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

Did Putin Really Order a “Cyber–Pearl Harbor”?

CONFRONTATIONS BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND MOSCOW—NOW EXTENDING from the Baltic region, Ukraine, and Syria to the American political system itself—are becoming more dangerous than was the US-Soviet nuclear confrontation over Cuba in 1962. Unlike in 1962, when the Kennedy administration made public evidence of Soviet missile silos under construction on the neighboring island, the Obama administration has presented no concrete evidence that the Kremlin, directed by President Putin, hacked the Democratic National Committee and arranged for damaging materials to be disseminated in order to put Donald Trump in the White House.

Nonetheless, even as a number of independent cyber experts doubt the plausibility of White House intelligence reports, powerful political interests are inflating the story to imply that a US warlike act of retaliation is required. A Washington Post editorial on Dec. 31, for example, declared that America had suffered “a real cyber-Pearl Harbor” at Putin’s hands. The motives of these political interests vary, as we have seen, from exonerating Hillary Clinton of her defeat to crippling Trump before he even enters the White House. In resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis wisely, President Kennedy did not have to cope with these kinds of debilitating public divisions and toxic allegations.

Today’s hysteria, suffused with growing neo-McCarthyism and a witch hunt–like search for “Putin’s friends” in the United States, first and foremost, of course, Trump himself, are making any rational, fact-based discourse nearly impossible. Public discussion is urgently needed regarding NATO’s buildup on Russia’s western borders, the civil/proxy wars in Ukraine and Syria, and more generally a less confrontational US policy toward Russia. With the New York Times, the Washington Post, and their echo chambers on cable-TV networks labeling anyone who rethinks US policy a “Trump apologist” and “Putin apologist,” civil discourse so vital to democratic resolutions, and to US national security, has become nearly impossible.

Trump and Putin have tried to diminish the hysteria. Putin’s attempt, declining to adopt the traditional Cold War tit-for-tat approach of immediately expelling 35 American “intelligence operatives” from Russia, raises a question about the Obama administration. Did whoever advised the president to expel 35 Russians and their families within 72 hours understand the order would violate the hallowed tradition of Russian New Year’s Eve, the most sentimental of holidays, which families spend together at home, not in clubs or otherwise dispersed? If so, it was a malicious decision that enabled Putin to be magnanimous toward the American families affected in Russia. On the other hand, if Obama’s advisers did not know this simple fact, it may explain his disastrous Russia policies since taking office.

Meanwhile, Putin has his own political problems. His generals, tasked with taking the Syrian city of Aleppo, had already protested his repeated “humanitarian ceasefires” as thwarting their mission. Now hard-liners are asking why Putin gave such a “soft” response to Obama’s sanctions and expulsions as retaliation for Russia’s purported role in the US presidential election. This too Obama should have been made to understand by his advisers. Was he? Or was Obama determined to prevent Trump from changing the soon-to-be former president’s approach to Russia?

The Real Enemies of US Security

NOT SURPRISINGLY, NOW THERE IS MORE: allegations that the Kremlin possesses compromising materials, from sexual to financial, that would enable it to “blackmail” President-elect Trump. The leaked “documents” were first gleefully trumpeted by CNN on January 10 and quickly followed by a tsunami of echoing media stories. The allegedly incriminating documents themselves were then published by BuzzFeed—all raising serious questions about the sub-tabloid reporting of admittedly “unsubstantiated,” even “unverifiable,” allegations, though few people raised any. More importantly, who planned this obviously coordinated strike against Trump, and why?

At least two conflicting interpretations are possible. Either Trump is about to become a potentially treasonous American president. Or powerful domestic forces are trying for other reasons to destroy his presidency before it begins. Even if the allegations are eventually regarded as untrue, they may permanently slur and thus cripple Trump as a foreign-policy president, especially in trying to cope with the exceedingly dangerous new Cold War with Russia. That itself would constitute a grave threat to American national security—one created not by Trump or Putin but by whoever is responsible for these new “revelations.”

Their timing is suspicious. They come on the heels of the just-released “Intelligence Community’s” utterly vacuous “Assessment” that Kremlin leader Putin directed a campaign, including hacking of the Democratic National Committee, intended to discredit Mrs. Clinton and put Trump in the White House. Anti-Trump media widely trumpeted this story. But even the determinedly anti-Trump, anti-Putin New York Times “analysis”, by Scott Shane on January 7, initially had reservations. It found that the much awaited “intelligence community” report was “missing… hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims”—that there was an “absence of any proof”.

The anti-Trump “dossier” said to have been compiled by a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, and leaked to CNN and BuzzFeed, is no more convincing. Despite Steele’s claims of “Kremlin sources,” it seems culled from long circulating Russian, American, UK, and other NATO scuttlebutt, of the “Intel” variety.

Even before the latest “revelations,” there has been an unprecedented media campaign to defame Trump as a would-be traitor in his relations with Russia. On the evening of January 4, a CNN paid contributor characterized the next president as a Russian “fifth columnist.” No one on the panel dissented or demurred. Subsequently, Washington Post columnists warned that Trump might commit “treason” as president or even replicate with Putin the notorious 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. Another columnist set out the articles of Trump’s impeachment even before his inauguration. Here too nothing so poisonous, or potentially detrimental to national security, or to the institution of the presidency itself, has occurred in modern American history, if ever.

Predictably, anti-Trump media are warning him, and the public, against being “skeptical” about the quality and motives of US intelligence agencies. Given the long history of the CIA’s misleading American presidents into disastrous wars, from the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam to Iraq and Libya, why would anyone think this is sound advice? National security requires a president who is able to evaluate critically intelligence reports or have people around him who can do so.

All this comes on the eve of Rex Tillerson’s hearings for confirmation as secretary of state. Few doubt that Tillerson was a successful CEO of the global ExxonMobil Corporation, though some are charging that in doing so he too became “a friend of Putin.”

This unfortunate occasion is a moment to make a somewhat related point. The United States does not need a “friend” in the Kremlin, as President Bill Clinton liked to boast he had in the often compliant and intoxicated Boris Yeltsin, but a national-security partner whose nation’s interests are sufficiently mutual for sustained cooperation—for détente instead of Cold War. In this regard, Tillerson, whose professional success was based on reconciling national economic interests, would appear to be well qualified, though he too is being defamed for suggesting any kind of cooperation with Moscow, no matter the benefits to US national security.

What might Putin himself think about this political uproar in the United States? His own leadership motives are usually and wrongly surmised solely from the fact that he is “a former KGB agent,” which appears to be his middle name in US media coverage. However formative that biographical circumstance may have been, it does enable Putin to analyze intelligence reports and understand politics inside national intelligence agencies.

His reaction to the US Intelligence Community Assessment may therefore have been shock over the embarrassing paucity of the report. He might even have reconsidered his long-sought cooperation between Russian and US intelligence in the fight against international terrorism. Putin might now conclude, they need us more than we do them. Considering the recent antics of US “Intel,” he might not be wrong.

Ukraine Revisited

WITH FIGHTING HAVING ESCALATED BETWEEN THE US-backed Kiev government and Russian-backed rebels in Donbass, we must focus yet again on Ukraine’s pivotal role in the new Cold War since 2013–2014. Here again, as we have seen elsewhere, widely disseminated false narratives obscure what really happened.

The orthodox US account that Russian President Putin alone is responsible for the new Cold War hangs largely on his alleged unprovoked “aggression” against Ukraine in 2014 and ever since. (The narrative is sustained in part by the near-total absence of American mainstream reporting of what is actually happening in Kiev-controlled or rebel-controlled territories.) In fact, Putin’s actions both in Donbass, where an indigenous rebellion broke out against the overthrow of the legally elected president in Kiev three years ago, and in Crimea, which had been part of Russia for more than 200 years (about as long as the United States has existed), was a direct reaction to the longstanding campaign by Washington and Brussels to bring Ukraine into NATO’s “sphere of influence.”

That itself was a form of political aggression against the centuries of intimate relations between large segments of Ukrainian society and Russia, including family ties. At the very least, it was reckless and immoral for Washington and the European Union to impose upon Kiev a choice between Russia and the West, thereby fostering, if not precipitating, civil war. And to flatly reject Putin’s counter-proposal for a three-way Ukrainian-Russian-EU economic relationship. In this regard, Washington and the EU bear considerable responsibility for the 10,000 who have died in the ensuing Ukrainian civil and proxy war. They have yet to assume any responsibility at all.

A false narrative also quickly emerged to explain the recent escalation of fighting along the ceasefire zone in Ukraine. There are no facts to support the US political-media establishment’s contention that Putin initiated the escalation—all reported facts point to Kiev—or any logic whatsoever. Why would Putin, who has openly welcomed Trump’s détente initiative, seek to provoke or challenge the new American president at this critical moment? Whether or not Kiev was actively encouraged by anti-détente forces in Washington is unclear, but a real possibility. (Inflammatory remarks made by Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham in Ukraine, in January, now circulating on a video, may be telling evidence.) If so, the blood of the 40 or more who died in the January–February fighting is on their hands as well.

What are the chances of Trump-Putin cooperation to end the Ukrainian crisis? If the country is not to fragment into two, three, or more parts, a united Ukraine will have to be militarily non-aligned (that is, not a member of NATO) and free to have prosperous economic relations with both Russia and the West.

The Minsk Accords, drafted by Germany and France and endorsed by Moscow and Kiev, would have moved Ukraine in this direction, but have been repeatedly thwarted, primarily by Kiev. Whether or not full backing for Minsk by both Trump and Putin, particularly the provision giving rebel territories some degree of home rule, would end the Ukrainian civil war is far from certain. It might even result in the overthrow of the current Kiev government by well-armed ultranationalist forces. But for now there is no peaceful alternative.

Even if Trump and Putin adopt a wise joint policy toward Ukraine, neither leader has much political capital to spare at home. Trump is opposed by virtually across-the-political-spectrum opposition to any kind of agreements with Russia, not the least regarding Ukraine. And Putin can never be seen at home as “selling out” Russia’s “brethren” anywhere in southeast Ukraine. Whether the two leaders have the wisdom and determination to end Ukraine’s tragic and utterly pointless war, which has left the country nearly in ruins, remains to be seen.

Kremlin-Baiting President Trump

THE TSUNAMI OF ALLEGATIONS THAT PRESIDENT Trump has been seditiously “compromised” by the Kremlin continues to mount. New York Times guru-columnist Thomas Friedman repeated the charge yet again on February 15. He too did so without any verified facts. The lack of any non-partisan high-level protest against this Kremlin-baiting of Trump is deeply alarming. It has become, it seems, politically correct.

Promoted by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in mid-2016 and even more after her defeat, and exemplified now by the strident innuendos of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and almost equally unbalanced CNN panels and newspaper editorial pages, the practice is growing into a kind of latter-day McCarthyite red-baiting and hysteria. Such politically malignant practices are to be deplored anywhere they appear, without exception, whether on the part of conservatives, liberals, or progressives. Whatever the motives, the slurring of Trump, which is already producing calls for his impeachment, poses grave threats to US and international security and to American democracy itself.

One or more of the allegations against Trump may turn out to be true, as might be almost anything in politics, but no actual evidence has been presented for any of the allegations. Without facts, all of us—professors, politicians, doctors, journalists, pundits—are doomed to malpractice or worse. A special investigation might search for such facts, but it is hard to imagine a truly objective and focused probe in the current political atmosphere.

For now, there are no facts or logic to support the following six related allegations that Trump has been treasonously “compromised” by Putin’s Kremlin:

1. Trump has “lavished praise” on Putin, as the Times charged on February 12, echoing many other media outlets. All Trump has said is that Putin is “a strong leader” and “smart” and that it would be good “to cooperate with Russia.” These are empirically true statements. They pale in comparison with, for example, FDR’s warm words about Stalin, Nixon’s about Leonid Brezhnev, and particularly President Bill Clinton’s about Russian President Boris Yeltsin, whom he compared favorably with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR. Only against the backdrop of unrelenting US media demonizing of Putin could Trump’s “praise” be considered “lavish.” Unlike virtually every other mainstream American politician and most media outlets, Trump has simply refused to vilify Putin—as in declining to characterize him as “a killer,” for which there is also no evidence.

2. Trump and his associates have had, it is charged, business dealings in Russia and with Russian “oligarchs.” Perhaps, but so have scores of major American corporations, from Delta Airlines, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, KFC, and Starbucks to Ford, Procter & Gamble, and several energy giants. Unavoidably, some of their Russian partners are “oligarchs.” Moreover, unlike many international hotel chains, Trump tried but failed to build his own affiliate, or anything else permanent, in Russia. The “Russian assets” about which his son once spoke evidently referred to condos and coops in the United States sold to cash-bearing Russians in search of a luxury brand and who did not need mortgages. New York City and South Florida are among those prime and entirely legitimate markets. It is said that Trump’s tax returns, if revealed, would expose incriminating Russian money. Perhaps—but also an allegation, not a fact.

3. Trump’s “associate,” and briefly campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is alleged to have been “pro-Russian” when he advised Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who was subsequently deposed unconstitutionally during the Maidan “revolution” in February 2014. As I already pointed out, this, to be polite, is uninformed. A professional political “adviser,” Manafort was well paid, like many other American electoral experts hired abroad. But his advice to Yanukovych was to move politically and economically toward the ill-fated European Union Partnership Agreement, away from Russia, as Yanukovych did in order to get votes beyond his constituency in southeastern Ukraine. (Nor was the unsavory Yanukovych, whom Putin loathed for this and other reasons, considered pro-Russian in Moscow prior to his crisis in late 2013, when Putin got stuck with him.)

4. In January, as we know, a “dossier” of “black” or “compromising” material purporting to document how the Kremlin could blackmail Trump was leaked to CNN and published by Buzzfeed. Compiled by a former British intelligence official, Christopher Steele, whose shadowy partners in various countries abetted his commercial projects, the “report” was initially contracted by one of Trump’s Republican primary opponents and then taken up and paid for by the Clinton campaign. Its 30-odd pages are a compilation of the entirely innocent, unverified, preposterous, and trash for sale in many political capitals, including London, Moscow, Kiev, Baltic capitals, and Washington. More recently, CNN exclaimed that its own intelligence leakers had “confirmed” some elements of the dossier, but thus far nothing that actually compromises Trump. Generally, more fact checking is done at tabloid magazines, lest they be sued for libel. (Nonetheless, Senator John McCain, a rabid opponent of any détente with Russia, acquired and gave a copy of the dossier to the FBI. No doubt the agency already had copies, bits of which had been floating around for months, but understood McCain wanted it leaked. And so it was, by someone.)

5. But the crux of pro-Kremlin allegations against Trump was, and remains, the charge that Putin hacked the DNC and disseminated the stolen emails through WikiLeaks in order to put Trump in the White House. A summary of these “facts” was presented in the declassified report released by the US “Intelligence Community” and widely published in January 2017. Though it has since become axiomatic proof for Trump’s political and media enemies, as I pointed out earlier, virtually nothing in the “Assessment’s” some 13 pages of text (or Steele’s dossier) is persuasive—or entirely logical. For example, would Trump, a longtime hotelier, really commit “acts of sexual perversion” in a VIP suite he did not control, especially in Moscow, where audio and video bugging had long been rumored? Indeed, those who accept the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) as canon seem not to have noticed the nullifying disclaimer its authors buried at the end: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”

In reality, about half the ICA pages are merely assumptions—or “assessments”—based on surmised motivations, not factual evidence of a Kremlin operation on behalf of Trump. The other half is a pointless and badly outdated evaluation deploring broadcasts by the Kremlin-funded television network RT. Not addressed is the point made by a number of American hacking experts that Russian state hackers would have left no fingerprints, as US intelligence claimed they had. Indeed, the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity believes that the damaging DNC documents were not hacked but leaked by an insider. If so, it had nothing to do with Russia. (The NSA, which has the capacity to monitor the movement of emails, was only “moderately confident” in the report it co-signed, while the CIA and FBI were “highly confident,” even though the FBI inexplicably never examined the DNC computers.)

There is another incongruity. At his final presidential press conference, Obama referred to the DNC scandal as a leak, not a hack, and said he did not know how the emails got to WikiLeaks—this despite allegations by his own intelligence agencies. (No one seems to have asked Obama if he misspoke!) On the other side of this alleged conspiracy, nor is it clear that Putin so favored the clearly erratic Trump that he would have taken such a risk, which if discovered, as I also pointed out earlier, would have compromised Trump and greatly favored Clinton. (Judging from discussions in Kremlin-related Russian newspapers, there was a serious debate as to which American presidential candidate might be best—or least bad—for Russia.)

6. Finally, there is the resignation (or firing) of General Michael Flynn as Trump’s national security adviser for having communicated with Russian representatives about the sanctions imposed by Obama just before leaving the White House and before Trump was inaugurated. Flynn may have misled Vice President Mike Pence about those “back-channel” discussions, but they were neither unprecedented nor incriminating, so far as is known.

Other American presidential candidates and presidents-elect had communicated with foreign states before taking office—as Richard Nixon seems to have done to prevent a Vietnam peace agreement that would have favored Hubert Humphrey, and as Ronald Reagan seems to have done with Iran to prevent release of its American hostages before the election. In fact, this was and remained a common practice. Obama’s own top Russia adviser, Michael McFaul, told the Washington Post on February 9 that he visited Moscow in 2008, before the election, for talks with Russian officials. The Post reporter characterized this as “appropriate conduct.” Certainly, it was not unprecedented.

Nor was Flynn’s. More generally, if Flynn’s purpose was to persuade the Kremlin not to overreact to Obama’s December sanctions, which were accompanied by a provocative threat to launch a cyber attack on Moscow, this was wise and in America’s best interests. Unless our political-media establishment would prefer the harshest possible reaction by Putin, as some of its Cold War zealots apparently do.

All this considered, it is less Putin who is threatening American democracy than is the Kremlin-baiting of President Trump without facts. Less Putin who is endangering US and international security than are the American enemies of détente who resort to such practices. Less Putin who is degrading US media with “fake news” than is the media’s fact-free Kremlin-baiting of Trump. And less the “former KGB thug” who is poisoning American politics than are US intelligence leakers at war against their new president.

President Eisenhower eventually stopped Joseph McCarthy. Who will stop the new McCarthyism before it spreads even more into the “soul of democracy”? Facts might do so. But in lieu of facts there are only professional ethics and patriotism.

Putin’s Own Opponents of Détente

THE RUSSIAN POLICY ELITE CLOSELY FOLLOWS US publications, especially “leading” papers like the New York Times. It would have reacted strongly—as should American readers—to a series of articles in the Times from February 16 through February 19 on the theme of a “Trump-Putin axis” in the White House, as columnist Paul Krugman so elegantly phrased it on February 17. Indeed, the entire February 19 Times Sunday Review was substantially devoted to this extraordinary, though now commonplace, allegation.

But Russian analysts would have focused even more—as should we—on an ominous statement quoted approvingly by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, on February 16, that “the bigger issue here is why Trump and people around him take such a radically different view of Russia than has been the case for decades.” The clear message: any critical thinking about US policy toward Russia since the 1990s is now under suspicion—and perhaps criminal. No wonder some members of the Russian elite have concluded that the slurring of the new US president and all American proponents of better relations means there will be no new détente.

This can only please Putin’s own opponents of “cooperation” with the United States. There is, of course, a spectrum of policy views in the Russian political elite. Some strongly favor a new détente with Washington, but we should not discount those—rarely, if ever, noted in US media—that equally strongly do not. Generally known as “state nationalist patriots,” these Russians insist that détente has been historically catastrophic for Russia and thus is unpatriotic.

Their opposition echoes in part the centuries-long divide between Russian Westernizers and traditionalist Slavophiles, but it is also pointedly contemporary. Today’s Russian foes of détente argue that the Gorbachev-Reagan-Bush rapprochement of the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the end of the Soviet Union and Russia’s collapse as a great power. And that the Yeltsin-Clinton “partnership” during the 1990s resulted in a decade of Russia’s humiliation at home and abroad.

They add, not incorrectly, that the US repeatedly lied or broke promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and even to Putin himself during Moscow’s détente-like “reset” with Washington, and will do so again under President Trump. If nothing else, Putin must not be seen at home as following in the tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. (Yes, to make the point again, this means that Putin is not an “autocrat” whose will despotically becomes policy.)

Embracing Trump as a détente partner would pose other problems for Putin. As head of a vast multi-ethnic state, with some 20 million Muslim citizens, Putin cannot be associated with anti-Muslim aspects of Trump’s immigration policies. Nor can he consider as a “bargaining chip” Moscow’s increasingly close relations with China or even Iran. (The “China card,” played by Henry Kissinger on behalf of President Richard Nixon, is no longer applicable.) Even nuclear-weapons reductions, the most attainable détente achievement, along with cooperation in Syria, is no longer so straight-forward. For Putin, it is inextricably tied to the missile-defense systems Washington is installing around Russia. Trump would need to revise this Obama policy as well.

There is another historical echo in the new struggle over détente. As during the 40-year Cold War, those known as “hardliners” or “hawks” both in Washington and Moscow have again formed an unholy, if inadvertent, axis.

The “Fog of Suspicion”

ONCE RESPECTABLE AMERICAN MEDIA ARE RECKLESSLY feeding neo-McCarthyist impulses inherent in the Russiagate frenzy. This could indeed become a political witch hunt ensnaring Americans with legitimate “contacts” with Russia—scholars, corporate executives and independent business people invested in Russia, diplomats, performers, journalists themselves, and many others.

On March 6, for example, the New York Times’ Charles Blow, echoing his fellow columnists, applauded the “gathering fog of suspicion” in the hope it will bring down President Trump. MSNBC contributed a two-hour kangaroo tribunal on “The Trump-Putin Power Play” (no question mark) featuring “experts” without any doubts (or much actual knowledge) on their minds. A CNN “documentary” on Putin—“The Most Powerful Man in the World”—provided the kind of elliptical narrative needed to explain his “war” on America, and to inspire more hysteria. Both MSNBC and CNN regularly feature prosecutorial “former intelligence officials” whose misinformed statements about Russia’s leadership can only give the CIA and US “Intel” generally a bad reputation. Specialists with dissenting analyses and points of view are effectively excluded. In this enveloping “fog,” the accompanying clamor for “investigations” may only make things worse.

Not surprisingly, the “fog of suspicion” is chilling, even freezing, public discourse about worsening US-Russian relations, which should be a compelling media subject. As the political-media establishment “redirects” Trump away from his campaign promise of détente with Russian President Putin, some university scholars, think-tank specialists, and journalists are reluctant to speak candidly, at least publicly. As are US CEOs in pursuit of profits in Russia, who would normally welcome Trump’s détente as their predecessors embraced the Nixon-Kissinger détente with Soviet Russia in the 1970s. Also not surprisingly, only one or two members of Congress have publicly expressed any principled alarm over the mounting hysteria. Most seem willing to accept the anti–national security mission of Senator Lindsay Graham to make 2017 “the year of kicking Russia in the ass.”

This absence of statesmanship prevails in Washington even as three new Cold War fronts become more fraught with the possibility of hot war. In the Baltic and Black Sea regions, on Russia’s borders, where NATO’s unprecedented buildup continues and is provoking equally dangerous forms of Russian “brinkmanship.” In Syria, where the growing number of American troops are increasingly in military proximity to the Russian-Syrian alliance, another realm of lethal mishaps waiting to happen. And in Ukraine, where recent developments show again that the US-backed Kiev government is hostage to armed ultranationalists and where that civil and proxy war could easily become a much larger conflagration with Russia.

There is also the wildly hyperbolic charge that Putin, like his worst Soviet predecessors, is now at war against the entire “liberal world order,” including the European Union. This too is trumpeted by influential American media, but for this too there are no facts or logic. Why would Putin want to destroy the EU, an essential trading partner? Why would he undermine European politicians who favor ending sanctions against Russia, as is being alleged? More generally, is Putin really the cause of Europe’s multiple crises today in ways that the superpower Soviet Union never was? And what is this international “order” that has featured so many wars, many of them US ones, since the Soviet Union ended in 1991?

The blaming of Russia for America’s domestic shocks—for Hillary Clinton’s defeat and for President Trump, in particular—is political evasion now being projected onto the entire “liberal world order.” This is indeed a “fog,” but not the one of “suspicion” the Times, the Washington Post, cable “news,” and other mainstream media are busy promoting.

Neo-McCarthyism Is Now Politically Correct

I HAVE BEEN SHARPLY CRITICIZED, PARTICULARLY BY self-professed liberal and progressive Democrats, for warning that Russiagate allegations against President Trump, whatever their still unverified validity, are growing into a kind of widespread Russophobic neo-McCarthyism. Recall that the original premise of McCarthyism was the existence of a vast Soviet Communist conspiracy inside America. Now consider, in addition to previous examples I have already given, more recent echoes of that era.

At recent House hearings, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff warned of a “Russian attack on our democracy.” He meant the Kremlin’s alleged hacking of the DNC and allegations that the Trump campaign had “colluded”—that is, conspired—with the Kremlin.

As the session unfolded, representative after representative, most of them Democrats, demanded the “unmasking” of Americans who had or have “contacts” with Russia. Under suspicion, it seemed, was anyone who traveled frequently to Russia, married a Russian, written or spoken critically about US policy toward Russia (as the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof warned in an example I cited earlier), or, as another Democrat put it, otherwise done “Putin’s bidding.” He was referring to the new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in his previous role as CEO of ExxonMobil.

Most alarming perhaps was the spectacle of FBI Director James Comey emerging in the role of his distant predecessor J. Edgar Hoover as a great authority on Russian malignancies—in this case, on the politics of “Putin’s Russia” and Putin himself, including his personal motives, plans, and more. And yet, when asked what he thought about Gazprom—Russia’s giant natural gas company, producer of more than a third of Europe’s energy, and very often cited as a major pillar of Putin’s power—Comey said he had not heard of it. And there was the spectacle of Schiff, who elaborating on the purported “collusion” as “one of the most shocking betrayals of our democracy in history,” seemed to morph into McCarthy himself.

Congress, of course, was not acting in a political vacuum. For months, mainstream media, mostly associated with the Democratic Party—from the Times and the Washington Post to the New Yorker, Politico, MSNBC, CNN, and NPR—have promoted the theme of a Trump-Putin conspiracy and now a “Trump-Putin regime” in the White House.

Little wonder that related aspects of neo-McCarthyism have become politically correct. On March 20, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared that loyal “Americans don’t go to Russia.” In a tweet on March 14, the Atlantic’s David Frum proposed that someone “should stake… out” a Russian Embassy concert, in Washington, in memory of the Red Army Choir that perished in a plane crash and “photograph who attends.”

Adumbrations of the 1950s are bipartisan. For a disagreement in the Senate, John McCain accused his fellow Republican Senator Rand Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin.” And Trump’s new UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, proclaimed, “We should never trust Russia.” (If implemented, her diplomatic axiom would invalidate decades of US nuclear arms control agreements with Moscow.)

Lest anyone think the present danger is any less than was that of Soviet Russian Communism, we have Post columnist Dana Milbank warning, on March 21, of “the red menace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Considering recent American media coverage, he might well think Communists still control the Kremlin.

The political logic inherent in all of this is obvious—and ominous. The question is how many influential Americans, if any, will at long last stand publicly against it.

Yevtushenko’s Civic Courage

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO, RUSSIA’S GREAT POET-DISSENTER, DIED on April 1. I may not be fully objective about him, having known him for many years. Not well in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I lived off and on in Moscow among Soviet-era dissidents, though a bit from our encounters there and in New York. But very well from 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev began the perestroika reforms and I regained my Soviet entry visa, denied since 1982. So well that Zhenya, as his friends called him, was the godfather of my younger daughter, born in 1991.

Mindful of the adage that a great writer in Russia is more than a writer, Yevtushenko was for decades the nation’s—and perhaps the world’s—most famous and popular poet. He used his talent and position to champion the cause of historical and political justice and then a Soviet democratic reformation, as attempted by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. Long before Gorbachev’s “glasnost” summoned radical reformers into public action, Yevtushenko acted boldly at great political and personal risk.

Western observers not known for protesting anything in their own countries often criticized Yevtushenko for having been officially tamed and corrupted by privilege, and still do so. They do not know the scores of writers, dissidents, and cultural works his private interventions helped, even saved. Or the impact of his (not so) private letter to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Many of his poems, and his riveting public readings, inspired at least two generations of Soviet reformers, including Gorbachev, as he later acknowledged.

At least two of Yevtushenko’s most famous poems had a direct impact on public affairs. “The Heirs of Stalin” warned the nation in 1962 that powerful forces behind the scenes were seeking to overthrow Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in part for his anti-Stalinist revelations, as they finally did in 1964. And “Babi Yar” broke the official Soviet taboo against discussion of the Jewish Holocaust.

Zhenya’s death causes me to wonder again why established American figures—in the media, Congress, universities, cultural life, and elsewhere—have not protested abuses now engulfing US politics in a wave of McCarthy-like hysteria. They have far less to lose than did Yevtushenko. A torrent of fact-free allegations and slurring of people has flowed for months from leading newspapers and television networks, but exceedingly few, if any, Americans in a prominent position to protest have done so.

When New York Times columnist Charles Blow declares that “the Russians did interfere in our election. This is not a debatable issue”—why does no one protest that it is in fact debatable? Or when Blow slurs Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as a compromised friend of Russian President Putin? Or when other baseless allegations are made almost nightly by MSNBC and CNN hosts and panelists? Or when hyperbolic claims of a vast “Russian threat” to democracy everywhere were declared at the Senate “investigation” earlier this month? Some prominent Americans have grave doubts about this political and media conduct, but they are silent. Do they lack the civic courage that Yevtushenko exhibited for decades while treading a political razor’s edge?

Such behavior, along with large policy issues, were exhibited in another way by the US response to the recent terrorist act on a St. Petersburg subway. Downplaying it generally, too many American commentators suggested that Putin was himself behind the explosion that killed or maimed scores of Russian citizens—in order, it was said, to deflect attention from public protests against official financial corruption. Again, there is no evidence or plausible logic for these shameful innuendoes.

They also directly threaten US national security. Ever since the 9/11 actual attack on America, inescapably recalled by subsequent attacks on European cities, the imperative of a US-Russia alliance against international terrorism has been abundantly clear. So are the readiness and capabilities of Russia—which has suffered in this regard more than any other Western nation—to help. Time and again such an alliance has been thwarted, primarily by powerful forces in the US establishment.

President Trump indicated he wanted this alliance. The tragedy in St. Petersburg should have been occasion enough to warrant one. But it may again be thwarted, now by the Kremlin-baiting of Trump and the nearly indifferent reaction by the US political-media establishment to the most recent act of terrorism in Russia.

When Yevgeny Yevtushenko turned his pen against the powerful, repressive forces of Soviet neo-Stalinism and anti-Semitism, he risked his life and his family’s. What do privileged Americans who understand the ongoing folly but remain silent have to lose?

“Words Are Also Deeds”

THE US POLITICAL-MEDIA ESTABLISHMENT HAS EMBRACED three fraught narratives for which there is still no public evidence, only “Intel” allegations. One is, of course, “Russiagate,” as it is being called: that Kremlin leader Putin ordered a hacking of the DNC and disseminated its emails to help put Donald Trump in the White House. The second is that Syrian President Assad, Putin’s ally, ordered last week’s chemical-weapons attack on Syrian civilians, including young children. A new third faith-based narrative, promoted by MSNBC in particular, now links the other two: Trump’s recent missile attack on a Syrian military air base was actually a Putin-Trump plot to free the new American president from the constraints of “Russiagate” investigations and enable him to do Putin’s bidding.

In addition to the absence of any actual evidence for these allegations, there is no logic. The explanation that Putin “hated Hillary Clinton” for protests that took place in Moscow in 2011 is based on a misrepresentation of that event. (The protested parliamentary election actually resulted in Putin’s party losing its constitutional majority in the Duma.) And why would Assad resort to the use of chemical weapons, thereby risking all the military, political, and diplomatic gains he has achieved in the past year and half, and while he had Russian air power at his disposal as an alternative? The emerging sub-narrative that Putin lied in 2013, when he and President Obama agreed Assad would destroy all of his chemical weapons, is based on another factual misrepresentation. It was the United Nations and its special agency that verified the full destruction of those weapons, not Putin.

The Russian adage “words are also deeds” is true, it seems. Trump’s missile attack on Moscow’s ally Syria probably had a domestic political purpose—to disprove the narrative that he is somehow “Putin’s puppet.” If so, the American mainstream media that has promoted this narrative for months is deeply complicit. Meanwhile, the Kremlin, which watches these narratives unfold politically in Washington, has become deeply alarmed, resorting to its own fraught words. The No. 2 leader, Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, declared that US-Russian relations have been “ruined,” a statement I do not recall any previous Soviet or post-Soviet leader ever having made. Medvedev added that the two nuclear superpowers are at “the brink” of war.

Understanding that Medvedev is regarded as the leading pro-Western figure in Putin’s inner circle, imagine what the other side—state patriots, or nationalists, as they are called—is telling Putin. Still more, the Kremlin is warning that Trump’s missile attack on Syria crossed Russia’s “red lines,” with all the warfare implications this term has in Washington as well. And flatly declaring the mysterious use of chemical weapons in Syria to have been a “provocation,” Putin himself warned that forces in Washington were planning more such “provocations” and military strikes. In short, while the Kremlin does not want and will not start a war with the United States, it is preparing for the possibility.

Meanwhile, Trump’s new secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, had just arrived in Moscow for talks with Russian leaders. Whether or not Putin himself would met with Tillerson was still uncertain. Putin may be an authoritarian leader, the “decider,” but influential forces were strongly against him meeting with an American secretary of state in the immediate aftermath of such a US “provocation.” Whatever the case, Tillerson’s visit is vitally important.

Tillerson is well known to Putin and other Kremlin leaders. On behalf of ExxonMobil, he negotiated with them one of Russia’s largest energy deals, granting access to the nation’s vast oil resources beneath frozen seas. Putin personally approved the agreement, which oil giants around the world had sought. He would not have done so had he not concluded that Tillerson was a serious, highly competent man. (For this achievement on behalf of a major American corporation, US media continue to slur Tillerson as “Putin’s friend.”)

The Kremlin will therefore expect candid answers from Tillerson to questions related to the looming issue of war or peace. Are the fact-free narratives now prevailing in Washington determining factors in Trump’s policy toward Russia? Are they the reason Trump committed the “provocation” in Syria? Does this mean Trump no longer shares Russia’s essential strategic premise regarding the civil and proxy war in Syria—that the overthrow of Assad would almost certainly mean ISIS or another terrorist army in Damascus, an outcome the Kremlin regards as a dire threat to Russia’s national security?

And, most fundamentally, who is making Russia policy in Washington: President Trump or someone else? Putin, it should be recalled, asked the same question publicly about President Obama, when the agreement he and Obama negotiated for military cooperation in Syria was sabotaged by the US Department of Defense.

The answers that the experienced Tillerson—he had his own corporate global state department and intelligence service at ExxonMobil—gives may do much to determine whether or not the new Cold War moves even closer to the brink of hot war in Syria. To avert that dire possibility, American mainstream media should return to their once professed practice of rigorously fact-checking their narratives with an understanding that words are indeed also deeds.

Wartime “Tears” in Moscow, Cold War Inquisition in Washington

GROWING UP IN SMALL-TOWN KENTUCKY IN the aftermath of World War II, I looked forward to the annual V-E (Victory in Europe) Day remembrance, on May 8, particularly the parades featuring floats and veterans in their uniforms. Apparently it is no longer observed as a major American holiday across the United States. In sharp contrast, Victory Day, May 9, remains the most sacred Russian holiday, a “holiday with tears.”

And so it was this year. The day was marked by commemorations across the vastness of Russia, not only by the traditional military parade on Moscow’s Red Square. A remarkable new feature, “The Immortal Regiment,” has recently been added—millions of people, among them President Putin, walking together through a myriad of streets bearing portraits of family members who fought in what is known as The Great Patriotic War, very many of whom did not return. The annual events are promoted by the government, as US media unfailing point out, but the “holiday with tears” is profoundly authentic for an overwhelming majority of the Russian people, and for understandable historical reasons.

Most Americans today believe “we defeated Nazi Germany,” as President Obama wrote on the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. It is a misconception fostered by Hollywood films that portray the US landing at Normandy in June 1944 as the beginning of the destruction of Hitler’s Germany.

In truth, America won the war in the Pacific, against Japan, but the Soviet Union fought and destroyed the Nazi war machine on the “Eastern Front” almost alone from 1941 to 1944, from Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, and eventually to Berlin in 1945. Some 75 to 80 percent of all German casualties were suffered on the Eastern Front. By the time US and British forces landed at Normandy, Hitler had insufficient divisions to withstand the invasion, too many of them destroyed or still fighting oncoming Soviet forces from the east.

Soviet losses were almost unimaginable. More than 27 million citizens died, 60 to 70 percent of them ethnic Russians. Some 1700 cities and towns were all but destroyed. Most families lost a close or extended member. Perhaps most tellingly, only three of every hundred boys who graduated from high school in 1941–42 returned from the war. This meant that millions of Soviet children never knew their fathers and that millions of Soviet women never married. (They were known as “Ivan’s widows,” more than a few doomed to lonely lives in the often-harsh post-war Soviet Union.)

This is an enduring part of Russia’s “holiday with tears.” This is in large measure why so many Russians, not just the Kremlin, have watched with alarm as NATO has crept from Germany to their country’s borders since the late 1990s. Why they resent and fear Washington’s claims on the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. And why they say of NATO’s ongoing buildup within conventional firing range of Russia, “Never has so much Western military power been amassed on our borders since the Nazi invasion in June 1941.” This is the “living history” that underlies Russia’s reaction to the new Cold War.

Again in sharp contrast, on May 8 and 9 in Washington, today’s Russia was being portrayed at renewed Senate hearings as an existential threat, as having committed an “act of war against America” by “hijacking” the 2016 presidential election on behalf of President Trump. By end of day on May 9, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was said to be an attempt to cover up that collusion.

After nearly a year, no actual facts have yet been presented to support the allegation. On the other hand, evidence has appeared that for more than a year elements of the US Intelligence Community—almost certainly the CIA and FBI—have been engaged in shadowy operations designed to link Trump to Putin’s Kremlin. I’ve called this “Intelgate” and urged it be investigated first and foremost. Intel leaks and “reports,” in evident “collusion” with the failed Clinton campaign, have driven the Russiagate narrative from the outset, amplified almost daily by a mainstream media that shows no interest at all in Intelgate.

Which brings us to Trump’s (and before him Obama’s) thwarted effort to forge an anti-terrorist alliance with Moscow. Russia has suffered more from jihadist terrorism than has any other Western country. For many Russians, it is becoming an existential threat reminiscent of German fascism in the 1930s. Therefore, they naturally want another wartime alliance with the United States. But Russia’s tearful memories and real present-day perils do not interest Russiagate zealots, who are focused on Trump’s firing of Comey. (Considering his acts detrimental to her campaign, a President Hillary Clinton would almost certainly also have replaced Comey.)

None of this seems to matter to representatives of the Democratic Party or to Washington’s bipartisan cold warriors. They prefer pursuing still fact-free allegations. On May 8-9, they should instead have gone to Moscow to commemorate the historic allied victory in World War II. But they were following recent precedent: President Obama pointedly boycotted the 70th anniversary commemoration in Moscow in 2015.

Terrorism and Russiagate

IT CANNOT BE EMPHASIZED TOO OFTEN: international terrorism—a modern-day phenomenon that controls territory, has aspects of statehood, commands sizable fighting forces and agents in many countries, and is in pursuit of radioactive materials to make its bombings incalculably more lethal—is the No. 1 threat to the world today. Coping with this existential danger requires an international alliance of governments, first and foremost between the United States and Russia.

President Trump has suggested, publicly and privately, an anti-terrorism coalition with Russian President Putin. At each stage of the negotiations, the media’s Russiagate (no need for quote marks) narrative—has intervened in ways that jeopardize, if not sabotage, the diplomatic process.

We now have more instances. Allegations that Trump betrayed intelligence secrets to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov during an Oval Office meeting and discussed with him his firing of FBI Director Comey. And that the president’s son-in-law and aide, Jared Kushner, participated in an attempt to establish a secret “back channel” of communication with Moscow prior to Trump’s inauguration. These allegations, like many others, are uninformed.

Putin has repeatedly sought a US-Russian anti-terrorism alliance for nearly 17 years, at least since the 9/11 attacks on America. Each time the prospect seemed real, at least to Moscow, it was thwarted by forces in Washington.

This time, therefore, especially given misgivings by some of his senior advisers, Putin needed from Trump personally, via Lavrov, answers to two questions. Did the two sides agree about the exchange of high-level intelligence required for such an alliance? Trump responded by sharing a piece of classified information about a terrorist threat to American and Russian passenger airliners. In doing so, Trump did nothing unprecedented, improper, or probably even revelatory. (The source involved Israel, whose intelligence agencies work closely with their Russian counterparts on matters involving terrorism.)

Second, Putin needed to know whether Trump, reeling under accusations of being a “Kremlin puppet” and facing a myriad of investigations at home, could be a reliable anti-terrorism partner. Trump responded by saying he had fired Comey, whom he thought, not unreasonably, had been inspiring some of the allegations against him. However inelegantly expressed by Trump, these were necessary discussions with Lavrov if the US-Russian alliance against terrorism was to proceed.

Nor was the Trump team’s search for a back channel of communications with Moscow, whether through Russian officials or private American citizens, as Kushner then was, unprecedented or improper for a President-elect, as I previously detailed. The former diplomat Jack Matlock has said he did it for President-elect Jimmy Carter, as did then–private citizen Michael McFaul for President-elect Obama—in Moscow, no less. It is likely that Henry Kissinger, whom Putin knows and trusts, was also involved on behalf of President-elect Trump. (It’s worth recalling that President John F. Kennedy used both a private American citizen and the Soviet ambassador in Washington as a back channel during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Trump, however, had a special problem. Regular communications with the Kremlin eventually end up, of course, both in official Russian and American channels. Convinced that US intelligence agencies had been behind the allegations against him since the summer of 2016, and particularly the steady stream of leaks to the media, Trump reasonably worried about initiating his back channel through any US institution or agency. Hence attempts by Kushner, and possibly others, to begin privately with the Russian ambassador to Washington. Not unreasonably, not improperly, though perhaps ineptly.

The real issue Americans must decide is what is more compelling: the need for a US anti-terrorism alliance with Russia or the still-undocumented allegations called Russiagate? The lethal bombings in Manchester and in a St. Petersburg metro station are more evidence, if any is still needed, that American subways and arenas are not immune.

“Details After the Sports”

THE LATE COMEDIAN GEORGE CARLIN HAD a still telling routine. A local radio newscaster begins his report: “Nuclear war in Europe. Details after the sports.” Consider some recent “details” you may have missed in leading American media.

On June 18, a US plane shot down a Syrian military aircraft. Allied with Syria and fighting there at its government’s official invitation, unlike American forces which are there in violation of international law, Moscow regarded this as a provocative act of war. After a nearly 24-hour pause while the Putin leadership debated its response, the Russian military command announced that henceforth any US aircraft flying where Russia and Syria were conducting operations would be “targeted”—that is, warned to leave immediately or be shot down.

A red line had been crossed by the United States, as the Soviet Union had done in Cuba in 1962. This time, Washington wisely retreated, as Moscow did in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Department of Defense announced it would “reposition” its war planes away from Russian-Syrian operations.

But this does not mean the danger of a Cuba-like crisis has been eliminated in Syria (or elsewhere). The Trump administration is threatening to attack Syria if President Assad “again” uses chemical weapons, thereby creating the real risk of a “false flag.” Independent investigators, notably Seymour Hersh and Theodore Postol, have raised serious doubts as to whether Assad actually used chemical weapons previously, in 2013 or this April. Their findings were nowhere explored in the American mainstream media.

Nor was another recent episode. A NATO warplane above the Baltic Sea came perilously close to a Russian aircraft carrying Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, probably Russia’s most popular political figure after President Putin. Had something worse happened, it too might well have led to war between the two nuclear superpowers.

Such “details” in current US-Russian relations are deleted or obscured by the media’s fixation on Russiagate—allegations that Trump and Putin “colluded” to put Trump in the White House. Here too there are important new “details” you may have missed. Russiagate’s core allegation is based officially—leaving aside the private and easily disputed Steele “dossier”—on the January 2017 US “Intelligence Community Assessment.” We now know this report was not based on a consensus of all “seventeen US intelligence agencies,” as implied, but on “handpicked analysts,” possibly from only the CIA.

We learn this directly from former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Brennan, we also now know, was hardly an objective CIA director, having explained in his recent House testimony that any Americans who have contacts with Russians can embark “along a treasonous path” and “do not know they are on a treasonous path until it is too late.”

Brennan’s contempt for the trustworthiness of Americans was matched by Clapper’s contempt for Russians. He told NBC’s Meet the Press, on May 8, that “Russians … are typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate…” and thus “genetically driven” to attack American democracy. No mainstream media have explored these revelations about President Obama’s apparently paranoid CIA director and ethnically biased National Intelligence director.

Instead, they have continued to parrot what is now an established falsehood. The most indicative example is Maggie Haberman, a leading New York Times reporter on Russiagate and regular CNN panelist. On June 26, she wrote that President Trump “still refuses to acknowledge a basic fact agreed upon by 17 American intelligence agencies … Russia orchestrated the attacks and did it to help get him elected.” But it is Ms. Haberman and the Times that refuse “to acknowledge a basic fact.” And they are far from alone. On June 26, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen repeated the same falsehood about “17 American intelligence agencies,” as do almost daily CNN and MSNBC.

On June 25, the Post added another dubious “detail” that went unnoticed. Buried in an interminable “investigative” article claiming to prove Putin’s “crime of the century,” was something meant to be a bombshell: Obama’s White House knew about Putin’s personal role in Russiagate from a mole—either human or technical—in his Kremlin inner circle. Logic alone discredits the story. If US Intel had acquired a listening source in Putin’s closed circle, it would be one of the great espionage feats in history—a present and future asset so precious that no official would dare leak it (a treasonous capital crime) to the Washington Post.

One day, all of these reckless media malpractices may be critically exposed by historians and schools of journalism, though they do not do so today. One day we may learn, to use an expression I first heard from a former British intelligence agent more than 40 years ago, that documents like the ICA report and Steel’s dossier are mostly “rubbish in and rubbish out.” In real time, however, such “details”—with their deletions, distortions, and distractions—are a major reason why we are slouching toward war with Russia, as in Syria.

Cold-War News Not “Fit to Print”

THE MAINSTREAM NARRATIVE OF THE NEW Cold War, now including Russiagate, continues to exclude important elements that do not conform to its orthodoxies. Typically, the narrative is driven by stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, often based on anonymous Intel sources, and amplified for hours, even days, on CNN and MSNBC. As for the exceptionally influential Times, its front-page credo, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” seems to have become “All the News That Fits.” Here are more recent examples:

News that Trump and Putin met privately after their formal “summit” meeting in Hamburg earlier in July was treated as a sinister development. Omitted was the history of previous summit meetings. For example, Reagan and Gorbachev met alone with their translators in February 1986, when they agreed that the abolition of nuclear weapons was a desirable goal. That did not happen, but the following year they became the first and only leaders ever to abolish an entire category of those weapons. Moreover, in the long history of summits, advisers of American, Soviet, and post-Soviet leaders frequently thought it wise to arrange some “private time” for their bosses so they could develop a political comfort level for the hard détente diplomacy that lay ahead.

History is also frequently missing in other media accounts. When it turned out that a Russian lawyer wanted to speak to Donald Trump Jr. about “orphans,” at a now infamous meeting at Trump Tower, this was derided as a laughable Russiagate cover-up. But the issue is serious both in Russia and for some in the United States. In 2012, Putin signed a bill banning future American adoptions of Russian orphans. (Thousands had been adopted by American families since the 1990s.) It was generally thought to have been Putin’s retaliation for the US Congress’ Magnitsky Act, which sanctioned Russian “human rights violators.”

Several other aspects of this saga are rarely, if ever, reported. One is that the account of the Magnitsky affair given by William Browder, a onetime American financial operator in Russia who spearheaded the US legislation, uncritically repeated by US media, has been seriously challenged. Another is that Putin was already, prior to the Magnitsky Act, under considerable Russian public and elite pressure to end American adoptions because several adopted children had died in the United States. Yet another is the pain of more than 40 American families who had virtually completed the formal adoption process when the ban was enacted, leaving their children stranded in Russia.

Still more, there is the possibility that Putin might enable at least some of these Russian children to come to their would-be American families as a détente concession to Trump. But similarly unreported, Putin needs a “sanctions” concession from Trump.

In December 2016, on his way out of the White House, President Obama seized two Russian diplomatic compounds in the United States, both Russian private property, and expelled 35 Russian diplomats as intelligence agents. Putin has yet to retaliate tit for tat, as has long been traditional in such matters, by seizing American facilities in Moscow and expelling an equal number of US diplomats. Here too Putin is under Russian public and elite pressure—lest he look “soft”—to retaliate. US media reporting on Russiagate, however, probably makes it politically impossible for Trump to reverse any of Obama’s sanctions, even if it helped to avoid yet another crisis in US-Russian relations and abet the détente he seems to want.

Other facts and context were missing from reports of Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer, which was initiated by an offer of “Kremlin dirt” on Hillary Clinton and thus portrayed as exceptionally sinister. But at that very time, June 2016, the Clinton campaign was already paying the former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to collect “Kremlin dirt” on Trump—an enterprise that became known as the anti-Trump or Steele “dossier” and a foundation of Russiagate. In addition, by then, a staffer at the Clinton campaign or the DNC was collecting “black” information on Trump from officials of the US-backed Ukrainian government. Both acts of “opposition research,” however commonplace in American politics, may have been deplorable, but only Clinton’s was actually operationalized and productive. Nothing of the sort seems to have come of Trump Jr.’s meeting.

Consider also the US Senate’s proposed economic sanctions against Russia, applauded by mainstream media. Largely uninformed, as are most of Congress’ contributions to the new Cold War, they would penalize European energy corporations, and possibly American ones as well, involved in any vital (or profitable) undertakings that include Russian energy companies. Heavily dependent on Russian energy, European governments are furious over the Senate sanctions. This looming rift in the transatlantic alliance has barely been reported here, though it is a major story in Europe.

Ignorance or Russiagate spite has also obscured, perhaps entirely undermined, a potentially vital development. In Hamburg, Trump and Putin agreed that the two sides should work toward regulating cyber technology, including hacking, in international affairs. Certain that Putin had “hacked American democracy” in 2016, though still without any evidence, the US political-media establishment protested so vehemently that Trump seemed to withdraw from this agreement. But it is urgently needed, if only because cyber-hacking, with its capacity to penetrate strategic infrastructures, increases the chances of nuclear war by mishap or intent. Here too orthodox media coverage of “Russiagate” has become a direct threat to American and international security.

What’s fit to print also ignores the possible significance of new French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to hold state visits both with Putin and then Trump. American commentary has offered trivial explanations without considering that Macron may be trying to adopt the tradition of the founder of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle—aloof from both Moscow and Washington, and even NATO, during the preceding Cold War. If so, this too would not fit the US media’s orthodox narrative.

Finally, there is Russia’s own internal politics, no longer reliably reported by US media. A recent trip to Moscow confirmed my own perception that the political situation there is also worsening due primarily to Cold War fervor in Washington, including Russiagate and proposed new sanctions. Contrary to US opinion, Putin has long been a moderate, restraining force in his own political establishment, but his space for moderation is shrinking. Thus far, his response to various US sanctions was the least he could have done. Much harsher political and economic counter-measures are being widely discussed and urged on him. For now, he resists, explaining, “I do not want to make things worse.”

But as always happens in times of escalating Cold War, the pro-American faction in Russian politics is being decimated by Washington’s policies. And the space for anti-Kremlin and other opposition is rapidly diminishing. This too appears to be news not fit to print.

Historical Monuments, From Charlottesville to Moscow

CONFRONTATIONS OVER MEMORIAL REMNANTS OF THE Confederacy, in Charlottesville and elsewhere, revived a theme that has long interested me: similar political legacies of American slavery and of Stalin’s Great Terror, which engulfed the Soviet Union from the mid-1930s until the despot’s death in 1953. Having grown up in the Jim Crow South and later become a historian of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist eras, I understand, of course, profound differences between the black victims of slavery and the victimization caused by the Stalinist Terror. But I also see some similar historical and political consequences. Notably:

• Both events victimized many millions of people and were formative chapters in the histories of the two political systems and societies.

• For decades, in both countries, subsequent generations were not taught the stark truth about these monstrous historical events. I did not learn in Kentucky schools, for example, that many founding fathers of American democracy had been slave owners. Similarly, the beginning of partial truth-telling about Stalin’s Terror began in the Soviet Union only in the mid-1950s and early ’60s, under Nikita Khrushchev, and was then stopped officially for another 20 years until Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, when the Terror was fully exposed as part of his glasnost, or truth-telling, reforms.

• Both traumas—great and prolonged crimes, to be exact—produced citizens with very different life experiences and conflicting narratives of their own lives and their nation’s history. The result was constant political, social, and even economic conflicts during the course of many years, some of them dramatic and violent. Eventually, descendants both of the victims and the victimizers were in the forefront. (My book The Victims Return focuses on this dimension of the Stalinist Terror and its aftermath.)

• One aspect of the controversy in both countries has been conflict over existing monuments and other memorializing sites established decades ago honoring leading victimizers in the American slave and Soviet Stalinist eras, and what to do about them in light of what is now known about these historical figures. Recent events in Charlottesville are only one example, as are ongoing Russian controversies about sites that still honor Stalin—notably his bust behind the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square—and his “henchmen.”

• A profound, even traumatic, historical-political question underlies these conflicts in both countries. How to separate the “crimes” committed by the historical figures still honored from glorious national events with which their names are also associated—in the American case, with the founding of American democracy; in the Russian case, with the great Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, led by Stalin? And if the “crimes” are paramount, who else, and what else, should be deleted from places of honor in the respective national histories? No consensus regarding this ramifying question has been achieved in either society. Both have their consensus-seekers and their “alts,” with no resolution in sight.

Which brings us, very briefly, to Putin, whose place in this saga needs to be considered more fully later on. Since coming to power in 2000, he has played an essential but little-understood role in trying to cope with this decades-long controversy in Russia. It has not been, contrary to widespread opinion in American media, the role of a neo-Stalinist.

In order to rebuild a Russian state that would never again disintegrate, as it had in 1917 and again in 1991, Putin needed an effective degree of historical consensus about the conflicting Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet pasts. Unlike many previous Kremlin rulers, Putin has not sought to impose a new historical orthodoxy through censorship and the educational system but to let society—through historians, journalists, broadcast and movie producers, and others—sort out history by presenting their rival perspectives. As a result, there is almost no historical censorship in Russia today.

Even more telling symbolically is the matter of memorials. In America, it bears repeating, there is still no national museum or memorial dedicated solely to the history of slavery. In 2015, there opened in Moscow, with Putin’s essential political and financial backing, a large, modern-day State Museum of the History of the Gulag, the penal labor camps in which millions of Stalin’s victims languished virtually as slaves and often died. Still more, on October 30, Putin will personally commemorate the first-ever national monument, in the center of Moscow, memorializing the memory of Stalin’s victims.

Many Russians will not approve. A recent survey of opinion found Stalin to be “the most admired figure in history.” Americans should not be surprised. As William Faulkner reminded us, such past eras are never really past.

The Lost Alternatives of Mikhail Gorbachev

THE YEAR 2017 MARKS THE 30TH anniversary both of Gorbachev’s formal introduction of his democratization policies in the Soviet Union and of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty he signed with President Reagan, the first—and still only—abolition of an entire category of nuclear weapons.

For me personally, 2017 also marks the anniversary of my first meeting with Gorbachev, in Washington in November 1987. Over the years, our relationship has grown into a personal family friendship. It has included many private discussions about politics, past and present. The most recent, three hours over dinner, was in late July at a restaurant near Gorbachev’s home, about a 50-minute drive from Moscow. Also present were my wife Katrina vanden Heuvel—publisher and editor of The Nation—and Dmitri Muratov, editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, of which Gorbachev is a minority owner.

I asked Gorbachev, on this multiple 30th anniversary, whether he felt his legacies, and his place in history, had been lost in light of events after 1987 and especially since he left power in 1991. He has addressed variations of these questions many times over the years, often in English translation.

Now 86 and in poor health, but mentally as engaged as ever, Gorbachev reiterated two points he has made before. Regarding democracy in Russia, it is a long process with forward and backward stages, but ultimately inevitable because more than one generation of Russians now adheres to the democratic values he promoted while in power. Regarding the new Cold War, he ascribes the largest responsibility to US and European leaders, particularly American ones, who failed to seize the opportunity he (and Reagan) left behind. My own thoughts on these issues will not surprise readers.

Circumstances today, certainly in the US political-media establishment, could hardly be more unlike they were when Gorbachev was Soviet leader and shortly after. Hopes for a strategic partner in the Kremlin have given way to nearly consensual assertions that the current Kremlin leader, Vladimir Putin, poses a worse threat to democracy everywhere and to US national security than did even his Soviet Communist predecessors. Hopes 30 years ago for a world without Cold War and nuclear buildups on both sides have been vaporized by unrelenting Cold War politics in Washington and by inclinations, both in Washington and Moscow, favoring another nuclear arms race. The alternatives presented by Gorbachev are no longer discussed, or even remembered, lost in a haze of historical amnesia.

Nor is there any meaningful public discussion in the United States of who—how, when, and why—those alternatives were squandered during the past 30 years. To the extent they are discussed, the nearly unanimous American explanation is that Putin’s “aggressive” policies abroad and undemocratic ones at home were, and remain, solely responsible.

As I have argued, this is an exceedingly unbalanced explanation that requires deleting many causal factors that unfolded before and after Putin came to power in 2000. Among them, Washington’s decision to expand NATO eastward to Russia’s borders after the Cold War purportedly ended; President George W. Bush’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; the West’s annexation of Kosovo, which the Kremlin cited as a precedent for its annexing of Crimea; and regime-change policies by several US presidents, from Iraq and Libya to, more surreptitiously, Ukraine in 2014.

None of this is discussed in the US mainstream media, partly because of the exclusion of opposing voices and partly because any Americans suggesting these alternative explanations for the new Cold War are being traduced as “pro-Kremlin” and “Putin apologists,” even in progressive publications that once deplored such defamatory discourse.

Which should remind us of another great achievement by Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the introduction of glasnost—unfettered journalism and history writing in the Soviet Union—that led to the end of Soviet censorship but also to “more glasnost” impulses around the world, including in the US media. This too seems to have been lost, displaced by secrecy, a pervasive lack of candor, and other media malpractices in the United States. What we have been told, and not told, for example, about Russiagate allegations reflects a lack of glasnost at the top and lack of willingness in the mainstream media to ferret out anything that does not suggest the culpability of President Trump. Almost everything else is ignored, marginalized, or maligned, even when put forth by well-credentialed observers.

Analyzing the end of Gorbachev’s democratization policies in post-Soviet Russia is more complex. Having set out my interpretation in my book Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives, I will note only several factors that also unfolded before Putin came to power.

They included the undemocratic way the Soviet Union was ended surreptitiously in December 1991; the all-but-unprecedented decision by Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, to use tank cannons to abolish a popularly elected parliament—indeed, an entire constitutional order—in October 1993 and to replace it with one with fewer checks on what became a super-presidency; Yeltsin’s brutal wars against the breakaway province of Chechnya; the rigging of his reelection in 1996; and the oligarchic plundering of Russia and attendant impoverishment of a majority of Russian citizens while he was in power. Again, these, and other developments under Yeltsin in the 1990s, are the essential starting point for any analysis of Putin’s role in the reversal of Russia’s democratization initiated by Gorbachev. For many American commentators, however, the Yeltsin 1990s remain a rose-tinted period of “democratic transition” and US-Russian solidarity.

Are Gorbachev’s lost alternatives retrievable? It’s hard to be optimistic. We are probably closer to actual war with Russia today than ever before in history. President Trump, who seemed to want to reverse bipartisan US policies that contributed so significantly to the new Cold War, is said to have been defeated or dissuaded in this regard by “adults” who themselves represent those previous policies.

The absence of debate and glasnost in the mainstream American media encourages silent opponents of Washington’s Cold War policies to remain mute. Western Europe may, for various reasons, eventually rebel against Washington’s anti-Russian policies and adopt its own approach to Moscow. But as Gorbachev demonstrated, leaders are needed for transformational alternatives. And time is running out.

Meanwhile, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, having lived long beyond his greatest achievements, watches and hopes, however faintly.

Does Putin Really Want to “Destabilize the West”?

AT THE CENTER OF RUSSIAGATE AND near abolition of US diplomacy toward Russia today is the accusation that Putin wants to “destabilize Western democracies,” from America to Europe. As with so many other new Cold War narratives, there is no persuasive historical evidence or political logic for this sweeping allegation.

Putin came to power in 2000 with the expressed mission of rebuilding, modernizing, and stabilizing Russia, which had collapsed into near-anarchy and widespread misery during the decade following the end of the Soviet Union. He sought to do so, in very large measure, through expanding good political and economic relations with democratic Europe.

Until the Ukrainian crisis erupted in 2014, much of Putin’s success and domestic popularity was based on an unprecedented expansion of Russia’s economic relations with Europe and, to a lesser extent, with the United States. Russia provided a third or more of the energy needs of several European Union countries while thousands of European producers, from farmers to manufacturers, found large new markets in Russia, as did scores of US corporations. As late as 2013, the Kremlin was employing an American public-relations firm and recruiting Goldman Sachs to help “brand” Russia as a profitable and safe place for Western investment. Along the way, Putin emerged, despite some conflicts, as a partner among European leaders and even American ones, with good working relations with President Bill Clinton and (initially) with President George W. Bush.

Why, then, would Putin want to destabilize Western democracies that were substantially funding Russia’s rebirth at home and as a great power abroad while accepting his government as a legitimate counterpart? Putin never expressed such a goal or had such a motive. From the outset, in his many speeches and writings, which few American commentators bother to read—even though they are readily available in English at Kremlin.ru—he constantly preached the necessity of “stability” both at home and abroad.

Putin’s vilifiers regularly cite questionable “evidence” for the allegation that he has long, even always, been “anti-American” and “anti-Western. They say he previously had a career in the Soviet intelligence services. But so did quite a few Western-oriented Russian reformers during the Gorbachev years. They say Putin opposed the US invasion of Iraq. But so did Germany and France. They say he fought a brief war in 2008 against the US-backed government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. But a European investigation found that Georgia’s president, not the Kremlin, began the war.³⁵

Putin is also accused of pursuing a number of non-Western and thus, it is said, anti-Western policies at home. But this perspective suggests that all foreign “friends” and allies of America must be on America’s historical clock, sharing its present-day understanding of what is politically and socially “correct.” If so, Washington would have considerably fewer allies in the world, not only in the Middle East. Putin’s reply is the non-Soviet principle of national and civilizational “sovereignty.” Each nation must find its own way at home within its own historical traditions and current level of social consensus.

In short, had Putin left office prior to 2014, he would have done so as having been, certainly in the Russian context, a “pro-Western” leader—a course he generally pursued despite NATO’s expansion toward Russia’s borders, US regime -change policies in neighboring countries, and criticism in high-level Russian circles that he had “illusions about the West” and was “soft” in his dealings with it, especially the United States.

Everything changed with the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, as a result of which, it is asserted, Russia “aggressively” annexed Crimea and supported Donbass rebels in the ensuring Ukrainian civil war. Here began the sweeping allegation that Putin sought to undermine democracy everywhere, and eventually the American presidential election in 2016. Here too the facts hardly fit, as we have already seen but need to recall.

Throughout 2013, as the European Union and Washington wooed Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, with a bilateral economic partnership, Putin proposed a tripartite agreement including Russia, Ukraine’s largest trading partner. The EU and Washington refused. The crisis erupted when Yanukovych asked for more time to consider the EU’s financial terms, which also included ones involving adherence to NATO’s policies.

Putin watched as initially peaceful protests on Kiev’s Maidan Square devolved by February 2014 into Western-applauded armed street mobs that caused Yanukovych, still the constitutional president, to flee and put in power an ultranationalist, anti-Russian government. It seemed to threaten, not only vocally, ethnic Russians and other native Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine as well as the historical and still vital Russian naval base at Sevastopol, in Crimea, and that province’s own ethnic Russian majority. Given those circumstances, which were imposed on him, Putin seemed to have had little choice. Nor would have any imaginable Kremlin leader.

A vital episode amid the February 2014 crisis has been forgotten—or deleted. The foreign ministers of three EU countries (France, Germany, and Poland) brokered a compromise agreement between the Ukrainian president and party leaders of the street protesters. Yanukovych agreed to an early presidential election and to form with opposition leaders an interim coalition government. That is, a democratic, peaceful resolution of the crisis. In a phone talk, President Obama told Putin he would support the agreement. Instead, it perished within hours when rejected by ultranationalist forces in Maidan’s streets and occupied buildings. Neither Obama nor the European ministers made any effort to save the agreement. Instead, they fully embraced the new government that had come to power through a violent street coup.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. But if Ukraine is indicative, who actually destabilized its flawed, even corrupt, but legal constitutional democracy in 2014? Putin or the Western leaders who imposed an untenable choice on Ukraine and then abandoned their own negotiated agreement?

Will Russia Leave the West?

SOME FATEFUL QUESTIONS ARE RARELY, IF ever, discussed publicly. One is this: As the established post-1991 “liberal world order” disintegrates and a new one struggles to emerge, where will Russia, the world’s largest territorial country, end up politically? The outcome will be fateful, for better or worse.

Geographically, of course, Russia cannot leave the West. Its expanses include vast Far Eastern territories and peoples and a long border with China, but also major European cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow. For that reason alone, Russia has long been, to varying degrees at various times, both a European and non-European country. Geography, it is said, is destiny, but history is more complex.

The deep divide among Russia’s political and intellectual elites between Slavophiles, who saw Russia’s true destiny apart from the West, and Westernizers, who saw it with the West, originally debated passionately in the 19th century, has never ended. Arguably, it was only exacerbated by the country’s subsequent political history.

It was apparent in the Soviet Communist Party in the 1920s, when rival factions debated and fought over the nature and future of the 1917 Revolution. The long Stalin era, from 1929 to 1953, imposed aspects of Western modernization on the country, such as literacy, industrialization, and urbanization, but also strong elements of what some historians called “Oriental Despotism.” These conflicting aspects of the West and the East underlay the struggle, most significantly inside the Communist Party but not only, between anti-Stalinist reformers and neo-Stalinist conservatives during subsequent decades.

Even during the 40-year “Iron Curtain” Cold War, Soviet Russia, for all its elements of isolation, remained linked to the West. The official Communist ideology, however formal, was inherently Western and internationalist. The European nations entrapped in the Soviet Bloc (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and others) retained their Western currents, as did the Soviet Baltic republics. Those currents flowed from their own Communist parties into the Soviet Russian political establishment. Not surprisingly, many of Mikhail Gorbachev’s close advisers who influenced his perestroika program for a Westernizing reformation of the Soviet system had themselves been strongly influenced by ideological trends and developments in Soviet Bloc European countries. (A number of them had lived in Prague, for example.)

When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, due largely to Gorbachev’s democratizing reforms, it was widely assumed—in Washington, Europe, and by pro-Western factions in Moscow—that Russia was now or would soon be, after a short “transition,” an integral part of the US-led West. And yet today, just more than 25 years later, Russia is reviled in Washington and parts of Europe as the “No. 1 threat to the West.” Even though this widespread perception is without factual basis, we must ask, what went wrong?

The Western notion that all Soviet anti-Communist “reformers” were pro-Western was mistaken. If we take into account provincial political and intellectual elites, the majority were, and remain, modern-day Slavophiles—a circumstance I was surprised to discover while living in Russia in the 1970s and 1980s—and who now manifest themselves in various forms of “Euro-Asianism” and Russian nationalism. Their influence, abetted by the growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church, whose “ideology” lacks the Western elements of “Communism,” has increased very significantly since 1991.

More important were two shocks for Russia that followed the end of the Soviet Union and of the preceding Cold War. First came the social, economic, and demographic catastrophe of the 1990s, associated with Western-promoted democracy and capitalism. Here it is necessary to note again that Putin is regularly misquoted as having said the end of the Soviet Union caused “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.” He said instead, “one of the greatest catastrophes,” and for the majority of Russians it was a catastrophe.

The second shock was the onset of the new Cold War, for which Washington and much of Europe blame Russia for every mishap, from the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 to the election of President Trump. Many political and intellectual Russians, probably most, do not believe these allegations. They conclude instead that the West seeks only to exclude, isolate, and weaken Russia, no matter Russia’s actual intentions. (Here it’s also worth noting that while in Soviet times I encountered very little authentic anti-Americanism in Russia, today it is much more widespread among both older and younger generations.)

In addition, educated Russians, with far more access to information than is commonly understood in the West, see Western, particularly American, policies and actions that they interpret as intended to isolate Russia: the expansion of NATO to the country’s borders; economic sanctions, along with warnings, as by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, that any “business” with Russia is undesirable; Russophobic demonizing of Putin and thus Russia itself; violations of diplomatic treaties and norms, as occurred recently at the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, suggesting that Washington may no longer want any diplomatic relations with Moscow—or, considering efforts to ban Russia’s media outlets RT and Sputnik, even information relations. As a result, the conclusion of the late, but still influential, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Zinoviev is increasingly quoted as retrospective wisdom about the preceding Cold War: Western foes “were shooting at Communism, but they were aiming at Russia.”

Also not surprisingly, Russia is pushing back against, even retreating from, the West. The surge of Slavophile-like ideological movements is one soft expression of this backlash. A more tangible example is Moscow’s growing economic self-sufficiency from the West and reorientation toward non-Western partners, from China and Iran to the BRICS countries more generally. There are other manifestations, including, of course, military ones. Meanwhile, the fastest-growing segments of Russia’s populace are its millions of Islamic citizens and immigrants from Central Asia. Eventually, demography will influence politics, if it is not already doing so.

All of these Eastern-bound developments may or may not eventually take Russia politically out of the West. If so, this will be clearer after Putin is no longer the country’s leader. One indication is that none of his potential successors now visible are, in the Russian context, as “pro-Western” as Putin has been since he came to power in 2000.

What would it mean if Russia leaves—or is driven from—the West politically? Most likely a Russia—with its vast territories, immense natural resources, world-class sciences, formidable military and nuclear power, and UN Security Council veto—allied solidly with all the other emerging powers that are not part of the US-NATO Western “world order” and even opposed to it. And, of course, it would drive Russia increasingly afar from the West’s liberalizing influences, back toward its more authoritarian traditions.

The Silence of the Doves

A PERILOUS PARADOX: WHY, UNLIKE DURING THE 40-year Cold War, is there no significant American mainstream opposition to the new and more dangerous Cold War? In particular, from the 1960s through the 1980s, there were many anti–Cold War, or pro-détente, voices in the American political-media-corporate establishment—in the White House, Congress, State Department, political parties, influential print and broadcast outlets, universities and think tanks, major US corporations, even in elections.

That is, debates about Washington policy toward Moscow were the norm during the preceding Cold War, at the very top and at grassroots levels. as befits a democracy. As to the former, I can provide personal testimony. In November 1989, the first President George Bush convened at Camp David virtually his entire national-security team to attend a debate between myself—I was then at Princeton and, as now, a pro-détente advocate—and Harvard professor Richard Pipes, a renowned “hardliner,” on the pressing issue of whether the détente under way with the Soviet Union under Gorbachev should be expanded or reversed.

And yet, today, despite escalating perils in US-Russian relations from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria, despite the circumstance that Russia’s ruling elites are no longer Communists but professed capitalists, there is virtually none of that. Even the well-organized grassroots anti-nuke movement that once animated pro-détente politics in elections has all but vanished. In the vernacular of the preceding Cold war, political struggles between American “hawks” and “doves” no longer exist. Everywhere, hawks prevail and doves are silent, even in corporations with major Russian investments.

I cannot explain this exceedingly dangerous paradox, only point out some partial factors:

The longtime demonization of Russian President Putin has been an inhibiting factor since the early 2000s. The vilification of President Trump has intensified it. Mainstream Americans skeptical about Washington’s Russia policies worry about being labeled “pro-Putin” and/or “pro-Trump.” That anyone need worry about such slurs is deplorable, but they do.

There is also the neo-McCarthyism that has grown considerably since Trump’s election. As official investigations into alleged “collusion with Russia” become more promiscuous and well-funded campaigns to ferret out “Russian disinformation” in US media unfold, a self-censoring chill has descended on policy discussions. No one wants to be suspected of “collusion with the Kremlin” or of conveying “Russian propaganda.” Nor is this merely self-censorship. Major media outlets regularly exclude critics of Washington’s Russia policy from their news reports, opinion pages, and TV and radio broadcasts.

On the other hand, some have argued that the persistence and prevalence of Cold War politics is best explained by a nativist American social tradition that “needs an enemy,” and more often than not Russia has been assigned this role. Having grown up in Kentucky and lived in Indiana, Florida, New York, and New Jersey, I find no evidence for this “blame the people” explanation. Nor do periodic opinion surveys.

The fault lies with America’s governing elites. Two recent developments illustrate that conclusion. US political-media elites fully expected that post-Soviet Russia would become, during the “transition” of the 1990s, Washington’s junior and compliant partner in world affairs. When Russia took a different course after 2000, Washington elites blamed not their own illusions and ill-conceived policies but Putin. More recently, as the US-led “liberal world order” shows signs of disintegrating, from Europe to the Middle East, with disparate symptoms from Brexit to Trump’s election—US elites and “thought leaders,” rather than consider profound historical factors and their own prior policies, again resort to blaming “Putin’s Russia.”

Where are the liberal Democrats and progressives who once opposed Cold War extremes? Many present-day ones are in the forefront of the new manias. Russiagate allegations did not begin with Trump’s election but in the summer and fall of 2016 with pro- Democratic media, led by the New York Times, seeding the notion of a “Trump-Putin” conspiracy. Hillary Clinton herself, her campaign already funding the Steele “Dossier,” branded Trump a “Putin puppet” in their August televised debate. And when President Obama imposed new sanctions on Russia in December 2016, he cited what became known as Russiagate as a reason, still without presenting any proof.

Congress is now driving Russiagate, with Democrats, many of them self-professed liberals, still in the forefront, among them Representatives Adam Schiff, Jackie Speier, Eric Swalwell, and Maxine Waters, along with Senators Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal. Abandoning journalistic standards of verifiable evidence, reliable sources, and balanced coverage, the Times, joined by the Washington Post, are publishing even more sweeping allegations as virtual facts. (For their practices, see the many critical articles by the award-winning journalist Robert Parry at consortiumnews.com.) That print news is amplified almost nightly on pro-liberal MSNBC and CNN. Smaller liberal and progressive outlets are playing the same role.

Not surprisingly, celebrities are also trumpeting Russiagate’s most reckless charge that in 2016 America “came under attack by the Russian government.” In a recent video produced by Hollywood liberals, Morgan Freeman intoned, “We are at war.”

Don’t blame trendy celebrities. According to the eminent liberal Democratic intellectual Robert Reich, Russia committed an “unprecedented attack on our democracy,” the professor apparently having forgotten or discounted Pearl Harbor and 9/11. And in a major foreign-policy speech on September 21, the “maverick” Bernie Sanders told the Democratic Party, “We now know that the Russian government was engaged in a massive effort to undermine one of our greatest strengths: The integrity of our elections, and our faith in our own democracy.” In reality, we do not “know” that.

We do know what many liberal Democrats and progressives once did, but no longer do. They evince no skepticism about intelligence and media Russiagate allegations, despite contrary evidence. They do not protest the growing criminalization of customary “contacts” with Russia—financial, diplomatic, even conjugal, while still promoting the truly “fake news” anti-Trump “Dossier.”

Most liberals and progressive express no interest in the role of Obama’s Intel chiefs in Russiagate. And even less interest in evidence that Trump’s campaign was in fact surveilled by the FBI, as the president later claimed. Instead, Democrats, including liberals, have turned the intelligence agencies into an iconic source of testimony (and leaks). Indeed, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, whose ethnic slurs about Russians as inherently subverting did not perturb liberals either, is on the advisory board of Hollywood’s “Committee to Investigate Russia,” which scripted Morgan Freeman.

Above all, liberals once would have been shocked into protest by a recent Times article characterizing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative methods as “aggressive tactics,” “shock-and-awe tactics to intimidate witnesses and potential targets.” Methods, as one source put it, “to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington.” But there is no liberal outrage, no ACLU actions, only articles applauding Mueller for his “scrupulousness” and egging him on, as by Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker. Not even when the Times suggests that Mueller, unable to find evidence of electoral “collusion,” might be “on a fishing expedition” reminiscent of past abuses.

Liberal Democrats even seem indifferent to the slouching toward forms of media censorship. Some of it is soft, such as excluding contrarian voices. But there are adumbrations of harder censorship—official and unofficial campaigns to purge “Russian disinformation and propaganda” from American media, even if expressed by Americans as their own opinion. Thus we have Obama’s former UN ambassador, Samantha Power, demanding that we “enhance our vigilance” and her longing for media “gatekeepers” and “umpires.” This too betrays not only a disregard for the First Amendment but also contempt for American voters, who presumably, zombie-like, have no critical minds of their own. The normally loquacious ACLU, PEN, and other civil-liberties guardians remain silent.

Privately, some liberal Democrats justify their new illiberalism by insisting it is necessary for the “Resistance” against Trump. But history has long shown that ends-justify-means reasoning does not end well for liberals—or anyone else. Or maybe mainstream “doves” are silent because there no longer are any. This too is, of course, without precedent and exceedingly dangerous.

Has NATO Expansion Made Anyone Safer?

TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN 1997, PRESIDENT Bill Clinton made the decision to expand NATO eastward. In order to placate post-Soviet Russia, then weak but heralded in Washington as America’s “strategic friend and partner,” the Russian-NATO Founding Act was also adopted. It promised that expansion would not entail any “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces.” Today they are encamped on Russia’s borders and growing. Have twenty years of NATO’s expansion actually created the international security it promised?

The expansion of the US-led military alliance, which began in Germany with 13 member states and now stretches to Russia with 29, is the largest and fastest growth of a “sphere of influence” (American) in modern peacetime history. Throughout the process, with hypocrisy that does not go unnoticed in Moscow, Russia has been repeatedly denounced for seeking any sphere of security of its own, even on its own borders.

NATO expansion included two broken promises that the Kremlin has not forgotten. In 1990, the Bush administration and other Western powers assured Soviet leader Gorbachev that, in return for Russia agreeing to a united Germany in NATO, the alliance would “not expand one inch to the east.” (Though denied by a number of participants and pro-NATO commentators, the assurance has been confirmed by other participants and by archive researchers.)

The other broken promise is unfolding today as NATO builds up its permanent land, sea, and air power near Russian territory, along with missile-defense installations. NATO “enlargement,” as its promoters benignly termed it, continues. Montenegro became a member in 2017 and the “door remains open,” Western officials say repeatedly, to the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

NATO is more than the world’s largest military alliance. With lavishly funded offices, representatives, think tanks, and other advocates not only in Brussels but in many Western capitals, it is also a powerful political-ideological-lobbying institution—perhaps the world’s most powerful corporation, taking into account its multitude of bureaucratic employees in Brussels and elsewhere.

NATO is also very big business. New members must purchase Western-made weapons, primarily US ones. The alliance has, that is, diverse corporate interests that it vigorously promotes. In the United States alone, scarcely a week passes without promotional “news” and commentary produced by NATO-affiliated institutes and authors or based on NATO sources. (The Atlantic Council is an especially prolific source of these media products.)

Asking whether “enlarged” NATO has actually resulted in more insecurity than security requires considering the consequences of several wars it led or in which some of its member states participated since 1997:

• The Serbian war in 1999 resulted in NATO’s occupation and annexation of Kosovo, a precedent cited by subsequent annexationists, including Russia when it took back Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

• The 2003 Iraq War was a catastrophe for all involved and a powerful factor behind expanding organized terrorism, including the Islamic State, and not only in the Middle East. The same was true of the war against Libya in 2011, no lessons of Iraq having been learned.

• NATO promises that Georgia might one day become a member state was an underlying cause of the Georgian-Russian war of 2008, in effect a US-Russian proxy war. The result was the near ruination of Georgia, where NATO remains active today.

• Similarly persistent NATO overtures to Ukraine underlay the crisis in that country in 2014. It resulted in Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war in Donbass, and another US-Russian proxy war. Meanwhile, US-backed Kiev remains in deep economic and political crisis, and Ukraine fraught with the possibility of a direct US-Russian military conflict.

• There is also, of course, Afghanistan, initially a NATO war effort, but now the longest (and possibly most un-winnable) war in American history.

Any rational calculation of the outcomes of these NATO wars adds up to far more military and political insecurity than security—at most a pseudo-security of simmering crises.

NATO expansion has also bred political-ideological insecurities. The alliance’s incessant, ubiquitous media saturation and lobbying in Western capitals, particularly in the United States, has been a major driving force behind the new Cold War and its rampant Russophobia. One result has been the near-end of American diplomacy toward Russia and the almost total militarization of US-Russian relations. This alone is a profound source of insecurity—including the possibility of war with Russia.

During these same 20 years, the enormous resources devoted to NATO expansion have scarcely contributed anything to resolving real international crises, among them economic problems in Europe that have helped inspire its own secessionist movements; international terrorism in the Middle East and the refugee crisis; the danger of nuclear proliferation, which NATO has abetted by spurring a new nuclear arms race with Russia; and others.

Nor has NATO’s vast expansion resolved its own internal crises. They include growing military cooperation between NATO member Turkey and Russia; and undemocratic developments in other member states such as Hungary and Poland. And this leaves aside the far-reaching implications of the emerging anti-NATO alliance centering around Russia, China, and Iran—itself a result of NATO’s 20-year expansion.

Now consider arguments made by NATO- expansion promoters over the years:

• They say the small Baltic and other Eastern European countries previously victimized by Soviet Russia still felt threatened by Russia and therefore had to be brought into the alliance. This makes no empirical sense. In the 1990s, Russia was in shambles and weak, a threat only to itself. And if any perceived or future threat existed, there were alternatives: acting on Gorbachev’s proposed “Common European Home”—a security agreement including all of Europe and Russia; bilateral security guarantees to those once-victimized nations, along with diplomacy on their own part to resolve lingering conflicts with Russia, particularly the disadvantaged status of their ethnic Russian citizens. This argument makes no historical sense either. The tiny Baltic states nearest to Russia were among the last to be granted NATO membership.

• It is also said that every qualified nation has a “right” to NATO membership. This too is illogical. NATO is not a non-selective college fraternity or the AARP. It is a security organization whose sole criterion for “enlargement” should be whether or not new eastern members enhance the security of its current members. From the outset, it was clear, as many Western critics pointed out, it would not.

• Now, it is belatedly argued, Russia has become a threat under Vladimir Putin. But much of what is decried as “Putin’s aggression” abroad has been the Kremlin’s predictable responses to US and NATO expansionist policies. There is a related negative consequence. Moscow’s perception that it is increasingly encircled by an “aggressive” US-led NATO has had lamentable, and also predictable, influence on Russia’s internal politics. As NATO expanded, space for democracy in Russia diminished.

For the sake of international security, NATO expansion must end. But is there a way to undo the 20-year folly? Member states taken in since the late 1990s cannot, of course, be expelled. NATO expansion could, however, be demilitarized, its forces withdrawn back to Germany, from which they crept to Russia’s borders.

This may have been feasible in the late 1990s or early 2000s, as promised in 1997. Now it may seem to be a utopian idea, but one without which the world is in ever graver danger—a world with less and less real security.

More Double Standards

MOSCOW AND WASHINGTON HAVE CONFLICTING NARRATIVES—EXPRESSED regularly in their mass media and periodic diplomacy—regarding the history, causes, and nature of the new Cold War. Not surprisingly, both narratives are often self-serving and unbalanced. But the near-consensual US version features an array of double standards that ought to be of grave concern.

I have previously commented on some of these double standards. Moscow is condemned for wanting a sphere of security, or absence of Western military bases, near its borders, while the US-led NATO military alliance has expanded from Germany to countries directly on Russia’s borders. (Imagine a Russian-Chinese “sphere” in Canada or Mexico.) NATO’s military buildup around Russia is frequently justified by “Putin’s lies and deceits.” But Kremlin complaints about American “lies and deceit” can hardly be challenged, including the 1990 promise that NATO would “not expand one inch to the east” and the Obama administration’s pledge in 2011 that a UN Security Council resolution permitting use of force against Libya would not seek to remove its leader Gaddafi, who was tracked down and assassinated. And then there is professed alarm over Moscow’s very few military bases abroad while Washington has some 800.

Now we have more American double standards. When Russian air power and the Syrian army “liberated” the Syrian city of Aleppo from terrorists last year, the US political-media establishment denounced the operation as “Russian war crimes.” No such characterizations appeared in coverage of the subsequent US-led “liberation” of the Iraqi city Mosul or Syria’s Raqqa, where destruction and civilian casualties may have been considerably greater than in Aleppo. Indeed, on October 19, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius was awed by “the overwhelming, pitilessly effective military power of the United States” displayed in Raqqa.

Moscow’s nonviolent “annexation” of Crimea in 2014—the Kremlin and most Russian citizens regarded it as “reunification”—continues to inspire anti-Russian sanctions by Washington. American media explain that Crimea was the first forcible modern-day realignment of borders and territory. This narrative omits the Balkan wars in the 1990s and the fate of what was once Yugoslavia, and particularly the US-led NATO annexation of the Serbian province of Kosovo, after a long bombing campaign, in 1999. It also omits secession movements since Crimea—Brexit and the recent Catalonia and Kurdish referenda.

As an outgrowth of their Russiagate coverage, US media now allege that the Kremlin, using its foreign broadcast outlets and social media everywhere, has promoted white-supremacist, neo-Nazi movements in the West, particularly in the United States. Some of this commentary gives the impression that the Kremlin actually created racial conflict in America or is primarily responsible for “exacerbating” it. Meanwhile, the US establishment has virtually nothing to say about the truly ominous growth of extreme-right-wing, even neo-Nazi, movements in US-backed Ukraine.

We will return to this phenomenon later, but briefly stated: with the tacit support, indifference, or impotence of the Kiev government, these movements, some well-armed, are rehabilitating and memorializing Ukrainian Jew-killers during the World War II German occupation—rewriting history in their favor, erecting memorials and renaming public places in their honor, occasionally directly threatening Ukrainian Jews.

Though well-reported in foreign and alternative media, these signs of a rebirth of fascism in a large European country—one supported politically, financially, and militarily by Washington—are rarely, if ever, covered by American mainstream media, notably the New York Times and the Washington Post. Where is the balance between these unreported realities and daily allegations of some murky “Russian” divisive posts in American social media?

Finally, also almost daily, American media report that the Kremlin “meddled” in the US 2016 presidential election, warning, “They will be back!” There is as yet no actual evidence in these hyperbolic media accounts, nor any historical balance. Leave aside that Washington and its representatives have “meddled” in nearly every Russian election since the early 1990s. Leave aside even the Clinton administration’s large-scale, on-site involvement in Russian President Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996. Do note, however, the recent scholarly finding—reported in the Post on September 7, 2016—that from 1946 to 2000 (prior to Putin), the United States and Russia interfered in 117 foreign elections.

When pointed out, our new Cold Warriors denounce criticism of these US double standards as “moral equivalence” and pro-Kremlin “whataboutism.” But facts being facts, their self-apologetics are really an extreme expression of “American exceptionalism.”

The Unheralded Putin—Official Anti-Stalinist No. 1

IN NOVEMBER 1961, AT THE FIRST SOVIET Communist Party Congress that publicly condemned Stalin’s crimes, the leader, Nikita Khrushchev, unexpectedly called for a national memorial to the tens of millions of victims of the despot’s nearly 25-year reign. During the following decades, a fierce political struggle raged between anti-Stalinists and pro-Stalinists, sometimes publicly but often hidden inside the ruling Communist Party, over whether the victims should be memorialized or deleted from history through repression and censorship.

This year, on October 30, anti-Stalinists finally won the struggle when President Putin personally inaugurated a large memorial sculpture, in the center of Moscow, named “Wall of Sorrow” depicting the victims’ fate. Though nominally dedicated to all victims of Soviet repression, the monument was clearly—in word, deed, and design—focused on the Stalin years from 1929 to 1953.

I have spent decades studying the Stalin era, during which I came to know many surviving victims of the mass terror and personally observed aspects of the struggle over their place in Soviet politics and history. (I recount these experiences in my book The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin.) As a result, I and my wife of many years, Katrina vanden Heuvel, felt a compelling need to be present at the ceremony on October 30. Having been assured access to the semi-closed event, attended perhaps by some 300 officials, representatives of anti-Stalinist memorial organizations, aged survivors, relatives of victims, and the mostly Russian press)—we flew to Moscow.

It was a special occasion featuring three speakers: Putin, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a representative of a leading memorial organization, Vladimir Lukin. (I have known Lukin since 1976, when he was a semi-dissident outcast in Moscow. Many years later he was Russian ambassador to Washington.) The formal ceremony began just after 5 pm and lasted, after choir hymns, about 45 minutes. At first, I felt the long-anticipated event was marred by the dark, cold, rainy weather, until I heard someone quietly remark, “The heavens are weeping for the victims.”

In the context of other anti-Stalinist speeches by Soviet and post-Soviet leaders over the years, Putin’s remarks seemed heartfelt, moving, even profound. Without mentioning their names, he alluded to the crucial roles played in the anti-Stalinist struggle by Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev, whose glasnost policies made public the full dimensions of Stalin’s mass terror.

One of Putin’s remarks seemed especially important. After allowing that many events in Russian history were the subject of legitimate debate, he said Stalin’s long terror was not. Other controversial episodes may have their historical pluses and minuses, but the Stalinist terror and its consequences were too criminal and ramifying for any pluses. This, he seemed to emphasize, was the essential lesson for Russia’s present and future.

Russia’s media being diverse these days, they reacted in three conflicting ways to the memorial monument and Putin’s role, at least in Moscow. One was with full approval. Another, expressed in a protest by a number of Soviet-era dissidents, most now living abroad, objected to a memorial to historical victims as “cynical” while there are still victims of repression in Russia. The third view, asserted by ultranationalists, opposed any official condemnation of Stalin’s “repression” as detrimental because it weakened the nation’s will to “repress” US and NATO encroachment on Russia’s borders and the West’s “fifth column” inside Putin’s own political establishment.

Nonetheless, official state sponsorship of the memorial monument was a historic development—not only a much belated tribute to Stalin’s victims and millions of surviving relatives but acknowledgment of the (Soviet) Russian state’s prolonged act of criminality. Putin’s personal role in the ceremony made this all the more emphatic.

And yet, American media coverage of the October 30 event was characteristic of its general reporting on Russia today—either selectively silent or slanted to diminish the significance of the event, whether out of historical ignorance or a need to vilify everything Putin does and says. The title of the New York Times report, on October 30, was representative: “Critics Scoff as Kremlin Erects Monument to the Repressed.” Not atypically, the article also contained an untrue assertion, reporting that the Kremlin “has never opened the archives from the [Stalin] period.” As all historians of the Soviet period, and any informed Moscow journalist, know, those archives have opened ever wider since the 1990s. This is true of the Soviet Communist Party archive, which holds most of Stalin’s personal documents, where I work during periodic visits to Moscow.

But the media malpractice is larger. The persistent demonizing of Putin portrays him as a kind of crypto-Stalin who has promoted the rehabilitation of the despot’s reputation in Russia. This is also untrue. Putin’s rare, barely semi-positive public references to Stalin over the years relate mostly to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, from which, however great Stalin’s crimes, he cannot truthfully be separated. For better or worse, Stalin was the wartime Soviet leader.

Nor was October 30 the first time Putin had appeared at a public memorialization of Stalin’s victims. He had done so previously, and is still the only Soviet or post-Soviet leader ever to do so. Above all, as I know from my sources, Putin personally made possible politically and financially, against high-level opposition, the creation not only of the new memorial monument but, a few years earlier, a large State Museum of the History of the Gulag, also in Moscow.

It is true that Stalin’s reputation in Russia today is on the rise. But, as I explained earlier, this is due to circumstances that Putin does not control, certainly not fully. Pro-Stalin forces in the Russian political-media-historical establishment have used their considerable resources to recast the murderous tyrant in the image of a stern but benign leader who protected “the people” against foreign enemies, traitors, venal politicians, and corrupt bureaucrats.

In addition, when Russia is confronted with Cold War threats from abroad, as it perceives itself to be today, Stalin reemerges as the leader who drove the Nazi war machine from Russia back to Berlin and destroyed it along the way. Not surprisingly, in the recent survey of popular attitudes toward historical figures I cited before, Stalin topped the most-admired list. That is, his reputation has fallen and risen due to larger social and international circumstances. Thus, during the very hard economic times of the Yeltsin 1990s, Stalin’s reputation, after plunging under Gorbachev, began to rise again.

It is often reported that Putin’s relative silence about controversial subjects in modern Russian history is a kind of sinister cover-up or censorship. Again, this misinterpretation fails to understand two important factors. Like any state, Russia needs a usable, substantially consensual history for stability and progress. Achieving elite or popular consensus about the profound traumas of the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet pasts remains exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

Putin’s approach, with rare exceptions, has been twofold. First, he has said little judgmental about controversial periods and events while encouraging historians, political intellectuals, and others to argue publicly over their disagreements, though “civilly.” Second, and related, he has avoided the Soviet practice of imposing historical orthodoxy though heavy-handed censorship and other forms of suppression. Hence Putin’s refusal to stage state events during this 100th anniversary year of the 1917 Revolution—not, as is widely reported, because he “fears a new revolution.” He left the public celebrations to the large Russian Communist Party, for which 1917 remains sacred.

American media also regularly assert that Russia has never grappled publicly with, “confronted,” its dark Stalinist past. In fact, from 1956 to his overthrow in 1964, Khrushchev permitted waves of revelations and judgments about the crimes of the Stalin era. They were mostly stopped under his immediate successors, but under Gorbachev there was, as was commonly said at the time, a kind of “Nuremberg Trial of the Stalin Era” in virtually all forms of Soviet media. It has continued ever since, though to a lesser degree, with less intensity, and facing greater pro-Stalin opposition. Again, Americans might consider that in Moscow there are two state-sponsored national memorials to Stalin’s millions of victims—the Gulag Museum and the new monument. In Washington, there are none specifically dedicated to the millions of American slaves.

Nonetheless, the new memorial to Stalin’s victims, however historic, will not end the bitter controversy and political struggle over his reputation, which began with his death 64 years ago. The dispute will continue, not primarily because of one or another Kremlin leader, but because millions of relatives of Stalin’s victims and their victimizers still confront each other and will do so for perhaps at least another generation. Because the Stalin era was marked both by the mountain of crimes and the mountain of national achievements I discussed earlier, which even the best-informed and most well-intended historians still struggle to reconcile or balance. And because the nearly 30-year Stalinist experience still influences Russia in ways no less than does a Kremlin leader, even Vladimir Putin, however good his own intentions.

Russiagate Zealots vs. National Security

AMERICA IS NOW IN UNPRECEDENTED DANGER due to two related crises. A new and more perilous Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war between the two nuclear superpowers on several fronts, especially in Syria. And the worst crisis of the American presidency in modern times, which threatens to paralyze the president’s ability to deal diplomatically with Moscow. (As a reminder, Watergate never accused President Nixon of “collusion with the Kremlin” or his election having been abetted by a Russian “attack on American democracy.”)

What Trump did in Vietnam last week was therefore vitally important and courageous, though uniformly misrepresented by the American mainstream media. Despite unrelenting Democratic threats to impeach him for “collusion with the Kremlin,” and perhaps even opposition by high-level members of his own administration, Trump met several times, informally and briefly, with Russian President Putin. Presumably dissuaded or prevented by top advisers from having a formal lengthy meeting, Trump was nonetheless prepared. He and Putin issued a joint statement urging cooperation in Syria, where the prospects of a US-Russian war had been mounting. And both leaders later said they had serious talks about cooperating on the crises in North Korea and Ukraine.

What Trump told the US press corps after his meetings with Putin was even more remarkable—and defiantly bold. He reiterated his longstanding position that “having a relationship with Russia would be a great thing—not a good thing—it would be a great thing.” He is right: it would be an essential thing for the sake of US national security on many vital issues and in many areas of the world, and should be a priority for both political parties.

Trump then turned to Russiagate, saying that Putin had again denied any personal involvement and that the Russian leader seemed sincere. Trump quickly added that three of President Obama’s top intelligence directors—the CIA’s John Brennan, Office of National Intelligence’s James Clapper, and the FBI’s James Comey—were “political hacks,” clearly implying that their comments about Russiagate have been and remain less than sincere. He also suggested, correctly, that Russia had been too “heavily sanctioned” by Washington to be the national-security partner America needs.

The immediate reaction of liberal and progressive Russiagaters was lamentably predictable, as was that of their Cold War allies Brennan, Clapper, and Senator John McCain, who never saw the prospect of war with Russia he didn’t want to fight. Racing to their eager media outlets, they denounced Trump’s necessary diplomacy with Putin as “unconscionable.”

Columnist Charles Blow, who from his regular perch at the New York Times and on CNN influences many Democrats, followed suit, accusing the president of “a betrayal of American trust and interests that is almost treasonous.” He quickly deleted “almost,” declaring Trump’s presidency to be “a Russian project” and Trump himself “Putin’s dupe.” In full retro mode, Blow characterized the US president as Putin’s “new comrade,” apparently unaware that both leaders are known to be anti-Communists.³⁶

It’s hard not to conclude that promoters of Russiagate have no concern for America’s actual national-security interests and indeed, in this regard, are actively undermining those interests. To the extent that Russiagate’s crippling of Trump as a foreign-policy president is becoming a major part of the Democratic Party’s electoral platform, can the party really be trusted to lead the nation?

Trump’s diplomatic initiatives with Putin in Vietnam also demonstrate that a fateful struggle over Russia policy is under way at high levels of the US political-media establishment. Whatever else we may think of the president—I did not vote for him and I oppose many of his other policies—Trump has demonstrated consistency and determination on one existential issue: Putin’s Russia is not America’s enemy but a national-security partner our nation vitally needs. The president made this clear again following the scurrilous attacks on his negotiations with Putin: “When will all the haters and fools out there realize that having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”

Another indication that Trump is prepared to fight for his Russia policy was also noteworthy. He sent his own CIA director to speak with William Binney, a leading member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which recently published a study concluding that the theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign was not a remote hack by Russia—the foundational allegation of Russiagate—but an inside job. Russiagate zealots quickly dismissed Binney as a “crackpot conspiracy theorist,” but he is hardly that.

A retired longtime NSA official, Binney and his colleagues produced a serious alternative explanation of what happened at the DNC. Highly technical aspects of the VIPS report have been seriously contested, including by members of the organization itself, but it cannot be lightly dismissed. It is no more “crackpot conspiracy theory” than was the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that alleged, without the slightest evidence, as we saw, that Putin personally ordered what became known as the “attack on American democracy.”

Trump also pointed out, as have others, that the ICA report was not the produce of “17 intelligence agencies” but of a few hand-picked “analysts.” He seems to have been suggesting, as I have, that an Intelgate, instead of Russiagate, should first be investigated. This too enraged Democrats, who now defer to US intel chiefs as iconic truth-tellers. They apparently have no memory of the 1976 Senate Church Committee report on gross abuses by US intelligence agencies over the years, including foreign assassinations and violations of Americans’ privacy at home, or even their malpractices during the run-up to the not-so-remote Iraq War.

We are clearly at a fateful crossroads in US-Russian relations and in the history of the American presidency. The crux should be American national security in the fullest domestic and international respects, not whether we are Trump supporters or members of the “Resistance.” Reckless denunciations make both crises worse. The only way out is nonpartisan respect for verified facts, logic, and rational civil discourse, which Russiagate seems to have all but vaporized, even in once-exalted places.

Russia Is Not the “No. 1 Threat”

IN THE 1990S, THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION embraced post-Soviet Russia as America’s “strategic partner and friend.” Twenty years later, twenty-six since the end of the Soviet Union, the US policy establishment, from liberals to conservatives, insists that “Putin’s Russia” is the No. 1 threat to American national security. The primary explanation for how this bipartisan axiom came about, as I have long argued, is to be found in Washington, not Moscow. Whatever the full explanation, it is myopic and itself a threat to US national security.

Threats can be real, uninformed misperceptions, or manufactured by vested interests. In today’s real world, Russia is not even among the top five, which are these:

1. Russiagate. Since the late 1940s, when both the United States and the Soviet Union acquired atomic and then nuclear weapons, the first existential duty of an American president has been to avoid the possibility of war with Russia, a conflagration that could result in the end of modern civilization. Every American president has been politically empowered to discharge that duty, even during the most perilous crises, until now.

The still unverified but ever-more-persistent allegations that President Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin and may even be its agent are the number-one threat to America because they hinder, if not cripple, his ability to carry out that existential duty. Recently, for example, his negotiations with Russian President Putin to replace US-Russian conflicts in Syria with cooperation were treated as “treasonous”—not by a successor publication of the John Birch Society but in the pages of the New York Times and by other leading media.

Still more, Russiagate alleges that “we were attacked by Russia” during the 2016 presidential election, an act likened to a “political Pearl Harbor.” What could be more reckless than to insist we are already at war with the other nuclear superpower? Lest there is any doubt about the gravity of the national-security threat represented by Russiagate, imagine President John F. Kennedy so burdened with such allegations during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. It is unlikely he could have negotiated its peaceful resolution as he did.

2. The demonization of Putin. This too, as I have documented, is unprecedented. No Soviet or post-Soviet leader was ever so wildly, baselessly vilified as Putin has increasingly been for more than a decade. Demonizing Putin has become so maniacal that leading “opinion-makers” seem to think he is a Communist. Joy Reid of MSNBC actually said so, but more telling is the breathless warning on March 30 by Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank about “the red menace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

Mainstream media consumers may be excused for thinking that somehow the Soviet Communist “menace” has been reborn in Moscow, and as an even more fearsome threat. Trump’s own CIA Director at the time, Mike Pompeo, evidently believes this uninformed nonsense, or wishes us to do so. Warning that “we still face a threat from the Russians,” he explains: “They’re Russians, they’re Soviets … pick a name.”³⁷

Demonizing Putin and “Putin’s Russia” as a ramifying threat. It is hard to imagine the plausibility of Russiagate without such a master villain in the Kremlin. And it all but excludes, in effect delegitimizes, the national-security partner most needed by Washington—whoever sits in the Kremlin—in the nuclear age.

3. ISIS and other international terrorist organizations in pursuit of radioactive material to lace with their explosives. This threat would be number one if the US political-media establishment had not conjured up the preceding ones.

Little more needs be said about the looming danger. Imagine even small quantities of radioactive material aboard the planes of 9/11, mixed with the bombs of Paris, Boston, and many other cities, spewed in the air by the fiery explosions and borne by the wind—and wonder if those areas would be inhabitable today. Now consider the value and willingness of Moscow, so often a target of terrorism, as a security partner in this regard given its experiences, sprawling presence between East and West, and exceptional intelligence capabilities. Unlike Russiagate allegations, the threat of terrorism has been amply verified.

4. The proliferation of states with nuclear weapons. In 1949, there were two. Today there are nine. In a new era of transnational ethnic and religious hatreds and wars, such fanaticisms could easily overwhelm the taboo against using forbidden weapons. Iran and North Korea are not the only states capable of acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. (Every time the United States militarily attacks a non-nuclear state, others feel the imperative to acquire them as a deterrent.) US-Russian cooperation is essential for preventing more proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction, but threats No. 1 and 2 are preventing Trump from achieving this, even if he wants to do so.

5. Climate change—the science is sound—along with global income inequality, which breeds misery, resentments, fanaticism, and thus terrorism around the world. (According to a report by Scott Shane and others in the New York Times on November 7, “The richest 1 percent of the world’s population now owns more than half of global wealth, and the top 10 percent owns about 90 percent.”) These growing threats rank below the others only because of what a US-Russian bilateral partnership could achieve now. These two require a much larger international alliance and considerably more time.

Why are neither Russia nor China on this list? Russia—because it represents no threat to the United States at all (apart from a nuclear accident or miscalculation) except those Washington and NATO have themselves created. China—because its historical moment as a very great power has come. It may be an economic and regional rival to the United States, but an actual threat (at least thus far) only if Washington also makes it one. The expanding alliance between Russia and China, itself significantly a result of unwise Washington policy-making, is a separate subject.

Why Russians Think America Is Attacking Them

FOR 18 MONTHS, MUCH OF THE US establishment has told us, preposterously and without real evidence, that “Russia attacked America” during the 2016 president election. On the other hand, many Russians—in the policy elite, the educated middle class, and ordinary citizens—believe “America has been at war with Russia” for 25 years, and for understandable reasons.

US commentators attribute these views to “Kremlin propaganda.” It is true that Russians, like Americans, are strongly influenced by the mass media, especially television. It is also true that Russian television news reporting and commentary are no less politicized than their US counterparts.

But elite and educated Russians are generally better informed and more independent-minded about our political life than most of us are about theirs. They have much more regular access to American news and opinions—from cable and satellite TV, US-funded Russian-language broadcasts and Internet sites, and from Russian sites, such as inosmi.ru, that translate scores of US media articles daily. (Recent prohibiting steps taken by the Department of Justice against RT and Sputnik can only further diminish American information about Russia.)

Above all, Russians are strongly influenced by what they call “living history.” They remember the history of US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since the early 1990s, especially episodes they perceived as having been warlike or acts of “betrayal and deceit”—promises and assurances made to Moscow by Washington and subsequently violated, such as the following:

Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending “with no losers, only winners.” (For this crucial mutual understanding, see two books by Jack F. Matlock Jr., both presidents’ ambassador to Moscow: Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended and Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray—And How to Return to Reality.) But readers will recall that in 1992, during his reelection campaign against Bill Clinton, Bush suddenly declared, “We won the Cold War.” This anticipated the triumphalism of the Clinton administration and the implication that post-Soviet Russia should be treated as a defeated adversary, as Germany and Japan were after World War II. For many knowledgeable Russians, including Gorbachev himself, this was the first American betrayal.

For the next eight years, in the 1990s, the Clinton administration based its Russia policy on that triumphalist premise, with wanton disregard for how it was perceived in Russia or what it might portend. The catastrophic “shock therapy” economics imposed on Russia by President Boris Yeltsin was primarily his responsibility, but that draconian policy was emphatically insisted on and (meagerly) funded by Washington. The result was the near ruination of Russia—the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle classes, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy, the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia’s wealth, and more.

All the while, as we have seen, the Clinton administration lauded Yeltsin as its “democrat” and clung to him, as did most leading US political figures, media, and many other influential Americans. Re-making post-Soviet Russia became an American project, as countless American “advisers” encamped to Moscow and other cities. So many that Russians sometimes said their country had been “occupied.” (I treated this subject at the time in my book Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia.)

In 1999, Clinton made clear that the crusade was also a military one. He began the still-ongoing eastward expansion of NATO, now directly on Russia’s borders. That so many Russians see NATO’s unrelenting creep from Berlin to within artillery range of St. Petersburg as “war on Russia” hardly needs explanation. Moreover, herein lies the second “betrayal and deceit” that has not been forgotten.

As readers already know, in 1990, in return for Gorbachev’s agreement that a reunited Germany would be a NATO member, all of the major powers involved, particularly the first Bush administration, promised that NATO “would not expand one inch to the east.” Many US participants later denied that such a promise had been made, or claimed that Gorbachev misunderstood. But documents just published by the National Security Archive in Washington, on December 17, prove that the assurance was given on many occasions by many Western leaders, including the Americans. The only answer they can now give is that “Gorbachev should have gotten it in writing,” implying that American promises to Russia are nothing more than deceit in pursuit of domination.

In 1999, Clinton made clear that NATO expansion was not the non-combat policy Russia had been told it would be. For three months, US-led NATO war planes bombed tiny Serbia, Russia’s traditional Slav ally, in effect annexing its province of Kosovo. Visiting Moscow at the time, I heard widely expressed shock, dismay, anger, and perceptions of yet another betrayal, especially by young Russians, whose views of America were rapidly changing from ones of a benign well-wisher to a warlike enemy. Meanwhile, also under Clinton, Washington began its still-ongoing campaign to diminish Moscow’s energy sales to Europe, thereby also belying US wishes for Russia’s economic recovery.

George W. Bush’s administration continued Clinton’s winner-take-all approach to post-Soviet Russia. More than any NATO member, Putin’s government assisted the United States in its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan after the events of 9/11, saving American lives. In return, Putin expected a genuine US-Russian partnership in place of the pseudo-one Yeltsin had received.

Instead, by 2002, Bush had resumed intrusive “democracy promotion”—interference, or, in today’s Russiagate parlance, “meddling”—in Russian politics and NATO expansion eastward. No less fatefully, Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of Russian nuclear security. That led to the ongoing process of ringing Russia with anti-missile installations, now formally a NATO project.

In 2008, President Bush tried to fast-track Georgia and Ukraine—both former Soviet republics and Moscow’s “red lines” into NATO. Though vetoed by Germany and France, a NATO summit that same year promised both eventual membership. Hardly unrelated, in August Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, a Washington protégé, launched a sudden military assault on the Russian protectorate of South Ossetia, inside Georgia, killing a number of Russian citizens. Seeing Saakashvili as an American proxy, the Kremlin intervened.

President Obama came to office promising a “new era of American diplomacy,” but his approach to Russia was no different and arguably even more militarized and intrusive than that of his predecessors. During the White House’s short-lived “reset” of relations with the Kremlin, then occupied by President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama’s vice president, Joseph Biden, told a Moscow public audience, and then Putin himself, that Putin should not return to the presidency. (In effect, Obama and Biden were “colluding” with their imagined partner Medvedev against Putin.)

Other “meddling” was also under way. The Obama administration, notably Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stepped up intrusive “democracy promotion” by publicly criticizing Russia’s parliamentary and presidential elections. Though welcomed by Putin’s street opponents, many Russians saw her remarks as characteristic American arrogance.

By 2011, the Obama administration, presumably having lost interest in its own “reset,” now betrayed its own partner, President Medvedev, by breaking its promise not to use a UN Security Council resolution in order to depose Libyan leader Gaddafi. Readers will recall that he was tracked by US-NATO war planes and murdered—sodomized with a bayonet—in the streets, a gruesome end Mrs. Clinton later laughingly rejoiced over. All the while, Obama, like his predecessors, pushed NATO expansion ever closer to Russia, eventually to its borders.

Given this history, the fateful events in Kiev in 2014 seem almost inevitable. For anti-Russian NATO expansionists in Washington, Ukraine remained “the biggest prize” in their march from Berlin to Russia, as Carl Gershman, head of the official US regime-change institution, the National Endowment for Democracy, candidly proclaimed in the Washington Post on September 26, 2013.

The ensuing crisis led to yet another broken US commitment. In February 2014, readers will also recall, Obama assured Putin that he supported a negotiated truce between Ukrainian President Yanukovych and the Maidan street protesters. Within hours, the protesters headed toward Yanukovych’s official residence, and he fled, yielding to the US-backed anti-Russian regime now in power.

Then or later, Obama did not, for whatever reasons, ultimately prefer real diplomacy with Russia. He repeatedly refused, or stepped back from, Moscow’s offers of cooperation against ISIS in Syria, until finally Putin, after months of pleading, acted on his own in September 2015. Typically, Obama left office by imposing more sanctions, essentially economic warfare, on Russia—this time for the unproven allegations of Russiagate. Indeed, his sanctions included an unprecedented and reckless threat of covert cyber attacks on Russia.

It is through this 25-year history of “American aggression” that many Russians perceive the meaning of Russiagate. For them, a US presidential candidate, and then president, Donald Trump, suddenly appeared proposing to end the long US war against Russia for the sake of “cooperation with Russia.”

Russiagate charges—Russians had seen multitudes of American “contacts” with their officials, oligarchs, politicians, wheeler-dealers, ordinary women and men, even orphans ever since the Soviet Union ended—are seen as fictions designed to prevent Trump from ending the long “war against Russia.” When influential American media denounce as “treasonous” Trump’s diplomacy with Putin regarding Syria and terrorism, for example, Russians see confirmation of their perceptions.

Americans themselves should decide whether these perceptions of US policy are correct or not. Perceptions are at the core of politics, and even if Russians misperceive American intentions, has Washington given them cause to do so? Put another way, is Putin really the “aggressor” depicted by the US political-media establishment or a leader responding to a decades-long “American war against Russia?”

There is one anomaly: Putin, almost alone among high Russian officials, rarely—if ever—speaks of an “American war against Russia.” In the context of bellicose statements issued almost daily by the US Congress and mainstream media, might we call this statesmanship?