of his own administration? Russians and West Europeans are also asking this question.

Washington Warmongers, Moscow Prepares

WE SHOULD BE “SHOCKED” LESS BY Donald Trump’s sexual antics or by Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds as secretary of state than by the entire US political-media establishment’s indifference to Washington’s drift toward war with Russia.

Since the breakdown of the Obama-Putin agreement to cooperate militarily against terrorists in Syria—a failure for which the Obama administration is primarily responsible—Washington has escalated its warfare rhetoric against the Kremlin and particularly Russian President Putin. The man with whom the Obama administration proposed to partner with in Syria only two weeks ago is now denounced as a “war criminal” for Russia’s fight against terrorists in Aleppo, which was to be “liberated” by the now aborted US-Russian military alliance. The ever-bellicose Washington Post was more specific, publishing a leaked account of how Putin might be arrested outside of Russia and put on trial.

But the first victim might have been Secretary of State Kerry, who negotiated and advocated the proposed alliance and who now must level “war crimes” accusations against Russia, dealing a considerable blow to his own reputation. Putting another nail in the coffin of its jettisoned cooperation with the Kremlin, the White House also officially accused the Putin leadership of trying to undermine the American electoral system through systematic hacking, though it presented no real evidence.

Meanwhile, mainstream media continue to base their coverage of US national security in this regard on unrelenting vilification of Putin, not on actual US interests. Any talk of partnership with Russia, though still advocated by Donald Trump, is being widely traduced as “insanity,” as, for example, by MSNBC’s unabashedly Russophobic Rachel Maddow.

Moscow is reacting in kind to Washington’s words and deeds. The reaction includes unusually harsh speeches by Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov (formerly Kerry’s partner); an unusual nationwide civil-defense exercise; a proposal to give military officials control over regional political leaders in the event of war; and a beefing up of Russian ground-to-air missile defense systems in Syria. While Lavrov spoke of an American policy driven by “aggressive Russophobia,” Putin said normal relations could be restored only by Washington reversing all of its Cold War policies in recent years, from NATO expansion to Russia’s borders to economic sanctions. Though clearly Putin did not mean this literally, it seems to have been his most expansive condition to date.

For those of us with historical memory, there is a precedent for a way out in dark times in US-Russian relations. Only a generation ago, in the mid- and late 1980s, President Ronald Reagan decided to meet halfway in very fraught times repeatedly with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. A breakthrough as achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev is urgently needed, but no such leader seems likely to occupy the White House any time soon, unless it might be Trump.

Did the White House Declare War on Russia?

A STATEMENT BY VICE PRESIDENT JOSEPH BIDEN on NBC’s Meet the Press on October 16, pre- released on October 14, stunned Moscow, though it was scarcely noted in the American media. In response to a question about alleged Kremlin hacking of Democratic Party headquarters in order to disrupt the presidential election and throw it to Donald Trump, Biden said the Obama administration was preparing to send Putin a harsh “message,” presumably in the form of some kind of cyber-attack.

The Kremlin spokesman and several leading Russian commentators characterized Biden’s announcement as a virtual “American declaration of war on Russia” and as the first ever in history. At this potentially explosive stage in the new Cold War, Biden’s statement, which must have been approved by the White House, could scarcely have been more dangerous or reckless.

Biden was reacting, of course, to official US charges of Kremlin political hacking. No actual evidence for this allegation has yet been produced, only suppositions or, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, “unproven assertions.” While the political-media establishment has uncritically stated the allegation as fact, a MIT expert, Professor Theodore Postol, has written there is “no technical way that the US intelligence community could know who did the hacking if it was done by sophisticated nation-state actors.” Instead, the charges, leveled daily by the Clinton campaign as part of its neo- McCarthyite Kremlin-baiting of Trump, are mostly political. We should ask why some US intelligence officials have permitted themselves to be used for this unprofessional purpose.

Still more, the warlike context includes a stunning reversal of the American political-media establishment’s narrative of the ongoing battle for the Syrian city of Aleppo. Only a few weeks ago, as I pointed out, President Obama had agreed with Putin on a joint US-Russian military campaign against “terrorists” in Aleppo. That agreement collapsed primarily due to an attack by US warplanes on Syrian forces. Russia and its Syrian allies continued their air assault on east Aleppo but now, according to Washington and its mainstream media, against anti-Assad “rebels.”

Where have the jihad terrorists gone? They have been deleted from the US narrative, which now accuses Russia of “war crimes” in Aleppo for the same military campaign in which Washington was to have been a full partner. Equally obscured is that west Aleppo, largely controlled by Assad’s forces, is also being assaulted—by “rebels”—and children are dying there as well.

And why is there no US government or media concern about the children who will almost certainly die in the American-backed campaign to recapture Mosul, in Iraq? Here too the stenographic American media has gone from the fog of cold war to falsification.

Trump Could End the New Cold War

WILL, OR CAN, A PRESIDENT TRUMP enact a policy of détente—replacing elements of conflict with elements of cooperation—in US relations with Russia? As we saw earlier, détente had a long 20th-century history. Indeed, its major episodes were initiated by Republican presidents, from Eisenhower and Nixon to, most spectacularly, Reagan in 1985.

The history of détente teaches that at least four prerequisites are required: a determined American president who is willing to fight for the policy against fierce mainstream political opposition, including in his own party; a leader who can rally some public support by prominent figures who did not support his presidential candidacy; a president with like-minded appointees at his side; and A White House occupant who has a pro-détente partner in the Kremlin, as Reagan had with Soviet leader Gorbachev.

Whether or not he knows the history of détente, Trump seems determined. During his primary and presidential campaigns, he alone repeatedly called for cooperation with Moscow for the sake of US national security and refused to indulge in today’s fact-free vilification of Russian President Putin. Trump also seems little impressed by the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment, even contemptuous of its record during the preceding two decades. The establishment’s certain opposition is unlikely to deter him.

Less clear is whether or not many of Trump’s previous opponents in either party will support détente or whether he will have in his inner circle of appointees—particularly a secretary of state and ambassador to Moscow—who will wisely advise and assist him in this vital pursuit, as Reagan had. As for a partner in the Kremlin, Putin is clearly ready for détente. He has said and demonstrated as much many times, contrary to commentary about him in the American media.

In many respects, as we have seen, the new Cold War is more dangerous than was the preceding 40-year Cold War. Three of its current fronts—Ukraine, the Baltic region, and Syria—are ever more fraught with the possibility of hot war. Détente succeeds, however, when mutual national interests are agreed upon and negotiated.

The Ukrainian civil and proxy war has become a disaster for Washington, Moscow, and for the Ukrainian people themselves. Ending it is therefore a common interest, but perhaps the most difficult to negotiate. NATO’s ongoing buildup up in the Baltic region and in Poland, and Russia’s counter-buildup on its Western borders, are fraught with accidental or intentional war. Avoiding war, as Reagan and Gorbachev agreed, is an existential common interest.

If Trump is determined, he has the power to end the buildup and even reverse it, though the new eastern-most members of NATO will loudly protest. On the other hand, despite claims to the contrary, Russia represents no military threat to these countries, as wise Trump advisers will assure him. Agreement on Syria should be the easiest. Both Trump and Putin have insisted that the real threat there is not Syrian President Assad but the Islamic State and other terrorists. The first major step of a new détente might well be the US-Russian military alliance against terrorist forces that even President Obama once proposed but abandoned.

There are, of course, other new Cold War conflicts, large and smaller ones. Some could be easily and quickly negotiated in order to build elite and popular support for détente in the US. This could begin with the “banomania” both sides have enacted since 2014. For example, Putin could end the ban on American adoptions of Russian orphans, which wrecked the hopes of scores of American families and Russian children. Such a good-will step would give détente a human face and soften opposition in the US.

The largest ban is, of course, US and European economic sanctions on Russia, which Putin wants ended. A more complex issue, this is likely to come to the fore only if or when détente progresses. On the other hand, a number of European countries, which have suffered economically from Russia’s counter-sanctions, also want them ended. Trump will not be without allies if he moves in this direction.

There are other considerations. History shows that successful, stable détente requires the give-and-take of diplomacy, something not practiced by the White House with Russia for several years. The standard version of why Obama’s détente (“reset”) failed, to take an often-cited example, is untrue. Putin did not wreck it. The Obama administration took Moscow’s major concessions while making almost none of its own. In this regard, Trump’s businessman model of negotiations may be an asset. Businessmen understand that a mutual interest (profit) is gained only when both sides make concessions.

There is also a larger question. As I explained previously, détente rests on what was formerly called “parity,” in particular recognition that both sides have legitimate national interests. For many years, due largely to the demonization of Putin, the American political-media establishment has implied that Russia has no legitimate national interests of its own conception, not even on its borders. Trump seems to think otherwise, but as with many of his other elliptical statements, time will tell.

And there is this. Reagan and Gorbachev began with nuclear and other military issues. Trump and Putin might do so as well—for example, by agreeing to take nuclear warheads off high-alert and adopting a mutual doctrine of no-first-use of nuclear weapons, which Obama also briefly proposed but also abandoned. Given current toxic relations between the two countries, however, more political steps may be needed first.

Whether or not Trump vigorously pursues détente with Russia may tell us more about his presidency generally if only because an American president usually has more freedom of action in foreign affairs than in other policy realms. And no issue is now more important than the state of US-Russian relations.

The Friends and Foes of Détente, II

ANTI-DÉTENTE OPPOSITION HAS QUICKLY EXPRESSED ITSELF in response to President-elect Trump’s still elliptical indications that he may seek a strategic partner in Russian President Putin. The opposition is led in the Senate by the usual Cold-War bipartisan axis that includes John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Benjamin Cardin, and in the print media by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their thinking and goals are expressed by one of their stenographers, Post columnist Josh Rogin. He warns readers that détente is both impermissible and unattainable because of Putin’s “long-term strategy to undermine the stability and confidence of liberal Western democracies.”

There is, of course, no evidence that this is Putin’s goal. The allegation merely recapitulates existential language of the preceding 40-year Cold War, as though the Soviet Union never ended. Rogin concludes by assuring readers that these American foes of détente are readying a campaign, here and abroad, to “stop the next Russian reset [the term Obama used for détente] before it even begins.” If Trump is determined to reduce or even end the new Cold War, another historic struggle over détente has thus begun.

There is, however, a new important factor. Europe is playing a larger and more active role in this Cold War than it did in the preceding one, and there the friends and foes of détente are more evenly divided. Socially, politically, and electorally, a growing number of European countries are increasingly opposed to confronting and trying to isolate Russia. For economic reasons, they are also eager to end the economic sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West.

Non-anti-Russia governments (not necessarily “pro-Russian” ones) have recently come to power in Moldova and Bulgaria. More are possible within a year or so in Austria, Italy, and elsewhere, even in Germany. The Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus, and Spain have already expressed discontent with the sanctions and with the stalemated war in Ukraine. And one exceedingly anti-Russian government, the United Kingdom, has left the European Union via Brexit.

In this respect, Europe may be diminishing its political deference to the United States, currently the most anti-Russian, pro–Cold War of the major powers, along with the UK, and finally edging toward its own foreign policy. If so, what this means for the heralded “transatlantic alliance” may depend on whether or not Trump reaches out for pro-détente allies in Europe.

Just how much relations with Russia are in flux is indicated even by outgoing President Obama. He recently stopped referring to the United States as “the indispensable nation” in world affairs and termed it instead “an indispensable nation,” suggesting America might have equal partners. And whereas he once dismissed Russia as a weak “regional power,” he has revised that formulation considerably. Now, according to Obama, “Russia is an important country. It is a military superpower… It has influence around the world. And in order for us to solve many big problems around the world, it is in our interest to work with Russia and obtain their cooperation.” This is the traditional language of détente.

False Narratives, Not “Fake News,” Are the Danger

DESPITE THE (LARGELY BOGUS) FUROR OVER “fake news,” entrenched false narratives of the new Cold War are the real threat to US national security and to the détente policies that President-Elect Trump suggests he might pursue. I have commented on them intermittently in recent years, but it is important at this crucial political moment to reiterate five of them:

1. That Russian President Putin is solely responsible for the new Cold War and its growing dangers on several fronts, from the confrontation over Ukraine to Syria. If this is true, there is no need for Washington to rethink or change any of its policies, but it is not true.

2. That President Obama’s declared intention, in 2014, to “isolate Putin’s Russia” in international affairs has been successful, and therefore Putin is desperate to be released from the political wilderness. This too is untrue. Since 2014, Putin has been perhaps the busiest national leader of any major power on the world stage, from China and India to the Middle East and even Europe. Arguably, the world is changing profoundly, and Putin is more attuned to those changes than is the bipartisan US foreign-policy establishment.

3. That Washington’s Cold War policies toward Russia have strengthened the vaunted US-European “transatlantic alliance,” as exemplified by NATO’s buildup on Russia’s western borders. In reality, a growing number of European countries are trending away from Washington’s hard-line policies toward Moscow, among them France, Austria, The Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, and others, perhaps even Germany. And this does not include Brexit, which removed hard-line London from European policy-making. This does not mean these countries are becoming “pro-Russian,” as crude media coverage would have it, but less anti-Russian for the sake of their own national interests.

4. That “Russia’s aggression,” its “invasion,” is the primary cause of the Ukrainian crisis, which is still the political epicenter of the new Cold War. In reality, the underlying cause is a civil war that grew out of Ukraine’s diverse history, politics, social realities, and culture. This means that negotiations, not more war, are the only solution.

5. The orthodox US narrative of the Syrian civil war has, on the other hand, suddenly changed. While Obama was negotiating with Putin for joint US-Russian military action in Syria, “terrorists” were said to be entrenched in Aleppo and other anti-Assad strongholds. Since that diplomacy failed, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other mainstream media have rewritten the narrative to pit Syrian, Russian, and Iranian forces against benign anti-Assad “rebels” and “insurgents.” In Iraq, in Mozul, however, the US-led war is said to be against “terrorists” and “jihadists.” Thus, in Aleppo, Russia is reported to be committing “war crimes” while in Mozul these are called “collateral damages.”

All of us live according to the stories we tell ourselves. When policy-makers act according to false narratives, the result is grave dangers, as we are now experiencing in the new Cold War. To escape these dangers, Washington must first get the history right, particularly of its own role in creating it.

Cold War Hysteria vs. National Security

SINCE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, ALLEGATIONS HAVE grown that Kremlin cyber-invasions of the Democratic National Committee and dissemination of its materials severely damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. Thus far, no actual evidence has been made public to support these unprecedented and exceedingly dangerous charges.

Nor are the motives being attributed to Russian President Putin credible. Why would a Kremlin leader whose mission has been to rebuild Russia with economic and other partnerships with the West seek to undermine the political systems of those countries, not only in America but also in Europe, as is being alleged?

Judging by the public debate among Russian policy intellectuals close to the Kremlin, it is not clear that it so favored the largely unknown, inexperienced, and unpredictable Trump. But even if Putin was presented with the possibility of stealing and publicizing DNC emails, he certainly would have understood that such crude Russian interference in a US election would become known and thus work in favor of Clinton, not Trump.

Nonetheless, these Trump-Putin allegations are inspiring an alarming Cold War hysteria in the American political-media establishment, still without facts to support them. One result is more neo-McCarthyite slurring of people who dissent from this narrative. A December 12 New York Times editorial alleged that Trump had “surrounded himself with Kremlin lackeys.” And Senator John McCain ominously warned that anyone who disagreed with his longstanding political jihad against Putin “is lying.”

A kind of witch hunt may be unfolding of the kind the Washington Post tried to instigate with its now discredited “report” of scores of American websites said to be “fronts for Russian propaganda.” It could spread to higher levels. For example, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is charged with being “a friend of Putin” as a result of having struck a major deal for ExxonMobil for Russian oil reserves. Surely Tillerson was obliged to do this as the company’s CEO.

Several motives seem to be behind this bipartisan campaign against the President-elect, who is being associated with all manner of Russian misdeeds. One is to reverse the Electoral College vote. Another is to exonerate the Clinton campaign from its electoral defeat by blaming Putin instead and thereby trying to maintain the Clinton wing’s grip on the Democratic Party. Yet another is to delegitimize Trump even before he is inaugurated. And no less important, to prevent the détente with Russia that Trump seems to want.

We therefore face the growing possibility of two profound and related crises. One is an ever more perilous Cold War with Russia. The other is a new American president so politically paralyzed he cannot cope with such dangers as previous presidents have done.