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

Four Years of Maidan Myths

THE UKRAINIAN CRISIS, WHICH UNFOLDED IN late 2013 and early 2014, again requires our attention. It has become a seminal political event of the early 21st century, leading to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and to the ongoing US-Russian proxy war in Donbass. It militarized and rooted the epicenter of the new Cold War on Russia’s borders, indeed inside a civilization shared for centuries by Russia and large parts of Ukraine. It implanted a toxic political element in American, Russian, Ukrainian, and European politics, possibly in ways we do not yet fully understand. And it has left Ukraine in near-economic ruin, with thousands dead, millions displaced, and others still struggling to regain their previous quality of life.

The events of 2014 also led to NATO’s ongoing buildup on Russia’s western border, in the Baltic region, yet another new Cold War front fraught with the possibility of hot war. Making things only worse, in late 2017, the Trump administration announced it would supply the Kiev government with more, and more sophisticated, weapons, a step that even the Obama administration, which played a large detrimental role in the 2014 crisis, declined to take.

There are, as we already saw, two conflicting narratives of the Ukrainian crisis. One, promoted by Washington and the US-backed government in Kiev, blames only “aggression” by the Kremlin and specifically by Russian President Putin. The other, promoted by Moscow and rebel forces in eastern Ukraine, which it supports, blames “aggression” by Washington and the European Union. There are enough bad intent, misconceptions, and misperceptions to go around, but on balance Moscow’s narrative, almost entirely deleted from US mass media, is closer to the historical realities of 2013–2014.

One myth has been particularly tenacious in Western accounts: what occurred on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014 was a “democratic revolution.” Whether or not it eventually turns out to have been a “revolution” can be left to future historians, but it hardly seems like one now. Most of the oligarchic powers that afflicted Ukraine before 2014 remain in place four years later, along with their corrupt practices. As for “democratic,” removing a legally elected president by threatening his life, as happened to Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, did not qualify. Nor did the preemptory way the new government was formed, the constitution changed, and pro-Yanukovych parties banned. Yanukovych’s overthrow involved people in the streets, but it was a coup.

How much of it was spontaneous and how much directed, or inspired, by high-level actors in the West remains unclear, but a related myth again needs to be dispelled. The rush to seize Yanukovych’s residence was triggered by snipers who killed some 80 or more protesters and policemen on Maidan. It was long said that the snipers were sent by Yanukovych, but it has now been virtually proven that the shooters were instead from Right Sector, a neo-Nazi group that was among the protesters on the square.³⁸

The anti-democratic origins of today’s Kiev regime continue to afflict it. Its president, Petro Poroshenko, is intensely unpopular at home, as are his leading would-be successors. The government remains pervasively corrupt. Its Western-financed economy continues to flounder. And for the most part, Kiev still refuses to implement its obligations under the 2015 Minsk II peace accords, above all granting the rebel Donbass territories enough home rule to keep them in a unified Ukrainian state.

Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s government remains semi-hostage to armed ultranationalist battalions, whose ideology and symbols include proudly neo-fascist ones—forces that hate Russia and Western “civilizational” values, to which Maidan was said to aspire, almost equally. The Donbass rebel “republics” have their own ugly traits, but they fight only in defense of their own territory against Kiev’s armies and are not sponsored by the US government.

Making things worse, the Trump administration now promises to supply Kiev with more weapons. The official pretext is plainly contrived: to deter Putin from “further aggression against Ukraine,” for which he has shown no desire or intention whatsoever. Nor does it make any geopolitical or strategic sense. Neighboring Russia can easily upgrade its weapons to the rebel provinces.

There is also the danger that Kiev’s wobbly regime will interpret the American arms as a signal from Washington to launch a new offensive against Donbass in order to regain support at home, but which is likely to end again in military disaster for Kiev. If so, it could bring neo-fascists, who may acquire some of the American weapons, closer to power and the new US-Russian Cold War closer to direct war between the nuclear superpowers. (US trainers will need to be sent with the weapons, adding to the some 300 already there. If any are killed by Russian-backed rebel forces, even unintentionally, what will be Washington’s reaction?)

Why would Trump, who wants to “cooperate with Russia,” take such a reckless step, long urged by Washington’s hawks but resisted even by President Obama? Assuming it was Trump’s decision, no doubt to disprove Russiagate allegations that he is a lackey of the Kremlin—accusations he hears and reads daily not only from damning commentary on MSNBC and CNN, but from the once-distinguished academic Paul Krugman, who told his New York Times readers on November 17, 2017: “There’s really no question about Trump/Putin collusion, and Trump in fact continues to act like Putin’s puppet.”

Even though there is every “question” and as yet no “in fact” at all, Trump is understandably desperate to end the unprecedented allegations that he is a “treasonous” president—to demonstrate there was “no collusion, no collusion, no collusion.” We have here yet another example of how Russiagate has become the No. 1 threat to American national security, certainly in regard to nuclear Russia.

If the media insists on condemning Trump based on dubious narratives and foreign connections, they might focus instead on former vice president Joseph Biden. President Obama put him in charge of the administration’s “Ukrainian project,” in effect making him pro-consul overseeing the increasingly colonized Kiev. Biden, who is clearly already seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, bears a heavy personal responsibility for the four-year-old Ukrainian crisis, though he shows no sign of any rethinking or remorse.

In an article in Foreign Affairs, Biden and his coauthor, Michael Carpenter, string together a medley of highly questionable, if not outright false, narratives regarding “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin,” many involving the years he was vice president. Along the way, Biden repeatedly berates Putin for meddling in Western elections. This is the same Joe Biden who told Putin not to return to the Russian presidency during Obama’s purported “reset” with then President Dmitri Medvedev, and who, in February 2014, told Ukraine’s democratically elected President Yanukovych to abdicate and flee the country.

Russia “Betrayed” Not “News That’s Fit to Print”

US MAINSTREAM MEDIA MALPRACTICE IN COVERING Russia has a long history. There have been three major episodes.

The first was when American newspapers, particularly the New York Times, misled readers into thinking the Communists could not possibly win the Russian Civil War of 1918–1920, as detailed in a once famous study by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz and published as a supplement to the New Republic, August 4, 1920. (Once canonical, the study was for years assigned reading at journalism schools, but no longer, it seems.)

The second episode was in the 1990s, when virtually the entire mainstream America print and broadcast media covered the US-backed “reforms” of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, which plundered the state and brought misery to its people, as a benevolent “transition to democracy and capitalism” and to “the kind of Russia we want.”³⁹

The third and current episode of journalistic malpractice grew out of the second and spread quickly through the media in the early 2000s with the demonization of Vladimir Putin, Yeltsin’s successor. It is now amply evident in mainstream coverage of the new Cold War, Russiagate allegations that “Russia attacked American democracy” in 2016, and by much else. Today’s rendition may be the worst; certainly it is the most dangerous.

Media malpractice has various elements—among them, selective use of facts, some unverified; questionable narratives or reporting based on those “facts”; editorial commentary passed off as “analysis”: carefully selected “expert sources,” often anonymous; and amplifications by chosen opinion- page contributors. Throughout is the systematic practice of excluding developments (and opinion) that do not conform to the Times’ venerable front-page motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” When it comes to Russia, the Times often decides politically what is fit and what is not.

And thus the most recent but exceedingly important example of malpractice. In 1990, as readers know, Soviet Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed not only to the reunification of Germany, whose division was the epicenter of that Cold War, but also, at the urging of the Western powers, particularly the United States, that the new Germany would be a member of NATO. (Already embattled at home, Gorbachev was further weakened by this decision, which probably contributed to the attempted coup against him in August 1991.) Gorbachev made the decision based on assurances by his Western “partners” that in return NATO would never be expanded “one inch eastward” toward Russia. Today, having nearly doubled its member countries, the world’s largest military alliance sits on Russia’s western borders.

At the time, it was known that President George H.W. Bush had especially persuaded Gorbachev through Secretary of State James Baker’s “not one inch” promise and other equally emphatic guarantees. Ever since Bush’s successor, President Bill Clinton, began the still ongoing process of NATO expansion, its promoters and apologists have repeatedly insisted there was no such promise to Gorbachev, that it had all been “myth” or “misunderstanding.”

Now, however, the National Security Archive at George Washington University has established the historical truth by publishing, on December 12, 2017, not only a detailed account of what Gorbachev was promised in 1990–1991 but the relevant documents themselves. The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved—the US, the UK, France, Germany itself—made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways. If we ask when the West, particularly Washington, lost Moscow as a potential strategic partner after the end of the Soviet Union, this is where an explanation begins.

And yet, nearly a month after publication of the National Security Archive documents, neither the Times nor the Washington Post, which profess to be the nation’s most important and indispensable political newspapers, has printed one word about this revelation. (The two papers are widely important to other media, not only due to their national syndication but because broadcast media such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS take most of their own Russia-related “reporting” cues from the Times and the Post.)

How to explain the failure of the Times and Post to report or otherwise comment on the National Security Archive’s publication? It can hardly be their lack of space or disinterest in Russia, which they featured regularly in one kind of unflattering story or another—and almost daily in the form of “Russiagate.” Given their immense news-gathering capabilities, could both papers have missed the story? Impossible, especially considering that three lesser publications—the National Interest, on December 12; Bloomberg, on December 13; and the American Conservative, on December 22—reported on its significance at length.

Or perhaps the Times and Post consider the history of NATO expansion to be no longer newsworthy, even though it has been the driving, escalatory factor behind the new US-Russian Cold War; already contributed to two US-Russian proxy hot wars (in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine since 2014) as well as to NATO’s provocative buildup on Russia’s borders in the Baltic region; provoked Russia into reactions now cited as “grave threats”; nearly vaporized politically both the once robust pro-American lobby in Moscow politics and previously widespread pro-American sentiments among Russian citizens; and implanted in the Russian policy elite a conviction that the broken promise to Gorbachev represented characteristic American “betrayal and deceit.”

Both Russian presidents since 2000—Putin and President Obama’s “reset” partner Dmitri Medvedev—have said as much, more than once. Putin put it bluntly: “They duped us, in the full sense of this word.” Russians can cite other instances of “deceit,” as I have already specified. But it is the broken promise to Gorbachev regarding NATO expansion that lingers as America’s original sin, partly because it was the first of many such perceived duplicities, but mainly because it has resulted in a Russia semi-encircled by US-led Western military power.

Given all this, we must ask again: Why did neither the Times nor the Post report the archive revelations? Most likely because the evidence fundamentally undermines their essential overarching narrative that “Putin’s Russia” is solely responsible for the new Cold War and all of its attendant conflicts and dangers, and therefore no rethinking of US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991 is advisable or permissible, certainly not by President Donald Trump.

Therein lie the national-security dangers of media malpractice. And this example, while of special importance, is far from the only one in recent years. In this regard, the Times and Post seem contemptuous not only of their own professed journalistic standards but of their professed adage that democracy requires fully informed citizens. It also sheds ironic light on the Post’s new front-page mantra, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

US Establishment Finally Declares “Second Cold War”

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, I have been warning about an unfolding new Cold War with Russia. Despite compelling evidence, leading US policy-makers, media commentators, and scholars have adamantly denied its existence, even such a possibility. They have cited post-Soviet Russia’s purported weakness; the absence of “ideological conflict”; the non-global nature of any conflicts; the benign nature of Washington policy; etc.

These new Cold War deniers were either uninformed, myopic, or unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in the squandered opportunity for a real post-Soviet peace, even an American-Russian strategic partnership. But the deniers’ most prestigious and influential foreign policy organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has now issued a report fully acknowledging, indeed eagerly declaring, that “The United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia.”

The importance of the CFR is not easily exaggerated. As its activities, history, self-proclamations, and Wikipedia entry make clear, it is not an ordinary “think tank.” Founded nearly a century ago, headquartered lavishly in New York City with a branch in Washington, almost 5,000 selected members, and considerable annual revenue, its aura, influential journal Foreign Affairs, and elite membership have long made the CFR America’s most important non-governmental foreign-policy organization—certainly for politicians, business executives, media leaders, academics, and others involved with US foreign policy. Almost all of them, including presidential candidates, aspire to CFR membership or its imprimatur in one way or another. (Hence Joseph Biden’s recent article in Foreign Affairs.)

For decades, the CFR’s primary role has been—through its journal, website, special events, and multiple weekly membership sessions—to define the legitimate parameters of discussion about US foreign policy and related issues. Regarding Russia, even the Soviet Union, the CFR, as a professed bipartisan, independent, centrist organization, generally adhered to this role, and not badly. (I became a member in the 1970s and resigned in protest this year.)

The CFR featured varying, even conflicting, expertise and opinions about the 40-year Cold War and thereby fostered intellectual and policy debate. This more ecumenical, pluralist orientation largely ended, however, more than a decade ago. Opinions incompatible with Washington’s growing “group think” about Russia were increasingly excluded, with very few exceptions. The CFR—much like Congress and the mainstream media—became a bastion of the new Cold War, though without acknowledging it.

Now it has done so. The CFR’s new report, “Containing Russia,” by two “bipartisan” veterans of the genre, both longtime CFR fellows, Robert D. Blackwill and Philip H. Gordon, could have been published during the hyperventilated early stage of the preceding Cold War, before it was tempered by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, as reflected in the retrograde word “Containing.”⁴⁰

The best that can be said about the report is its banality—some 50 pages and 72 endnotes offering little more than a superficial, though devout, digest of recent mainstream media malpractices. We find here, for example, the usual unbalanced narratives of contemporary events, questionable “facts,” elliptical history (when any at all), opinion and ideology passing as analysis, and not a little Russophobia.

Not surprisingly, the still unproven allegations of Russiagate are the pretext and pivot of the CFR report. (Its authors even inflate the scandal’s already inflammatory rhetoric: “Moscow’s ultimate objective was regime change in the United States.”) Thus the first sentence of the introduction by CFR president Richard Haass: “Russia’s interference in the 2016 US presidential election constituted an attack on American democracy,” echoing the tacky Hollywood celebrity video produced a few months ago. The authors also repeat hyperbolic assertions equating “the attack” with Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

From this, the report goes on to refer, directly and allusively, to the alleged Kremlin-Trump “collusion,” and then to project the “threat” represented by Russian President Putin, who is presented as having no legitimate Russian national interests, only “paranoia,” to “worldwide” status. Again, every piece of alternative or conflicting reporting, analysis, and sourcing is omitted, as is any mention of retracted and “corrected” mainstream media articles and broadcasts. Nowhere is there any serious concern about the graver dangers inherent in this “second Cold War.” In this perilous context, the CFR “recommendations” are of the back-to-the-future kind—back to the initial, unbridled, pre-1962 Cuban Missile Crisis threats, confrontations, and escalations.

Considering how this shabby—some may say shameful—report should reflect on the CFR’s reputation, what was the motivation behind its publication? Recalling that it comes on the heels of similar new Cold War exhortations—Biden’s article mentioned earlier, Senator Ben Cardin’s similar “report” not long ago, leading newspaper editorials demanding a stronger reaction to “Russia’s war on the West,” and the Trump administration’s own myopic doctrinal declaration last week that Russia and China are now a greater threat than is international terrorism—the CFR report’s purpose seems to be threefold. To mobilize the bipartisan US policy establishment behind a radical escalation of the new Cold War. (Tellingly, it also criticizes former President Obama for not having done enough to counter Moscow’s “growing geopolitical challenge”.) To preclude any critical mainstream discussion of past or current US policy in order to blame only Russia. And thereby to prevent the possibility of any kind of détente, as proposed by President Trump.

The CFR report may slam the door, already nearly shut, on such discussions and policies. If so, where is any hope, any way out of this unprecedentedly perilous state of US-Russian relations? Recent opinion surveys suggest that a majority of Americans have no appetite for such reckless policies. Conceivably, they could vote to change Washington’s approach to Russia. But for this they would need such candidates and time. Currently, there are neither. As during the 40-year Cold War, the CFR Report seeks to mobilize European allies behind escalating the “second Cold War.” In several European countries and parties, there also appears to be little appetite for this. Americans may have to look to Europe for alternative leadership, while hoping that meanwhile Moscow does not overreact.

For now, however, the only hope is that Russiagate allegations do not prevent Trump from becoming the pro-détente president “cooperating with Russia” he wanted to be. Even if he tries, would the Council on Foreign Relations’ like-minded praetorians in Washington—who now present that traditional aspiration as evidence of criminality—permit it?

Russiagate or Intelgate?

I FIRST RAISED THE QUESTION OF “INTELGATE,” perhaps coining the word, nearly a year ago. The recently released Russiagate memo, overseen by Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and declassified by President Trump, raises the question anew.

Having for years researched Soviet-era archive materials (once highly classified) in Moscow, I understand the difficulties involved in summarizing secret documents, in particular ones generated by secretive intelligence agencies. They must be put in the larger political context of the time, which can be fully understood only by using open and other sources as well. And they may be subsequently contradicted by classified materials not yet available.

Nonetheless, the “Republican memo,” as it has become known while we await its Democratic counterpart, indicates that some kind of operation against presidential candidate and then President Trump, an “investigation,” was under way among top officials of US intelligence agencies for a long time.

The memo focuses on questionable methods used by Obama’s FBI and Justice Department to obtain a secret warrant permitting them to surveil Carter Page, a peripheral and short-tenured Trump foreign-policy adviser, and on the role played in this by the anti-Trump “dossier” complied by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer whose career specialization was Russia. But the memo’s implications are larger.

Steele’s dossier, which alleged that Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin in various ways for several years even preceding his presidential candidacy, was the foundational document of the Russiagate narrative, at least from the time its installments began to be leaked to the American media in the summer of 2016. It has played a central role ever since, possibly even in the US Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of January 2017 (when BuzzFeed published the dossier), the same month that FBI Director James Comey “briefed” President-elect Trump on “salacious” parts of the dossier—apparently in an effort to intimidate him. Directly or indirectly, the dossier led to the special investigation headed by Robert Mueller.

Even though both the dossier and subsequent ICA report have been substantially challenged for their lack of verifiable evidence, they remain the basic sources for proponents of the Russiagate narrative of “Trump-Putin collision.” The memo and dossier are now being subjected to closer (if partisan) scrutiny, much of it focused on the Clinton campaign having financed Steele’s work through his employer Fusion GPS.

But two crucial and ramifying question are not being explored. Exactly when, and by whom, was this Intel operation against Trump begun? And exactly where did Steele get the “information” that he was filing in periodic installments and that grew into the dossier?

In order to defend itself against the Republican memo’s charge that it used Steele’s unverified dossier to open its investigation into Trump’s associates, the FBI claims it was prompted instead by a May 2016 report of remarks made earlier by another lowly Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, to an Australian diplomat in a London bar. Even leaving aside the ludicrous nature of this episode, the public record shows it is not true.

In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017, John Brennan, formerly Obama’s head of the CIA, strongly suggested that he and his agency were the first, as the Washington Post put it at the time, “in triggering an FBI probe.” Both the Post and the New York Times interpreted his remarks in this way.^{41, 42} Equally certain, Brennan, as widely reported, played a central role in promoting the Russiagate narrative thereafter, briefing members of Congress privately and giving President Obama himself a top-secret envelope in early August 2016 that almost certainly contained Steele’s dossier.

Early on, Brennan presumably would have shared his “suspicions” and initiatives with James Clapper, then Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. FBI Director James Comey, distracted by his mangling of the Clinton private-server affair during the presidential campaign, may have joined them actively somewhat later. But when he did so publicly, in his March 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, it was as J. Edgar Hoover reincarnate—as the nation’s number-one expert on Russia and its profound threat to America. (As I pointed out previously, his testimony regarding Russia was remarkably uninformed.)

The question therefore becomes: when did Brennan begin his “investigation” of Trump? His House testimony leaves this somewhat unclear, but according to a subsequent Guardian article, by late 2015 or early 2016 Brennan was receiving, possibly soliciting, reports from foreign intelligence agencies about “suspicious ‘interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents.”⁴³

If these reports and Brennan’s own testimony are to be believed, he, not the FBI, was the instigator—the godfather—of Russiagate. Certainly, his subsequent frequent and vociferous public retelling of Russiagate allegations against Trump suggest that he played a (probably the) instigating role. And, it seems, a role in the Steele dossier as well.

Equally important, where did Steele get his information? According to Steele and his many stenographers—they include his American employers, Democratic Party Russiagaters, the mainstream media, and many other, even progressive, publications—the information came from his “deep connections in Russia,” specifically from retired and current Russian intelligence officials in or near the Kremlin. From the moment the dossier began to be leaked to the American media, this seemed highly implausible (as reporters who took his bait should have known) for several reasons.

Steele had not returned to Russia after leaving his post there in the early 1990s. Since then, the main Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, has undergone many personnel and other changes, especially since 2000, and particularly in or near Putin’s Kremlin. Did Steele really have such “connections” so many years later?

Even if he did, would these purported Russian insiders really have collaborated with a “former” British intelligence agent under what is so often said to be the ever-vigilant eye of the ruthless “former KGB agent” Vladimir Putin, thereby risking their positions, income, perhaps freedom, as well as the well-being of their families?

It was said originally that his Russian sources were highly paid by Steele. Arguably, this might have warranted the risk. But on January 2, 2018, Steele’s employer and head of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, wrote in the Times that “Steele’s sources in Russia… were not paid.” If the Putin Kremlin’s purpose was to put Trump in the White House, why would these “Kremlin-connected” sources have contributed to Steele’s anti-Trump project without financial or political gain—only with considerable risk? (There is the also the matter of factual mistakes in the dossier that Kremlin “insiders” were unlikely to have made, but this is the subject for a separate analysis.)

We now know that Steele actually had at least three other “sources” for the dossier, ones not previously mentioned by him or his employer. There was information from foreign intelligence agencies provided by Brennan to Steele or to the FBI, which we also now know was collaborating with Steele. There was the contents of a “second Trump-Russia dossier” prepared by people personally close to Hillary Clinton and who shared their “findings” with Steele.⁴⁴ And in fact, Steele himself repeatedly cites as a source a Russian emigre associate of Trump—that is, apparently an American, not Russian, citizen.

Most intriguing, there was “research” provided by Nellie Ohr, wife of a top Department of Justice official, Bruce Ohr, who, according to the Republican memo, “was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife’s opposition research.” Most likely, it too found its way into Steele’s dossier. (Mrs. Ohr was a trained Russian studies scholar with a PhD from Stanford and a onetime assistant professor at Vassar, and thus, it must have seemed, an ideal collaborator for Steele.)

There is also the core allegation made both by Steele and the ICA report that Putin personally “ordered” and “directed” the Russiagate operation on behalf of Trump, but neither gives a persuasive or consistent motive, especially considering that if exposed—even Steele claims some top-level Kremlin officials feared the purported plot might “backfire”—it would benefit electorally only Hillary Clinton. Nor do their many media stenographers give us a coherent motive.

Some say the operation was “payback” for Clinton having encouraged protests against Putin in Moscow in 2011-2012. No, say others, it was a longer-standing Kremlin preference for Trump going back eight or more years, though this is contradicted in the Steele dossier where some Kremlin officials are said not to favor Trump. Still others say it was payback not against Clinton but for what Putin saw as the US-led doping scandal that battered the Russian Olympic team. Now it’s just Putin’s general desire to sow “chaos and disorder” in the West. None of these motives make sense given, as I have pointed out, Putin’s initial and still ongoing hope to rebuild Russia partly through modernizing economic partnerships with a stable and prospering West, including the United States.

We are left, then, with a ramifying question: how much of the “intelligence information” in Steele’s dossier actually came from Russian insiders, if any? (This uncertainty alone should stop Fox News’ Sean Hannity and others from declaring that the Kremlin used Steele—and Hillary Clinton—to pump its “propaganda and disinformation” into America. These pro-Trump counter-allegations also fuel the new Cold War.)

We are left with even more ramifying questions. Was Russiagate produced by leaders of Obama’s intelligence community, not just the FBI? If so, it is the most perilous political scandal in modern American history, and the most detrimental to American democracy. It would indeed, as zealous promoters of Russiagate assert, make Watergate pale in significance. (To understand more, we need to know more, including whether Trump associates other than Carter Page and Paul Manafort were surveilled by any of the intelligence agencies involved. And whether they were surveilled in order to monitor Trump himself, on the assumption they would be in close proximity to him, as the president suggested in a tweet.)

If Russiagate involved collusion among US intelligence agencies, as now seems likely, why was it undertaken? There are various possibilities. Out of loathing for Trump? Out of institutional opposition to his promise of better relations—“cooperation”—with Russia? Or out of personal ambition? Did Brennan, for example, aspire to remain head of the CIA, or to a higher position, in a Hillary Clinton administration?

What was President Obama’s role in any of this? Or to resort to the Watergate question: what did he know and when did he know it? And what did he do? The same questions would need to be asked about his White House aides and other appointees involved. Whatever the full answers, there is no doubt that Obama acted on the Russiagate allegations. He cited them for the sanctions he imposed on Russia in December 2016, which led directly to the case of General Michael Flynn; to the worsening of the new US-Russian Cold War; and thus to the perilous relationship inherited by President Trump.

With all of this in mind, and assuming Trump knew most of it, did he really have any choice in firing FBI Director Comey, for which he is now being investigated by Mueller? We might also ask again, given Comey’s role during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign (for which she and her team loudly condemned him), whether as president she too would have had to fire him.

Listening almost daily to the legion of former US intelligence officers condemn Trump in the media, we may wonder if they are increasingly fearful it will become known that Russiagate was mostly Intelgate. For that we may need a new bipartisan Senate Church Committee of the mid-1970s. Once famously, it investigated and exposed misdeeds by US intelligence agencies and led to reforms that are no longer the preventive measures against abuses of power they were intended to be. (Ideally, everyone involved would be granted amnesty for prior misdeeds, ending all talk of “jail time,” on the condition they now testify truthfully.)

Such a full, inclusive investigation of Intelgate would require the support of leading Democratic members of Congress. This no longer seems possible.

What Russiagate Reveals About America’s Elites

RUSSIAGATE’S NEARLY TWO YEARS OF ALLEGATIONS and investigations were instigated by top US political, media, and intelligence elites. They have revealed profoundly disturbing characteristics of people who play a very large role in governing our country. Six of these barely concealed truths are especially alarming.

1. Russiagate’s promoters evidently have little regard for the future of the American presidency. At the center of their allegations is the claim that the current president, Donald Trump, achieved the office in 2016 due to a conspiracy (“collusion”) with the Kremlin; or to some dark secret the Kremlin uses to control him; or due to “Russian interference” in the election; or all three. This means, they say outright or imply daily, that the president is some kind of Kremlin agent or “puppet” and thus “treasonous.”

Such allegations are unprecedented in American history. They have already deformed Trump’s presidency, but no consideration is given to how they may affect the institution in the future. Unless actual proof is provided in the specific case of Trump—thus far there is none—they are likely to leave a stain of suspicion on, or inspire similar allegations against, future presidents. If the Kremlin is believed to have made Trump president or corrupted him, why not future presidents as well?

That is, Russiagate zealots seek to delegitimize Trump’s presidency but risk leaving a long-term cloud over the institution itself. And not only the presidency. They now clamor that the Kremlin is targeting the 2018 congressional elections, thereby projecting the same dark cloud over the next Congress, even if embittered losers do not explicitly blame Putin’s Kremlin.

2. Russiagate promoters clearly also have no regard for America’s national security. By declaring that Russia’s “meddling” in the 2016 US presidential election was “an attack on American democracy” and “an act of war” comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, they are practicing the dictionary meaning of “war-mongering.” Can this mean anything less than that the United States must respond with “an act of war” against Russia? It is noteworthy that Russiagaters rarely, if ever, mention the potentially apocalyptic consequences of war between the two nuclear superpowers, an abiding concern once shared by all enlightened elites.

Closely related, Russiagate accusations against Trump, whom they characterize as a “mentally unstable president,” risk provoking him to stumbling into just such a war in order to demonstrate he is not the “Kremlin’s puppet.” By casting doubt on Trump’s loyalty to America, they also limit his capacity, possessed by all American presidents since the onset of the atomic age, to avert or resolve nuclear crises through diplomatic instead of military means, as President Kennedy did in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In short, American elites themselves have made Russiagate the number-one threat to US national security, not Russia.

3. Having found no factual evidence of such a plot, Russiagate promoters have shifted their focus from the Kremlin’s alleged hacking of DNC emails to a social-media “attack on our democracy.” In so doing, they reveal their contempt for American voters, for the American people.

A foundational principle of theories of representative democracy is that voters make rational and legitimate decisions. But Russiagate advocates strongly imply—even state outright—that American voters are easily duped by “Russian disinformation,” zombie-like responding to signals as how to act and vote. The allegation is reminiscent of, for people old enough to remember, the classic Cold War film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But let the following representatives of America’s elite media speak for themselves:

• According to Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, Russia’s social-media intrusions “manipulated American thought…. The minds of social media users are likely becoming more, not less, malleable.” This, she goes on, is especially true of “older, nonwhite, less-educated people.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow adds that this was true of “black folks.”^{45, 46}

• Times reporter Scott Shane is straightforward, writing about “Americans duped by the Russian trolls.” Evan Osnos of the New Yorker spells it out without nuance: “At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential, embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read.”^{47, 48}

• Another Post columnist, Dana Milbank, even rehabilitates a Leninist concept. “Putin,” he tells readers, “has played Americans across the political spectrum for suckers.” In particular, he turned Trump’s millions of voters “into the useful idiots of the 21st century.” To be clear, according to Milbank’s demeaning of US citizens generally, “Putin made fools of Americans.”⁴⁹

These denigrators of the American people are, of course, lead writers for some of our most elite publications. Their apparent contempt for “ordinary” citizens is not unlike a centuries-old trait of the radical Russian intelligentsia. That tradition has long viewed the Russian narod (people) with similar contempt, while maintaining that the rarified intelligentsia therefore must lead them, and not always in democratic ways.

4. Russiagate was initiated by political actors, but elite media gave it traction, inflated it, and promoted it to what it is today. These most “respectable” media include the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and, of course, CNN and MSNBC, among others. They proclaim themselves to be factual, unbiased, balanced, and an essential component of American democracy—a “fourth branch of government.”

Maybe a “branch,” but far from fact-based and unbiased in its reporting and commentary on Russiagate. The media’s combined loathing for Trump and “Putin’s Russia” has produced, as we have seen repeatedly, one of the worst episodes of malpractice in the history of American journalism. This requires a special detailed study, though no leading media critics or elite journalism schools seem interested.

Nor are elite media outlets above slurring the reputations of anyone who dissents from contemptuous aspects of Russiagate, even members of their own elite. Recently, for example, the Times traduced a Facebook vice president whose study suggested that “that swaying the election was not the main goal” of Russian use of Facebook. Similarly, a brand name of liberal-progressive MSNBC, John Heilemann, suggested on air, referring to questions about Russiagate posed by Congressman Devin Nunes, “that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side.” The Democratic senator being interviewed, Chris Murphy, was less than categorical in brushing aside the “question.”^{50, 51}

Not to be overlooked, elite media have done little, if anything, to protest the creeping Big Brother-like censorship programs now being assiduously promoted by other elites in government and private institutions in order to ferret out and ban “Russian disinformation,” something any American might be “guilty” of entirely on his or her own. Instead, leading media have abetted and legitimized these undemocratic undertakings by citing them as sources.

5. Then there is the Democratic Party’s role in promoting Russiagate. Preparing for congressional elections in 2018, this constituent component of the American two-party system seems less a vehicle of positive domestic and foreign-policy alternatives than a party promoting conspiracy theories, Cold War, and neo-McCarthyism. A number of local candidates say these electoral approaches are less their own initiatives than cues, or directives, coming from high party levels—that is, from Democratic elites.

6. Finally, but no less revealing, American elites have long professed to be people of civic courage and honor. Russiagate has produced, however, very few “profiles in courage”—people who use their privileged positions of political or media influence to protest the abuses itemized above. Hence another revelation, if it is really that: America’s elites are composed overwhelmingly not of “rugged individualists” but of conformists—whether due to ambition, fear, or ignorance hardly matters.

Russiagate Amnesia or Denialism

MANY RUSSIANS, I HAVE ALREADY EXPLAINED, have an awareness of “living history”—memories of past events that continue to influence current ones. Russiagate suggests that Americans have significantly less historical awareness—or that its promoters willfully ignore past American events and practices.

A fundamental Russiagate tenet is that the Kremlin sought, primarily through social media, “to create or exacerbate divisions in American society and politics” in 2016. Even if true, there is no evidence that this purported campaign had any meaningful impact on how Americans voted in the presidential election. But even it somehow did, the social and political “divisions” were hardly comparable to those in our not so distant past.,

Those past divisions included Jim Crow segregation and the black civil-rights struggle; the social-political barricade in American life—even in families—generated by the Vietnam War; and the religious-political division over abortion rights during several electoral cycles. There were also “divisions” associated with Watergate, which drove a president from office, and with the House impeachment of President Clinton. To assert that the considerably lesser “divisions” in the country in 2016 were any less American in origin or needed to be exacerbated by Russia is a kind of amnesia or denialism uninformed by history.

Closely related is the claim that “Russian propaganda and disinformation” played in 2016 an unprecedented, oversized role in America, and continue to do so. But I recall, at least since my schoolboy days in Kentucky, that this was an everyday allegation back then as well, including during the civil-rights struggle. A primary source of those dire warnings was none other than then FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, whose writings were often assigned in schools as cautionary readings.

Hoover’s essential theme was, of course, that Americans posing as loyal citizens were actually agents of Soviet (Russian) Communist “propaganda and disinformation.” That allegation was also widely used by many others, mainly for political purposes, and perhaps widely believed. When blacklisting reached Hollywood in the 1950s, films were “investigated” for latent “Communist propaganda,” and purportedly found. This was a search for, so to speak, “Russian trolls” in the movies, not so unlike those said to be found today in social media.

On similar ahistorical grounds, Russiagaters go on to allege that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 US presidential election and thus committed “an act of war against America.” Whatever “meddle” means—the word is both capacious and imprecise—governments have meddled in the elections of other states for centuries in one form or another. Israel has, of course, meddled in US elections for decades. More to the point, according to a study reported by the New York Times, on February 17, 2018, the US government ran 81 “overt and covert election influence operations” in foreign countries from 1946 to 2000. (Soviet and post-Soviet Russia ran 36 such operations during the same period.)

As readers already know, official and unofficial American institutions have been deeply involved in—meddled in—Russian political life ever since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The instance that should dispel any amnesia is, of course, the financial, on-site, hands-on American effort to help reelect a badly failing President Yeltsin in 1996. (There is some doubt as to whether he really was reelected). Nor was this, as we saw, covert, having been apparent at the time and US mass media later boasting about it. Two wrongs may not make a right, but less amnesia would put the lesser Russiagate allegations of “meddling,” none of the truly significant ones yet having been proven, in perspective.

One way or another, to some degree or another, at least two US intelligence agencies, the CIA and FBI, have played unsavory roles in Russiagate. And yet, many mainstream American media outlets and leading Democrats are exalting them as paragons of verified, nonpartisan information, including their recurring leaks to media. This is puzzling and probably best explained by willful amnesia or denial since not a few of these same media and politicians had previously been highly skeptical, even sharply critical, of both agencies.

Leave aside well-documented CIA assassinations and FBI persecution of civil-rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. Recall instead only the quality of CIA information that led President Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs disaster, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress ever deeper into the Vietnam War, and the nation to the catastrophic war in Iraq, whose consequences still linger. And yet information provided by the CIA regarding Russiagate is to be accepted uncritically? Is its past role, and that of the FBI, forgotten or forgiven?

Unable to provide proof linking the Kremlin or President Trump to the alleged original sin—the hacking and dissemination of DNC emails—media investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller himself have settled for seeking and prosecuting past financial misdeeds on the part of Trump “associates,” notably Paul Manafort. (Manafort’s laundered millions having originated mostly in Ukraine, not Russia, why is this not actually Ukrainegate? Or Russiagate without Russia?)

Here too precedents are forgotten or deleted. The “shock therapy” urged on Moscow by Washington in the 1990s led to the creation of a small group of Russian billionaire oligarchs and the “globalization” of their wealth, lavishly between the United States and Russia. Predictable scandals ensued. Two resulted in high-profile US convictions for money laundering and other financial improprieties, not unlike the charges against Manafort.

One involved the Bank of New York, the other a Harvard University institute. Both featured Americans and “Kremlin-linked” officials of the Yeltsin government, which the Clinton administration, to say the least, strongly supported. One scandal dwarfed the charges against Manafort financially, billions of dollars having been involved, and both did so politically. In the end, however, the Manafort and other Russiagate financial cases, like their predecessors, are likely to turn out to be mostly the everyday corruption of the 1 percent and its servitors. This too seems to have been forgotten or, considering the fully bipartisan nature of the American corruption, deleted.

A final example of amnesia is particularly remarkable and known to readers. Even though the new or “second” Cold War with Russia has been unfolding for nearly 20 years, the head of America’s most prestigious think tank and foreign-affairs organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, discovered it only recently and “unexpectedly.” Is such myopia on the part of one of the most acclaimed US foreign-policy experts amnesia—he did not remember what the preceding Cold War looked and sounded like—or denial of the role he and his fellow experts played in bringing about the “second” one?

Whatever the explanation, all of these “unprecedented” aspects of Russiagate are part of a new, more dangerous Cold War. We should worry that Marx’s famous adage—history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce—may in this case turn out to be, first as tragedy, then as something worse.

How Washington Provoked—and Perhaps Lost—a New Nuclear-Arms Race

PRESIDENT PUTIN’S SPEECH TO BOTH HOUSES of the Russian parliament on March 1, somewhat akin to the US president’s annual State of the Union address, was composed of two distinct parts. The first approximately two-thirds was pitched to the upcoming Russian presidential election, on March 18, and to domestic concerns of Russian voters not unlike those of American voters: stability, jobs, inflation, health care, education, taxes, infrastructures, etc.

The latter part of the speech was, however, devoted solely to recent achievements in Russia’s strategic, or nuclear, weapons. These remarks, though also of electoral value, were addressed directly to Washington. Putin’s overarching point was that Russia has thwarted Washington’s two-decade-long effort to gain nuclear superiority over—and thus a survivable first-strike capability against—Russia. His conclusion was that one era in Russian-American strategic relations has ended and a new one begun. This part of Putin’s speech makes it among the most important he has delivered during his 18 years in power.

The historical background, to which Putin refers repeatedly for his own purposes, is important. Ever since the United States and Soviet Union, the two nuclear superpowers, acquired the ability to deliver transcontinental warheads against the other, three alternative approaches to this existential reality have informed debates and policy-making: nuclear-weapons abolition, which is a necessary goal but not an achievable one in the foreseeable future; a quest for nuclear superiority, making a devastating first-strike immune from an equally catastrophic retaliation and thus “survivable” and thinkable; and mutual security based on “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD), which required that both sides have roughly equal nuclear capabilities and neither strive for first-strike superiority.

During the preceding Cold War, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, both Washington and Moscow officially embraced the mutual security approach. MAD, however fearful its apocalyptic reasoning, was accepted as the safest—only rational—orientation, along with the need to maintain rough strategic parity. Hence the succession of US-Soviet nuclear arms treaties, including reductions in arsenals. Nuclear technology continued to develop, making weapons ever more destructive, but MAD and the parity principle contained the technology and kept the nuclear peace despite some near misses.

This approach reached its most hopeful apogee in the late 1980s when President Reagan and the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, expanded their understanding of “mutual security.” They agreed that any strategic “build up” by one side would be perceived as a threat by the other, which would then undertake its own reactive buildup. They agreed to end this perilous dialectic that had driven the nuclear-arms race for decades. And in 1987, they abolished for the first (and still only) time an entire category of nuclear weapons, those borne by intermediate-range missiles.

That exceedingly hopeful opportunity, the legacy of Reagan and Gorbachev, was lost almost immediately after the Soviet Union ended in 1991—squandered in Washington, not in Moscow. Beginning in the 1990s, successive US administrations—under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—sought de facto nuclear superiority over post-Soviet Russia. Animated by rampant post–Cold War (misconceived) triumphalism and by a perception that Russia was now too weak, demoralized, or supplicant to compete, they did so in three ways: by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders; by funding ever more destructive, “precise,” and “usable” nuclear weapons; and, in 2002, by unilaterally withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The ABM treaty, by prohibiting wide deployment of anti–missile defense installments (each side got one exception at home), had long guaranteed mutual security based on the underlying principles of MAD and parity. Bush’s abolition of the treaty in effect nullified those principles and signified Washington’s quest for nuclear superiority over Russia.

Today, there are scores of deployed US missile-defense installments, now officially a NATO project, around the world, particularly on land and at sea targeted at Russia. From the beginning, Washington maintained, as it does today, that “Our missile defense has never been about Russia,” only about Iran and other “rogue states.” No sensible observer has ever believed this fairy tale, certainly not Moscow.

All of Russia’s new nuclear weapons itemized by Putin on March 1, long in development, have been designed to evade and render useless Washington’s global missile-defense program developed over decades at great financial, political, and real security costs. The US political-media establishment has mostly dismissed Putin’s claims as a “bluff,” “aggressive,” and “saber-rattling.” But these traits have never characterized his major policy statements, nor do they this one.

If even only a quarter of Putin’s claims for Russia’s new strategic weapons is true, it means that while Washington heedlessly raced for nuclear superiority and a first-strike capability, Moscow quietly, determinedly raced to create counter-systems, and—again assuming Putin’s claims are substantially true—Russia won. From Moscow’s perspective, which in this existential instance should also be ours, Russia has regained the strategic parity it lost after the end of the Soviet Union and with it the “mutual security” of MAD.

Read carefully, Putin’s speech also raises vital political questions. At one point, he remarkably says “we ourselves are to blame” for the dire strategic condition in which Russia found itself in the early 2000s. Presumably he is referring to his own “illusions” about the West, particularly about Washington, to which he has previously alluded. Presumably he is also referring to his fruitless appeals to “our Western partners” for policies of mutual security instead of NATO expansion and unilateral missile-defense deployments, “illusionary” appeals for which he has sometimes been criticized by actual anti-Western forces in Russia’s political-security establishment. As Putin ruefully admits, his “Western partners” did not “listen.” This is compelling evidence that Putin himself changed in response to US-NATO policies during his years in power, but also that he is capable of change again, given Western initiatives.

In the speech, Putin does not comment directly on past nuclear-arms races, but he makes clear that another, more dangerous, one looms, depending on how Washington reacts to Moscow’s new weapons. Washington can accept the parity—the deterrent—Russia has restored and return to full-scale nuclear arms negotiations. Or it can try again to surpass Moscow’s parity.

If Washington chooses the latter course, Putin says, Moscow is fully able and ready to compete, again and again, though he makes clear he would prefer instead to commit his remaining years of leadership, legacy, and national resources to Russia’s modernization and prosperity, which he spells out (yet again) in the first two-thirds of his speech. Putin insists, that is, Russia’s new weapons are not for any kind of aggression but solely for its legitimate military defense and, politically, to bring Washington back to détente-like policies and particularly to nuclear arms negotiations. The Kremlin, he adds, is “ready.”

Even having made a compelling and obviously proud presentation of what Russia has unexpectedly achieved, does Putin really believe Washington will “listen now”? He may still have some “illusions,” but we should have none. Recent years have provided ample evidence that US policy-makers and, equally important, influential media commentators do not bother to read what Putin says, at least not more than snatches from click-bait wire-service reports. Still worse, Putin and “Putin’s Russia” have been so demonized it is hard to imagine many leading American political figures or editorial commentators responding positively to what is plainly his hope for a new beginning in US-Russian relations.

If nothing else, strategic parity always also meant political parity—recognizing that Soviet Russia, like the United States, had legitimate national interests abroad. Years of American vilifying Putin and post-Soviet Russia are essentially an assertion that neither has any such legitimacy. Now, making matters worse, there is the Russiagate allegation of a Kremlin “attack” on the United States. Even if President Trump understands, or is made to understand, the new—possibly historic—overture represented by Putin’s speech, would the “Kremlin puppet” charges against him permit him to seize this opportunity? Do the promoters of Russiagate even care?

History has taught that technology sometimes outruns political capacity to control it. Several of Russia’s new nuclear weapons were unforeseen. (If US intelligence was not fully aware of their development prior to Putin’s speech, what were those agencies doing instead?) It is no longer possible to dismiss Russia, again declared to be America’s number-one threat, as anything less than a nuclear superpower at least fully equal to the United States.

If Washington does not “listen now,” if instead it again strives for superiority, we may reasonably ask: We survived the preceding Cold War, but can we survive this one? Put differently, is what Putin displayed but also offered on March 1, 2018, our last chance? In any event, he was right: “This is a turning point for the entire world.”

Russia Endorses Putin, the US and UK Condemn Him (Again)

US POLITICAL AND MEDIA ELITES ARE characterizing Putin’s overwhelming victory in Russia’s presidential election on March 18 as a “fraud” and “sham” that “does not matter.” Both assertions are untrue. They are made mostly by professed authorities whose opinions about Russia are based not on actual knowledge but on political and ideological biases.

Russian presidential and parliamentary elections are, of course, far from fully free and fair. The Kremlin has overwhelming “administrative resources,” including unlimited funds, control of the national television networks and many newspapers, and influence over who is, and is not, on the ballot.

But the March 18 election was not greatly constricted or fraudulent. Putin’s rivals, including outspoken anti-Putin ones, were permitted to debate on national television (though without Putin himself), and to conduct their campaigns throughout the country relatively freely with whatever resources they had, including in the significantly freer print media and on the nearly uncontrolled Internet. Voters knew the candidates and what they represented. According to many on-site observers, there was relatively little fraud. A frequent complaint that Putin’s campaign helped “get out the vote” by busing its voters to polling places is no doubt true, but also not uncommon in the United States.

In short, there is no reason to doubt the magnitude or authentic nature of Putin’s victory. The Kremlin hoped for a 70 percent turnout of eligible voters with a 70 percent vote for Putin. The turnout was somewhat less, 67 percent (but larger than the just under 58 percent in the 2016 US presidential election), while Putin’s victory margin, 77 percent, exceeded the Kremlin’s goal.

As for its authenticity and explanation, we have the reporting even of a Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, which competes with the Washington Post for being the most unrelentingly anti-Putin newspaper. On March 18, he wrote: “Russian voters gave… Putin their resounding approval” and a “popular mandate” for his next six-year term. “There is no question that Mr. Putin is wildly popular among Russians.” The Times correspondent concluded: “There was no need for extensive rigging… because of Mr. Putin’s genuine popularity.”

So widely and deeply “resounding” was Putin’s victory that he got 70 percent of the vote even in Moscow, where opposition candidates usually run relatively well, in sharp contrast to his less than 50 percent in 2012. Moreover, there is ample polling and anecdotal evidence that contrary to Western impressions, Putin is exceedingly popular among the youngest voters, many of whom regard him even more favorably than do middle-age and older generations. This means that the “Putin generation,” as it is called, is likely to play an important political role even after he leaves the scene.

More generally, nationalistic, anti-Western candidates gained approximately 20 percent of the vote, with “liberal,” pro-Western ones so favored by US political-media elites less than 5 percent. Assuming that few “liberals” voted for Putin but many anti-liberals did, this too speaks volumes about current and future Russian politics—and about highly selective, if not deluded, US media coverage. (It is often reported correctly that Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader and radical Putin opponent, was excluded from the ballot. But it is also true that preelection polls showed him with about 2 percent popular support, hardly enough to have affected the outcome.)

US commentary also attributes Putin’s popularity to his “aggressive, anti-Western foreign policies.” This assumes that most Russians favor policies hostile, even aggressive, toward the West, and that Putin relies on such attitudes for his power. These assumptions are also untrue or at least significantly so. Until the US-Russian proxy war in Georgia in 2008 and even prior to the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, Putin pursued cooperation with both Europe and the United States, during which his popularity ratings remained well above 60 percent. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 boosted his popular support to more than 80 percent.

The explanation is not complicated. Most Russians still credit Putin with having “saved Russia”—and their own families—from the catastrophic economic and social shock-therapy “reforms” of the Yeltsin 1990s.This “living history” remains the basis of Putin’s enduring popularity, despite more recent economic hard times. And when Russians perceive their country as being under attack by foreign powers—as most Russians interpret US-NATO policies in recent years, particularly in Ukraine—they rally around a “strong leader,” a reaction also not unknown in the United States.

Slurring the integrity and values of Russian voters is just that—a slur, and one on the rise in the United States, due partly to “Russiagate,” though not only. Thus when Senator John McCain and others declare that Putin’s victory was a “sham” and “every Russian citizen… was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election,” as reported by the Times on March 20, they are publicly denigrating and insulting those citizens—again without the slightest factual knowledge of what they are denouncing.

The election results should give Washington’s militant cold warriors serious second thoughts. Regime changers who hope US economic sanctions will turn Russia’s oligarchs and even its people against Putin and depose him should by now understand that these policies are counter-productive. The Russian people rallied around Putin. And the size of his electoral victory gives him even more authority over financial oligarchs who fear the people because so many citizens still loathe them as the plunderers of the country in the 1990s. Exceedingly rich oligarchs, even those with their assets and families parked offshore and private jets on standby, understand this persistent reality and look to Putin to protect them now and in the future. The election returns confirm that he can continue to do so, if he chooses.

The election should also discredit the growing number of American commentators who equate Putin’s Russia with Stalin’s “totalitarianism.” Proponents of this preposterous equation again reveal themselves as knowing (or caring) little about Russia’s political realities today and nothing about Stalin’s long terroristic rule, which destroyed millions of Soviet families.

In reality, to emphasize again, the Russian political system today is a mix of authoritarian and democratic elements, what political scientists call “soft authoritarianism.” The real discussion should be the relative weight of the two components and what this may bode for Russia’s future and for US-Russian relations. One thing is certain and borne out by history: Russian democratic reformers stand very little chance in conditions of Cold War and no chance at all if the new Cold War results in actual war.

Coincidentally or not, the reported assassination attempt against Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK has given Putin demonizers another opportunity to denigrate his reputation, no matter what Russian voters think. There are some parallels with Russiagate in the United States. Both scandals are said by high officials to have been “an act of war.” Both are said to have been ordered by Putin personally. And in both cases, there are as yet no verified facts, only allegations.

As for the appalling act committed in the Skripal case, not only are there no facts, there is no common sense. Putin had no possible motive, certainly not on the eve of the Russian presidential election, with the World Cup competition in Russia upcoming, and with the toxicity of Russiagate already poisoning relations with the West. Nor did Putin ever say, as he is widely mistranslated, that “traitors” should be killed. They will, he said instead, eventually “shrivel up” (zagnutsia) and wither away from the self-inflicted guilt and shame of their act of betrayal. Moreover, quite a few better-known Russian intelligence defectors have lived safely in the West, sometimes publishing accounts of their feats.

Contrary to many media accounts, nor was Skripal a “Russian spy.” He was a British spy, having covertly gone to work for UK intelligence in the 1990s, been arrested and convicted in 2004, and made part of an exchange of captured Russian and Western spies in 2010, which resulted in Skripal’s residence in the UK. If Putin wanted him dead, why not kill him in Russia or why let him leave for the West? And if some high-placed state assassin wanted Skripal dead, why try to kill him with a lethal nerve agent that might be traceable and could harm many other people? Why not a gun, a knife, or a car “accident”?

Though the nerve agent loosely termed “Novichok” was developed in the Soviet Union decades ago, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons certified in 2017 that Russia had fully destroyed all of its stockpiles and facilities for making such weapons.⁵² Still more, the formula for “Novichok” was published years ago and could have been replicated by any number of competent states or individuals. And if the nerve agent was so quickly “lethal,” why are the Skripals and others said to have been affected still alive and out of hospital?

There is also this crucial consideration. When Russia and the United States recruit spies in the other country, or send them there, they assure them, in so many words, “If you are caught, we will try to get you out, to bring you home.” For decades, this has resulted in the kind of spy swaps of which Skripal was part in 2010. If either side seriously harms an exchanged spy, the efficacy of such exchanges and the sanctity of such intelligence agency promises are undermined, if not made invalid. As a former intelligence official, Putin above all would have understood this and thus still less have had any motive.

Which is to say, Putin’s electoral victory was mostly authentic; the official version of what happened to the Skripals may not be.

Russophobia

ANALYZING WHY THE NEW COLD WAR is more dangerous than was its 40-year predecessor, I seem to have minimized the role of Russophobia. I understood its strength among some nationalities of the former Tsarist and Soviet empires now in the West, but Russophobia had not been a large causal factor, unlike anti-Communism, in the preceding Cold War. I’ve long been influenced by the compassionate words of George Kennan, the architect of containment, published in Foreign Affairs in 1951 about the Russian people: “Give them time; let them be Russians; let them work out their internal problems in their own manner… towards dignity and enlightenment in government.”

But recent Russophobic statements by former chief US intelligence officials and other influential American opinion-makers have caused me to reconsider this factor. Here are some examples:

• Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spoke on NBC national television about “the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor.” And former CIA Director John Brennan warned that Russians “try to suborn individuals and they try to get individuals, including US citizens, to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.” Former FBI director James Comey added, “They’re coming after America.”^{53, 54, 55} How would we react if these intelligence chiefs had said the same about another ethnic people? Or if Senator John McCain repeatedly characterized another nation as “a gas station masquerading as a country?”

• Russia’s presidential election, a kind of referendum on Putin’s 18 years as leader, gave him, as we saw, a resounding, nearly 77 percent endorsement. The election was widely dismissed by leading US media outlets as “a sham,” which denigrates, of course, the integrity of Russian voters. Indeed, a leading Putin demonizer earlier characterized Russian public opinion as a “mob’s opinion.”⁵⁶

• A Rolling Stone writer goes further, explaining that “Russia experts” think “much of what passes for civil society in modern Russia is, in fact, controlled by Putin.”⁵⁷ Civil society means, of course, non-state groups and associations, that is, society itself.

• A Washington Post editorial headline on April 3, 2018 asks: “Is It a Crime to Worship God? According to Russia, Yes.” This about a country where the Orthodox Church is flourishing and Jews are freer than they have ever been in Russian history.

• On March 7, 2018, the Post’s international columnist, David Ignatius, downplayed the personal causality of the Kremlin leader because “President Vladimir Putin embodies this Russian paranoid ethic.”

• Even a Post sports columnist is so afflicted that, referring to Olympic doping allegations, he characterizes Russian 2018 medal winners as representatives of “a shamed nation.”⁵⁸

• A New York Times columnist quotes approvingly a Post columnist, an expert on Russia, for asserting that “Putin’s Russia” is “an anti-Western power with a different, darker vision of global politics… [a] norm-violating power.”⁵⁹

• The title of an article by CNN’s Russia expert begins: “Russia’s Snark.”⁶⁰

• Another prominent media commentator advises, “Treat Russia Like the Terrorist It Is.” Yet another terms Russia “Gangster’s Paradise.”^{61, 62}

• A leading policy expert on Russia and former US official has decided that the West doesn’t have a Putin problem: “In fact, it has a Russia problem.”⁶³

• Deploring Russia, the Harvard policy intellectual Graham Allison has a regret: “The brute fact is that we cannot kill this bastard without committing suicide.”⁶⁴

• According to a longtime Fox News Russia expert, Ralph Peters, now a guest on CNN, Putin behaves as he does “because they are Russians.”⁶⁵

• A Post book editor tells readers that Russians tolerate “tyrants like Stalin and Putin” because “it probably seems normal.”⁶⁶

• A prominent Russia expert and NPR commentator wonders “whether Russia can ever be normal.”⁶⁷

• And impossible to overlook, there are the ubiquitous cartoons depicting Russia as a menacing rapacious bear and alternatively as an octopus whose grasping tentacles ensnare the globe.

How to explain this rampant Russophobia? Three important but little noted books provide useful history and analyses: David S. Foglesong’s The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”; Andrei P. Tsygankov’s Russophobia; and, most recently, Guy Mettan’s Creating Russophobia, which equates it with “Russo-madness.”

They examine various factors: ethnic peoples, now independent states with large diasporas, and with historical grievances against both the Tsarist and Soviet empires; historical developments and immigration beginning in the 19th century; today’s US military-industrial complex’s budgetary need for an “enemy” after the end of the Soviet Union; other present-day anti-Russian lobbies in the United States and the absence of any pro-Russian ones.

All need to be considered, but three circumstances are certain. American attitudes toward Russia are not historically or genetically predetermined, as evidenced by the “Gorbymania” that swept the United States in the late 1980s when Soviet President Gorbachev and US President Reagan tried to end the previous Cold War. The unprecedented demonization of the current Kremlin leader, Putin, has expanded to Russia more generally. And Russophobia is much more widespread and deeper among American political and media elites than among ordinary citizens. It was, after all, elites, not the American people, who gave us the new Cold War.

Russiagate and the Risk of Nuclear War

THE 1962 CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS REMAINS A LANDMARK event in the preceding Cold War. It was the closest the United States and (then-Soviet) Russia ever came to intentional nuclear war. Its lessons have been taught ever since. No such confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers should ever be permitted again. If it happens, only diplomacy of the kind practiced by President Kennedy during the Cuban crisis, including secret negotiations, can save both countries, and the world, from catastrophe.

Accordingly, in the decades following that sobering event, Washington and Moscow enacted forms of cooperation to limit their conflicts and prevent a recapitulation of the Cuban episode—mutual codes of Cold War conduct; a myriad of public and secret communications; nuclear-arms agreements; periodic summit meetings; and other regularized processes that kept the nuclear peace.

The new Cold War has vaporized, however, most of those restraining conventions, especially since the conflict over Ukraine in 2014 and even more since Russiagate began to unfold in 2016. During the first two weeks of this April, thus arose in Syria the real possibility of a new Cuban-like crisis and of war with Russia.

The danger developed less in the context of Syrian developments than that of Russiagate. For more than a year, President Trump had been hectored—mainly by Democrats and much of the media—to “get tougher” with Russia and its President Vladimir Putin in order to demonstrate he was not beholden to the Kremlin.

To his credit, Trump remained publicly committed to his campaign promise to “cooperate with Russia,” but while also “getting tougher.” He sent weapons to Ukraine, imposed mounting economic sanctions on Moscow, and expelled large numbers of Russian diplomats, even shutting a Russian consulate in the United States, as President Obama had unwisely done. But Russiagate advocates continuously moved the goal posts of “tougher” until the end zone, war, loomed on the horizon.

As it did during the fraught days from April 7, when reports appeared that Syrian President Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people in Douma, to the launching of US missiles against Syria on the night of April 13–14.

This might well have resulted in war with Russia because of two little-noticed red lines drawn by the Kremlin. In his speech on March 1, Putin stated that Russia’s new missiles were available to protect Moscow’s “allies,” which clearly included Damascus. And shortly later, when perhaps scores of Russian troops were killed in Syria by US-backed anti-Assad forces, Moscow’s military and civilian leadership vowed “retaliation” if this happened again. They meant Russian counter-strikes specifically against American forces in Syria and any US launchers of the weapons used. (Russian troops are embedded with many Syrian units and thus potential collateral damage.)

And yet, an evidently reluctant Trump launched more than a hundred missiles at Syria on August 13–14. Just how reluctant he was to risk a Cuban-like crisis, to risk any chance of war with Russia, is clear from what actually happened. Rejecting more expansive and devastating options, Trump chose one that gave Russia (and thus Syria) advance warning. It killed no Russians (or perhaps anyone else) and struck no essential political or military targets in Damascus, only purported chemical-weapons facilities. The Kremlin’s red lines were carefully and widely skirted.

Nonetheless, the events of April were ominous and may well forebode worse to come. The very limited, carefully crafted attack on Syria was clearly not undertaken primarily for military but political reasons related to Russiagate allegations against Trump. Just how political is indicated by the fact that no conclusive evidence had yet been produced that Assad was responsible for the alleged chemical attack and that the missiles were launched as chemical weapons investigators were en route to Douma.

We might fault Trump for being insufficiently strong—politically or psychologically—to resist warfare demands that he prove his “innocence,” but the primary responsibility lies with Russiagate promoters who seek obsessively to impeach the president: politicians and journalists for whom a porn actress, Stormy Daniels, seems to be a higher priority than averting nuclear war with Russia. They are mostly Democrats and pro-Democratic media, but also Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham, who declared, “If… we back off because Putin threatens to retaliate, that is a disaster for us throughout the world.” (No, senator, that is a Cuban missile crisis that was not resolved peacefully and a catastrophe for the entire world.)

More generally, as I have repeatedly warned, for the first time since the onset of the nuclear age, there is not in the White House an American president fully empowered—“legitimate” enough, Russiagaters charge—to negotiate with a Kremlin leader in such dire circumstances, as Trump has discovered every time he has tried. Or, in an existential crisis, to avert nuclear war the way President Kennedy did in 1962.

Given the escalating Cold war dynamics evidenced in recent months, not only in Syria, this generalization may be tested sooner rather than later. It doesn’t help, of course, that Trump has surrounded himself with appointees who apparently do not share his opinion that it is imperative “to cooperate with Russia,” but instead “adults” who seem to personify the worst aspects of Cold War zealotry and lack elementary knowledge of US-Russian relations over the years.

As President Reagan liked to say, it takes two to tango. In Moscow’s policy elite, there are influential people who believe “America has been at war against Russia”—political, economic, and military—for more than a decade. Their views are often mirror images of those of Lindsey Graham and other US establishment zealots.

In this decision-making context, Putin still appears to be, in words and deeds, the moderate, calling Western leaders “our partners and colleagues,” asking for understanding and negotiations, being far less “aggressive” than he could be. Our legions of Putin demonizers will say this is a false analysis, but it too should not be tested.

Criminalizing Russia

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, THE US political-media establishment has increasingly demonized, delegitimized, and now criminalized the Russian state and its leadership. This began with the personal vilification of President Putin and has grown into a general indictment of Russia as a nation. As President Obama’s former intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper and other US authorities have told us, any Russian “linked to the Kremlin,” Moscow officialdom generally, “oligarchs,” or certain traits is inherently suspicious.

“Crimes” said to be committed by today’s Kremlin, from America and the UK to Syria, have expanded the indictment beyond charges once leveled against Soviet Russia. The newly minted world affairs pundit Joe Scarborough, who believes the United States alone “spent the past 100 years inventing the modern age,” devotes a column warning Washington Post readers multiple times that “our democracy is under attack by the Russians.”^{68, 69}

There are many weightier and more far-reaching allegations. Canada’s foreign minister, echoing Washington, indicts Russia for its “malign behavior in all of its manifestations… whether it is cyberwarfare, whether it’s disinformation, assassination attempts, whatever it happens to be.”⁷⁰

On April 20, the Democratic National Committee, still mourning its defeat in 2016, went farther. It is seeking a formal indictment of “whatever it happens to be” by suing the Russian government for conspiring with the Trump campaign to deprive Hillary Clinton of her rightful victory in the 2016 presidential election. Central figures in this “act of unprecedented treachery” are stated to be “people believed to be affiliated with Russia.”⁷¹

It follows, of course, that a criminal Russia—frequently termed a “mafia state,” also incorrectly—can have no legitimate national interests anywhere, not on its own borders or even at home. And with such a state, it also follows, there should be no civil relations, including diplomacy, only warfare ones. Thus when a group of US senators visited Moscow in early July, another Post columnist, Dana Milbank, who seemed not to know or care there were precedents for the timing, indicted them for “visiting your foe on the Fourth of July” and equated it with “meeting with wounded Taliban fighters on Veterans Day.”⁷²

Lost, forgotten, or negated in this mania is why Russia was generally understood to matter so greatly to US national security during the 40-year Cold War that the result was myriad forms of growing and prolonged cooperation, even official episodes of détente. The reasons also apply to Russia today.

Even middle-school children presumably know the most existential reason. Like the United States, Russia possesses enormous arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. A conventional US-Russian war—as both sides are now flirting with in Syria and may soon do so in Ukraine or the Baltic region—could slip into nuclear war. As I reported earlier, at a recent meeting of Washington’s highly respected Center for the National Interest, several well-informed experts thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, the chances of war with Russia today are 5 to 7.⁷³

Today’s Cold War includes another existential danger in the form of international terrorists in pursuit of radioactive materials to make their attacks immeasurably more devastating and the consequences more enduring. Ask real experts the chances of that happening in a major city, and of the importance of the Kremlin’s full cooperation in preventing it.

Almost equally important is the reason called “geopolitical.” Even after the Soviet Union, Russia remains the largest territorial country in the world. It possesses a disproportionate share of the planet’s natural resources, from energy, iron ore, nickel, timber, diamonds, and gold to fresh water. It is also one of the world’s leading exporters of weapons. Still more, Russia is located squarely between East and West, whose civilizations are in conflict, and part of both. Months ago, I raised the possibility that Russia might “leave the West,” driven out by the new Cold War or by choice. That possibility is now said by a top Kremlin aide and ideologist to be inescapable.

Herein lies more myopia constantly perpetuated by the American media: sanctioned, criminal Russia is “isolated from the international community.” This is an Anglo-American conceit. Multi-dimensional relations between “Putin’s Russia” and non-Western countries such as China, Iran, India, and other BRIC nations are thriving. And it is there that most of the world’s territory, people, resources, and growing markets are located. For them, Russia is not criminal but an eagerly sought partner.

Given all the warfare talk emanating from the US political-media establishment, consider also Russia’s renewed military capabilities or, as strategists like to say, “capacity to project power.” There is no reason to doubt Putin’s March 1 inventorying of Moscow’s new weapons systems. The Kremlin demonstrated its formidable military capabilities by destroying ISIS’s entrenched grip on Syria following Russia’s intervention in September 2015, even though most US pundits and other professed experts falsely claim this was Washington’s achievement.

When there is military parity between Washington and Moscow, as during the preceding Cold War and now again, it is imperative to cooperate, not to ostracize. Otherwise, as President Reagan said when he decided to meet the Kremlin halfway in the late 1980s, there will be no winners,

There are also Moscow’s under-rated capabilities for conflict resolution, not only its vote on the UN Security Council. Various recent examples could be cited, but remember Russia’s essential role in the nuclear-weapons agreement with Iran; its behind-the-scenes part today in attempts to resolve the conflict with North Korea; its potential as a deciding partner in bringing peace to Syria; and the role it is likely to play when the United States finally decides to leave Afghanistan. If not criminalized, Russia can be a vital peacemaker, and there is ample reason to think that the Kremlin is ready to do so again.

Long ago, when I first developed my own “contacts” and “ties” with “Communist” Russian society and, yes, with Kremlin and many other officials, I often said and wrote, “The road to American national security runs through Moscow.” The same is no less true today. This necessity may now seem futile, as US political-media elites mindlessly criminalize Russia.

On the other hand, President Trump’s ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, stated publicly on April 24: “My president has said repeatedly that he wants a better relationship with Russia… with Putin…. You can call it a desire for détente.”⁷⁴ If so, it is imperative to support the president’s initiative, even if only this one.

America’s Collusion With Neo-Nazis

WE MUST RETURN YET AGAIN TO Ukraine because of what the orthodox US political-media narrative continues to omit—the still growing role of neo-Nazi forces in territories governed by US-backed Kiev. Even Americans who follow international news may not know the following:

• That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014—triggering a professed “democratic revolution” that overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime—were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported, but almost certainly by the neo-fascist organization Right Sector and its co-conspirators.⁷⁵

• That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Odessa shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it remains a painful and revelatory episode for many Ukrainians.

• That the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters, which has played a major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev’s armed forces, is avowedly “partially” pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations. Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving U.S. military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump administration due to Ukraine’s rampant network of corruption and to sympathizers in Kiev’s security ministries.

• That storm troop-like assaults on gays, Roma, women feminists, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. That a sacred Holocaust gravesite in Ukraine has been desecrated and looted.⁷⁶ And that police and legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged this violence by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing leading Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms during World War II. Kiev is renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.

• Or that Israel’s official annual report on anti-Semitism around the world in 2017 concluded that such incidents had doubled in Ukraine and the number “surpassed the tally for all the incidents reported throughout the entire region combined.” By the region, the report meant the total in all of Eastern Europe and all former territories of the Soviet Union.⁷⁷

The significance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and tacit US support or tolerance of it should have caused widespread outrage, but Americans cannot be faulted for not knowing these facts. They are very rarely reported and still less discussed in mainstream newspapers or on television. To learn about them, Americans would have to turn to alternative media and their independent non-mainstream writers.

Lev Golinkin is one such important American writer. He is best known for his book A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, a deeply moving and highly instructive memoir of his life as a young boy brought to America by his immigrant parents from Eastern Ukraine, a place now torn by tragic civil and proxy war. But Golinkin has also been an unrelenting and meticulous reporter of neo-fascism in “our” Ukraine and defender of others who try to chronicle and oppose its growing crimes, including Ukrainian Jews.

For the record, this did not begin under President Trump but under President George W. Bush, when then President Viktor Yushchenko’s “Orange Revolution” began rehabilitating Ukraine’s wartime killers of Jews. It grew under President Obama, who, along with Vice President Biden, were deeply complicit in the 2014 Maidan coup and what followed. Then too the American mainstream media scarcely noticed.

Even avid followers of US news probably missed this, for example. When the co-founder of a neo-Nazi party and now repackaged speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Andrei Parubiy, visited Washington in 2016, 2017, and 2018, he was widely feted. He spoke at leading think tanks, met with Senator John McCain, Rep. Paul Ryan, and Senator Chuck Schumer, as well as with the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.⁷⁸ Imagine the message this official embrace sent back to Ukraine—and elsewhere.

Fascist or neo-Nazi revivalism is under way today in many countries, from Europe to the United States, but the Ukrainian case is of special importance and a particular danger. A large, growing, well-armed fascist movement has reappeared in a large European country that is the political epicenter of the new Cold War—a movement that not so much denies the Holocaust as glorifies it.

Could such forces come to power in Kiev? Its American deniers and minimizers say never, because it has too little public support (though perhaps more than Ukrainian President Poroshenko). The same was said of Lenin’s party and Hitler’s until Russia and Germany descended into chaos and lawlessness. Ominously, a recent Amnesty International article reports that Kiev is losing control over these radical groups and over the state’s monopoly on the use of force.⁷⁹

For four years, the U.S. political-media establishment, including prominent American Jews and their organizations, has at best ignored or tolerated Ukrainian neo-Nazism and at worst abetted it by unqualified support for Kiev. Typically, the New York Times may report at length on corruption in Ukraine, but not on the very frequent manifestations of neo-fascism. And when George Will laments the resurgence of anti-Semitism today, he cites the British Labor Party but not Ukraine.

When Ukrainian fascism is occasionally acknowledged, a well-placed band of pro-Kiev partisans quickly asserts—maybe, but the real fascist is America’s number one enemy, Russian President Putin. Whatever Putin’s failings, this allegation is either cynical or totally uninformed. Nothing in his statements over 18 years in power are akin to fascism. Nor could there be, as I explained earlier.

We are left, then, not with Putin’s responsibility for the resurgence of fascism in a major European country allied with Washington, but with America’s shame—and possibly an indelible stain on its reputation—for tolerating Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, even if only through silence.

At least until recently. On April 23, a courageous first-term congressman from California, Ro Khanna, organized a public letter to the State Department, co-signed by 56 other members of the House, calling on the U.S. government to speak out and take steps against the resurgence of official anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism both in Ukraine and Poland. “Ro,” as he is known to many in Washington, is a rare profile in courage, as are his co-signers. Thus far, little has resulted from their wise and moral act.

In a righteous representative democracy, every member of Congress would sign the appeal and every leading newspaper lend editorial support. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has yet even to report on Rep. Khanna’s newsworthy initiative. Also not surprisingly, he has been slurred—and promptly defended by Lev Golinkin.

The previous 40-year experience taught that Cold War can corrupt American democracy—politically, economically, morally. There are many examples of how the new edition has already degraded America’s media, politicians, even scholars. But the test today is how our elites react to neo-fascism in U.S.-supported Ukraine. Protesting it is not a Jewish issue. It is an American one.

“Informant” Echoes of Dark Pasts

THE REVELATION THAT A LONGTIME CIA-FBI “informant,” professor emeritus Stefan Halper, had been dispatched to “interact” with several members of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 raises new and old issues.⁸⁰ For me, some of them revive Soviet-era memories.

A year ago, I asked if Russiagate was largely “Intelgate,” pointing to compelling evidence. The revelation about Halper, essentially an Intel undercover operative, is further indication that US intelligence agencies were deeply involved in the origins and promotion of allegations of “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin. (We do not know if other informers were deployed covertly to “investigate” the Trump campaign, what the two agencies did with Halper’s information, or whether he was connected in any way to UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his dossier.)

The issue is not President Trump, support him or not, but two others: our own civil liberties which can be threatened by “informants” and the indifference of US organizations and media that no longer profess or defend these liberties as inalienable principles of American democracy.

Notably, the venerable ACLU has not loudly protested Intelgate or related transgressions in this regard, if at all. Why should it when the standard-setting New York Times, in two articles and an editorial, unconditionally defended Halper’s clandestine mission. The Times did so by claiming that Russiagate is based on “facts” that “aren’t disputed”—that “there was a sophisticated, multiyear conspiracy by Russian government officials and agents, working under direct orders from President Vladimir Putin, to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.”^{81, 82}

In actual fact, aspects of this narrative have been strongly questioned by a number of qualified critics, though their questioning is never printed in the Times. Even if there was such a “multiyear conspiracy,” for example, how does the Times know it was carried out under Putin’s “direct orders”?

It is merely an assumption based on two seriously challenged documents, as we have already seen: the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and Steele’s dossier. But they are enough for the Times to charge that Halper’s targets had “suspicious contacts linked to Russia” and for its columnist Paul Krugman again, tweeting on May 19, to call them “treason.” (These “Russian contacts” are so vague they could apply to many New York City taxi drivers.)

Indicative of the Times’ coverage of Russia and Russiagate, the paper then proceeds to factual misrepresentations about three of Halper’s targets. General Michael Flynn did nothing wrong or unusual in talking with the Russian ambassador to Washington in December 2016. Other presidents-elect, we have also seen, established similar “back channels” to Moscow. Carter Page was not “recruited by Russian spies.” They tried to do so, but he helped the FBI expose and arrest them. And Paul Manafort had not, during the time in question, “lobbied for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine,” as I and others have also pointed out more than once.

The Times ends by asserting what it must know to be untrue—that no information collected by Halper or Steele had been made public prior to the November 2016 election. Widely read articles alluding to that information were published as early as July 2016 by Franklin Foer and then by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.^{83, 84, 85} The Times itself ran a number of insinuating “Trump-Putin” stories and editorials as well as accusatory opinion pieces by former Intel chiefs like the CIA’s Michael Morell and the NSA’s Michael Hayden—all prior to the election.^{86, 87} The allegations were so well-known that in their August debate Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s “puppet.”

Of course, the Times was not alone among media outlets that once deplored civil-liberties abuses but justified the Halper operation. The Washington Post also unconditionally did so, as in a May 21 column by Eugene Robinson denouncing critics of those Russiagate practices for “smearing veteran professionals” of the agencies. Had they not dispatched Halper, Robinson exclaimed, it “would have been an appalling dereliction of duty.” Proponents of civil liberties might consider Robinson’s statement “appalling.”

As usual, MSNBC and CNN were in accord with the Times and the Post. On May 17, for instance, CNN’s Don Lemon summoned former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself to vouch for Halper’s “informant” mission: “That’s a good thing because the Russians pose a threat to the very basis of our political system.” Lemon did not question Clapper about civil liberties or anything else. Nor did he book anyone who might have done so. The new cult of Intel is mainstream orthodoxy.

Not a word about constitutional civil liberties in any of this media coverage. Surely the “informant” and “contacts” themes—the Clinton-sponsored Center for American Progress recently posted 70-plus purportedly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s people and Russia—reminded some editors, writers, or producers about those practices during the McCarthy era. (If not, they should read the classic book Naming Names, by former Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky.)

My own reminders come from, so to speak, the other side. I lived in Soviet Russia periodically from 1976 to 1982 (the year those authorities banned me from the country) among open and semi-closeted Communist Party dissidents. Those were the years of Brezhnev’s “vegetarian” surveillance state. Russian friends called it “vegetarian” because the era of Stalin’s mass arbitrary arrests, torture, and executions had long passed. KGB suppression now relied significantly on “softer” tactics, among them clandestine informers and accusations of “contacts with the CIA and American imperialism.”

I was instructed by Moscow friends how to detect informers or, in any case, to be ever mindful “informants” might be present even at intimate gatherings of “friends.” As an American living among targeted people, I tried to take every precaution to avoid being a damning “contact.” In the end, though, I was cited by the KGB in cases against at least two prominent dissidents, one jailed and the other hounded. (Both later became leading human-rights figures under Gorbachev and Yeltsin: one as head of the organization Memorial, the other as founder of Moscow’s Museum of the History of the Gulag.)

Surveillance was, of course, very different and far more consequential in the repressive pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union than in America today. But a number of episodes on both sides involved professors who were intelligence operatives. In the Russiagate saga, there is already Halper and the still-shadowy Professor Joseph Mifsud, who befriended the very minor, very inexperienced, and apparently clueless Trump “aide” George Papadopoulos. (Originally said to be a Russian intelligence “asset,” there is some evidence that Mifsud may have worked for British intelligence. In any event, he has vanished.)

This should not surprise us. Not all US or Russian intelligence officers are assassins, recruiters, or even spies. Some are highly qualified scholars who hold positions in colleges, academies, and universities, as has long been the case both in Russia and in the United States. As a result, I myself had over the years—I will confess—knowing personal “contacts” with several Soviet and post-Soviet Russian “intelligence officers.”

Two held the rank of general and were affiliated with higher-educational institutions (one as a professor), which is where I first met them. Another intelligence general I met privately headed the former KGB (now FSB) archives. The others, more junior, were working on their doctoral dissertations, a step toward promotion, in the same Stalin-era archive where I was doing research for a book.

We took many lunch and smoking breaks together. Most of our discussions focused on archival “secrets” of the Stalin Terror of the 1930s. Sometimes talk did wander to current concerns—for example, whether Kentucky bourbon, which they had not sampled but I eventually provided, was superior to Russian vodka. No other “collusion” ever resulted.

Why This Cold War is More Dangerous Than the One We Survived

A FORMAL MEETING BETWEEN PRESIDENTS TRUMP AND Putin is being seriously discussed in Washington and Moscow. Ritualized but substantive “summits,” as they were termed, were frequently used during the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War to reduce conflicts and increase cooperation between the two superpowers. They were most important when tensions were highest. Some were very successful, some less so, others were deemed failures.

Given today’s extraordinary political circumstances, we may wonder if anything positive would come from a Trump-Putin summit. But it is necessary, even imperative, that Washington and Moscow try because this Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. By now, the reasons should be clear, but it is time to recall and update them. There are at least ten:

1. The political epicenter of the new Cold War is not in far-away Berlin, as it was from the late 1940s on, but directly on Russia’s borders, from the Baltic states and Ukraine to another former Soviet republic, Georgia. Each of these new Cold War fronts is fraught with the possibility of hot war. US-Russian military relations are especially tense today in the Baltic region, where a large-scale NATO buildup is under way, and in Ukraine, where a US-Russian proxy war is intensifying.

The “Soviet Bloc” that once served as a buffer between NATO and Russia no longer exists. And many imaginable incidents on the West’s new Eastern Front, intentional or unintentional, could easily trigger actual war between the United States and Russia. What brought about this situation on Russia’s borders—unprecedented at least since the Nazi German invasion in 1941—was, of course, Washington’s exceedingly unwise decision, in the late 1990s, to expand NATO eastward. Done in the name of “security,” it has made all the states involved only more insecure.

2. Proxy wars were a feature of the old Cold War, but usually small ones in what was called the “Third World,” in Africa, for example. They rarely involved many, if any, Soviet or American personnel, mostly only money and weapons. Today’s US-Russian proxy wars are different, located in the center of geopolitics and accompanied by too many American and Russian trainers, minders, and possibly fighters. Two have already erupted: in Georgia in 2008, where Russian forces fought a Georgian army financed, trained, and minded by American funds and personnel; and in Syria, where in February scores of Russians were killed by US-backed anti-Assad forces. Moscow did not retaliate, but it has pledged to do so if there is “a next time,” as there very well might be.

If so, this would in effect be war directly between Russia and America. The risk of a direct conflict also continues to grow in Ukraine. The country’s US-backed but politically failing President Petro Poroshenko seems periodically tempted to launch another all-out military assault on rebel-controlled Donbass, which is backed by Moscow. If he does so, and the assault does not quickly fail as previous ones did, Russia will certainly intervene in eastern Ukraine with a truly tangible “invasion.”

Washington will then have to make a fateful war-or-peace decision. Having already reneged on its commitments to the Minsk Accords, the best hope for ending the four-year Ukrainian crisis peacefully, Kiev seems to have an unrelenting impulse to be a tail wagging the dog of US-Russian war. Its capacity for provocations and disinformation seem second to none, as evidenced again recently by the faked “assassination and resurrection” of journalist Arkady Babchenko.

3. Years-long Western, especially American, demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, is also unprecedented. Too obvious to spell out again here, no Soviet Communist leader, at least since Stalin, was ever subjected to such prolonged, baseless, crudely derogatory personal vilification. Whereas Soviet leaders were regarded as acceptable negotiating partners for American presidents, including at major summits, Putin has been made to seem to be an illegitimate national leader—at best “a KGB thug” or murderous “mafia boss.”

4. Still more, demonizing Putin has generated widespread Russophobic vilification of Russia itself, or what the New York Times and other mainstream-media outlets have taken to calling “Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Yesterday’s enemy was Soviet Communism. Today it is increasingly Russia, thereby also delegitimizing Russia as a great power with legitimate national interests. “The Parity Principle,” as I termed it during the preceding Cold War—the principle that both sides had legitimate interests at home and abroad, which was the basis for diplomacy and negotiations, and symbolized by leadership summits—no longer exists, at least on the American side.

Nor does the acknowledgment that both sides were to blame to some extent for the previous Cold War. Among influential American observers who even recognize the new Cold War, “Putin’s Russia” alone is to blame. When there is no recognized parity and shared responsibility, there is ever-shrinking space for diplomacy, but more and more for increasingly militarized relations, as we are witnessing today.

5. Meanwhile, most of the Cold War safeguards—cooperative mechanisms and mutually observed rules of conduct that evolved over decades in order to prevent superpower hot war—have been vaporized or badly frayed since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, as the UN General Secretary António Guterres, almost alone, has recognized: “The Cold War is back—with a vengeance but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.”⁸⁸ Trump’s recent missile strike on Syria carefully avoided killing any Russians, but Moscow has vowed to retaliate against the US if there is a “next time,” as there may be.

Even the decades-long process of arms control may, an expert warns, be coming to an “end.”⁸⁹ It would mean an unfettered new nuclear-arms race as well as the termination of an ongoing diplomatic process that buffered US-Soviet relations during very bad political times.

In short, if there actually are any new Cold War rules of conduct, they are yet to be formulated and mutually accepted. Nor does this semi-anarchy take into account the new warfare technology of cyber-attacks. What are its implications for the secure functioning of existential Russian and American nuclear command-and-control and early-warning systems that guard against an accidental launching of missiles still on high alert?

6. Russiagate allegations that the American president has been compromised by—or is even an agent of—the Kremlin are also without precedent. These allegations, as we have seen, have already had profoundly dangerous consequences. They include the nonsensical, mantra-like declaration that “Russia attacked America” during the 2016 presidential election; crippling assaults on President Trump every time he speaks with Putin in person or by phone; and making both Trump and Putin so toxic that most American politicians, journalists, and intellectuals who understand the present-day dangers are reluctant to speak out against US contributions to the new Cold War.

7. Mainstream media outlets have, we know, played a woeful role in all of this. Unlike in the past, when pro-détente advocates had roughly equal access to influential media, today’s new Cold War media continue to enforce their orthodox narrative that Russia is solely to blame. They offer not diversity of opinion and reporting but “confirmation bias.” Alternative voices (with, yes, “alternative” or opposing facts) rarely appear any longer in the most influential newspapers or on national television or radio.

One alarming result is that “disinformation” generated by or pleasing to Washington and its allies has consequences before it can be corrected. The Ukrainian fake Babchenko assassination (allegedly ordered by Putin, of course) was quickly exposed, but not the official version of the Skripal assassination attempt in the UK, which led to the largest US expulsion of Russian diplomats in history before London’s initial account could be thoroughly examined. This too—Cold War without debate—is unprecedented, precluding the frequent rethinking and revising of US policy that characterized the preceding 40-year Cold War.

8. Equally lamentable, and very much unlike during the 40-year Cold War, there still is virtually no significant opposition in the American mainstream to the US role in the new Cold War—not in the media, not in Congress, not in the two major political parties, not in think tanks, not in the universities, not at grassroots levels. This continues to be unprecedented, dangerous, and contrary to real democracy.

Consider again the still thunderous silence of scores of large US corporations that have been doing profitable business in post-Soviet Russia for years, from fast-food chains and automobile manufacturers to pharmaceutical and energy giants. Contrast their behavior to that of CEOs of PepsiCo, Control Data, IBM, and other major American corporations seeking entry to the Soviet market in the 1970s and 1980s, when they publicly supported and even funded pro-détente organizations and politicians. How to explain the continuing silence of their counterparts today, who are usually so profit-motivated? Are they also fearful of being labeled “pro-Putin” or possibly “pro-Trump”?

9. And then there remains the widespread escalatory myth that today’s Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is too weak—its economy too small and fragile, its leader too “isolated in international affairs”—to wage a sustained Cold War, and that eventually Putin, who is “punching above his weight,” as the cliché has it, will capitulate. This too is a dangerous delusion—one that cannot be attributed to President Trump. It was, we saw earlier, President Obama who, in 2014, as approvingly reported by the New York Times, set out to make Putin’s Russia “a pariah state.”

Washington and some of its allies certainly tried to isolate Russia. How else to interpret fully the political scandals and media campaigns that erupted on the eve of the Sochi Olympics and again on the eve of the World Cup championship in Russia? Or the tantrum-like, mostly ineffective, even counter-productive cascade of economic sanctions on Moscow?

But Russia is hardly isolated in world affairs, not even in Europe, where five or more governments are tilting away from the anti-Russian line of Washington, London, and Brussels. Despite sanctions, Russia’s energy industry and agricultural exports are flourishing. Moreover, geopolitically, Moscow has many military and related advantages in regions where the new Cold War has unfolded. And no state with Russia’s modern nuclear and other weapons is “punching above its weight.” Contrary to Washington’s expectations, the great majority of Russians have rallied behind Putin because they believe their country is under attack by the US-led West. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Russia’s history understands it is highly unlikely to capitulate under any circumstances.

10. Finally (at least as of now), there is the growing warlike “hysteria” fueled both in Washington and Moscow. It is driven by various factors, but television talk “news” broadcasts, as common in Russia as in the United States, play a major role. Only an extensive quantitative study could discern which plays a more lamentable role in promoting this frenzy—MSNBC and CNN or their Russian counterparts. The Russian dark witticism seems apt: “Both are worst” (Oba khuzhe). Again, some of this American broadcast extremism existed during the preceding Cold War, but almost always balanced, even offset, by informed, wiser opinions, which are now largely excluded.

Is my analysis of the graver dangers inherent in the new Cold War itself extremist or alarmist? Some usually reticent specialists would seem to agree with my general assessment. As I reported earlier, experts gathered by a centrist Washington think tank thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, there is a 5 to 7 chance of actual war with Russia. There are other such opinions. A former head of British MI6 is reported as saying that “for the first time in living memory, there’s a realistic chance of a superpower conflict.” And a respected retired Russian general tells the same Washington think tank that any military confrontation “will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia.”^{90, 91}

A single Trump-Putin summit cannot eliminate these new Cold War dangers. But US-Soviet summits traditionally served three corollary purposes. They created a kind of security partnership—not a conspiracy—that involved each leader’s limited political capital at home, which the other should recognize and not heedlessly jeopardize. They sent a clear message to the two leaders’ respective national-security bureaucracies, which often did not favor détente-like cooperation, that the “boss” was determined and they must end their foot-dragging, even sabotage. And summits, with their exalted rituals and intense coverage, usually improved the media-political environment needed to enhance cooperation amid Cold War conflicts.

If a Trump-Putin summit achieves even some of those purposes, it might pull us back from the precipice.

Summitgate vs. “Peace”

WE NEED TO REMEMBER THAT US-RUSSIAN (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits are a long tradition going back to FDR’s wartime meeting with Stalin in Tehran in 1943. Every American president since FDR met with a Kremlin leader in a summit-style format at least once. Several did so multiple times. The purpose was always to resolve conflicts and enhance cooperation in relations between the two powers. Some summits succeeded, some did not, but all were thought to be an essential aspect of White House-Kremlin relations. (At least one seems to have been sabotaged. The third Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting, scheduled for Paris in 1960, was aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US U-2 spy plane sent, some think, by “deep state” foes of détente.)

As a rule, American presidents have departed for summits with bipartisan support and well-wishes. President Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin, in Helsinki on July 16, is very different in two respects. US-Russian relations have rarely, if ever, been more dangerous. And never before has a president’s departure—in Trump’s case, first for a NATO summit and then the one with Putin—been accompanied by allegations that he is disloyal to the United States and thus, as an “expert” told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 27, someone “we cannot trust.” Such defamations were once hurled at presidents only by fringe elements in American politics.

Now, however, in a kind of manufactured Summitgate scandal, we are being told this daily by mainstream publications, broadcasts, and “think tanks.” According to a representative of the Center for American Progress, “Trump is going to sell out America and its allies.”⁹² The New York Times and the Washington Post also feature “experts”—chosen accordingly—who “worry” and “fear” that Trump and Putin “will get along.”^{93, 94} The Times of London, a transatlantic bastion of Russophobic Cold War advocacy, captures this bizarre mainstream perspective in a single headline: “Fears Grow Over Prospect of Trump ‘Peace Deal’ with Putin.”⁹⁵

Peace, it turns out, is to be feared. A Washington establishment against “peace” with Russia is, of course, what still-unproven Russiagate allegations have wrought. A New York magazine writer summed them up by warning that the Trump-Putin summit could be “less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.”⁹⁶

The charge is hardly original, having been made for months on MSNBC by the questionably credentialed “intelligence expert” Malcolm Nance and, it seems, the selectively informed Rachel Maddow. Many other “experts” are doing the same. Considering today’s perilous geopolitical situation, it is hard not to conclude again that much of the American political establishment, particularly the Democratic Party, would prefer trying to impeach Trump to averting war with Russia, the other nuclear superpower. For this too, there is no precedent in American history.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s dreaded visit to the NATO summit has only inflated the uncritical cult of that organization, which has been in search of a purpose and ever more funding since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Times declares that NATO is “the core of an American-led liberal world order,” an assertion that might startle some non-military institutions involved in the “liberal world order” and even some liberals. No less puzzling is the ritualistic characterization of NATO, in the same July 9 Times editorial, as “the most successful military alliance in history.” It has never—thankfully—gone to war as an alliance, only a few “willing” member (and would-be member) states under US leadership.

Even then, what counts as NATO’s “great victories”? The police action in the Balkans in the 1990s? The disasters in the aftermath of Iraq and Libya? The longest, still-ongoing US war in history, in Afghanistan? NATO’s only real mission since the 1990s has been expanding to Russia’s borders, and that has resulted in less, not more, security for all concerned, as is evident today.

The only “Russian threats” since the end of the Soviet Union are ones provoked by US-led NATO itself, from Georgia and Ukraine to the Baltic states. Who has actually benefited? Only NATO’s vast corporate bureaucracy, its some 4,000 employees housed in its new $1.2 billion headquarters in Brussels, and US and other weapons manufacturers who profit from each new member state. But none of this can be discussed in the American mainstream because Trump uttered a few words questioning NATO’s role and funding, even though the subject has been on the agenda of Washington think tanks since the 1990s.

Also not surprising, and unlike on the eve of previous summits, mainstream media have found little place for serious discussion of today’s dangerous conflicts between Washington and Moscow—those regarding nuclear weapons treaties, cyber-warfare, Syria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, military confrontation in the Black Sea region, even Afghanistan. It’s easy to imagine how Trump and Putin could agree on conflict-reduction and cooperation in most of these realms. But considering the way the Post, Times, and Maddow traduced a group of US senators who recently visited Moscow, it’s much harder to see how the defamed Trump could implement any “peace deals.”

Nor is the unreasonably demonized Putin without constraints at home, though none like those that may cripple Trump. The Kremlin’s long-delayed decision to raise the pension age for men from age 60 to 65 and for women from 55 to 60 has caused Putin’s popular ratings, though still high, to drop sharply. Popular protests are under way and spreading across the country.

On another level, segments of Russia’s military-security establishment still believe Putin has never fully shed his admitted early “illusions” about negotiating with an always treacherous Washington. Like their American counterparts, they do not trust Trump, whom they too view as unreliable and capricious.

Russian “hard-liners” have made their concerns known publicly, and Putin must take them into account.⁹⁷ As has been a function of summits over the decades, he is seeking in Trump a reliable national-security partner. Given the constraints on Trump and his proclivities, Putin is taking a risk, and he knows it.

Even if nothing more specific is achieved, everyone who cares about American and international security should hope that the Trump-Putin summit at least results in a restoration of the diplomatic process, longstanding “contacts” between Washington and Moscow,” now greatly diminished, if not destroyed, by the new Cold War and by Russiagate allegations. Cold War without diplomacy is a recipe for actual war.

Trump as Cold War Heretic

ON JULY 16, PRESIDENT TRUMP HELD a summit meeting with Russian President Putin in Helsinki. Given fraught US-Russian confrontations from Ukraine and the Baltic and Black Sea regions to Syria, Trump had a vital national-security duty to meet with the Kremlin leader in this august way.

As with previous summits, details will come later, but the two leaders seem to have reached several important agreements. They revived a US-Russian diplomatic process tattered by recent events, apparently including negotiations to reduce and regulate nuclear weapons and thus avert a new arms race. They suggested a joint effort to prevent Iran, Russia’s Middle East partner, from threatening “Israeli security,” as Putin put it, on that nation’s borders. They also agreed on the need for a mutual effort to relieve the “humanitarian crisis” in Syria. And there was talk of promoting US-Russian “business ties,” a nebulous aspiration considering Western economic sanctions on Russia. (This may have been a signal by Trump that he would not object, as President Obama had, if the European Union diminished or terminated its sanctions.)

Historically, in once “normal” Cold War times, these summit achievements would have been supported, even applauded, across the American political spectrum. Predictably, they were not, eliciting only a torrent of denunciation. Idioms varied, from the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, but the once-stately New York Times, as is now its custom, set the tone. Its front-page headline on July 17 blared: “Trump, At Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election.” Another headline below explained, “Disdain for U.S. Institutions, and Praise for an Adversary.”

The Times’ “reporting” itself was fulsomely prosecutorial, scarcely mentioning what Trump and Putin had agreed on. Its columnists competed to indict the American president. An early entry, on July 16, before anything was actually known about the summit results, came from Charles Blow, whose headline thundered: “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.” The title of Michelle Goldberg’s entry, on July 17, was less alliterative: “Trump Shows the World He’s Putin’s Lackey.”

As I predicted in the weeks prior to the summit, the same toxic message bellowed through the realm of mainstream print and cable “news”: Trump had betrayed and shamed America before the entire world. As has been the case for years regarding “the Russia threat,” almost no dissenting voices were included in the “discussions,” apart from a few equally unqualified Trump representatives.

The media coverage, not Trump himself at the summit, was shameful. Media were reporting “news” of the kind they wanted, amplifying leading political figures, also across the spectrum. Senator John McCain, as usual on the subject of Russia, led the vigilante posse: “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” He added for personal emphasis: “One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Republican Senator Bob Corker, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee echoed McCain: “A sad day for our country and everyone knows it.” Democratic Senator Charles Schumer agreed, demanding that the Senate “hold the president accountable for … Helsinki.”^{98, 99}

Most unusual, given the traditional non-political public role of Intel chiefs was former CIA director John Brennan. He quickly appeared as Trump’s prosecutor and judge, declaring that the president’s behavior in Helsinki “exceeds the threshold” for impeachment and, still more, “was nothing short of treasonous.”¹⁰⁰

Only one major political figure stood apart from and above this political-media kangaroo court, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Defending the president’s meeting with Putin on behalf of US national security, Senator Paul emerged as the only visible statesman in Congress.¹⁰¹ (In the past, the US Senate was often led by distinguished statesmen, but now by the likes of McCain, Lindsay Graham, and other members who rarely see a war, cold or hot, they are not eager to fight.)

Yet unproven Russiagate allegations, of course, underlay this “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as it has been termed. Hence the charges that in Helsinki Trump allied with Putin “against US intelligence agencies.” (Commentators wanted, it seemed, for Trump to have publicly water-boarded Putin into a confession of having hacked the DNC’s emails.) Despite all we now know about the role of the CIA and other intelligence operatives in the past and in Russiagate, the pursuers of Trump, particularly liberal Democrats and their media, wish to judge him by the rectitude of “agencies” whose sharpest critics they once were. “Derangement,” indeed.

So much so that an astonishing and exceedingly wise comment by Trump, before and again at the summit, was barely noticed or derided. Trump’s remark relates directly to the most fateful question in US-Russian relations: Why has the relationship since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 evolved into a new and more dangerous Cold War?

For 15 years, the virtually unanimous American bipartisan establishment answer has been that Putin, or “Putin’s Russia,” is solely to blame. Washington’s decision to expand NATO to Russia’s border, bomb Moscow’s traditional ally Serbia, withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, carry out military regime change in Iraq and Libya, instigate the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and back the coup against the country’s legitimate president, and considerably more—none of these US policies, only “Putin’s aggression,” led to the new Cold War.

This explanation has long been a rigid orthodoxy tolerating no dissent, excluding, even slurring, well-informed proponents of alternative explanations. The result has been years without real public debate, without any rethinking, and thus no revising of the triumphalist, winner-take-all “post–Cold War” approach first adopted by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and continued in spirit and most practices ever since, from President George W. Bush to President Obama. This unassailable orthodoxy has now led to a new Cold War fraught with possibilities of actual war with Russia.

Suddenly, whether due to common sense or wise advice, President Trump broke with this years-long, untrue, and increasingly dangerous orthodoxy. In a tweet on July 15, he wrote, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” Asked in Helsinki about the new Cold War, he formulated his explanation more diplomatically: “I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago.”¹⁰²

Everything in those remarks by President Trump is factually and analytically true, profoundly so. But they are also outright heresy and perhaps the real reason his meeting with Putin is being so denounced by political and media elites that have made their careers on orthodox dogmas at the expense of American and international security.

Heretics are scorned or worse, but sometimes in history they prevail. However strongly Americans may disapprove of President Trump’s other words and deeds, everyone, anywhere across our political spectrum, who wishes to avoid war with Russia—again, conceivably nuclear war—must support and encourage his heresy until it is no longer heresy, until the full debate over reckless US policy since the 1990s finally ensues, and until that approach changes, as should have happened, as Trump said, “a long time ago.” It is not too late, but it may be the last chance.

Sanction Mania

THE BIPARTISAN SENATE CAMPAIGN TO IMPOSE new, “crushing” sanctions on Russia needs to be seen in historical context. Broadly understood, sanctions have been part of US policy toward Russia for much of the past 100 years.

During the Russian civil war of 1918–1920, President Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to fight against the emerging Soviet government. Though the “Reds” were the established government of Soviet Russia by 1921, Washington continued to deny the USSR diplomatic recognition until President Franklin D. Roosevelt established formal relations in 1933. During much of the 40-year Cold War, the United States imposed various sanctions on its superpower rival, mainly related to technological and military exports, along with periodic expulsions of diplomats and “spies” on both sides.

Congress’s major political contribution was the 1975 Jackson–Vanik Amendment. The legislation denied Moscow customary trading status with the United States, primarily because of Kremlin restrictions on Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Indicative of how mindlessly habitual US sanctions had become, Jackson–Vanik was nullified only in late 2012, long after the end of the Soviet Union and after any restrictions on Jews leaving (or returning to) Russia. Even more indicative, it was immediately replaced, in December 2012, by the Magnitsky Act, which purported to sanction individual Russian officials and “oligarchs” for “human-rights abuses.” The Magnitsky Act remains law, supplemented by additional sanctions leveled against Russia as a result of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Looking back over this long history, there is no evidence that any US sanctions ever significantly altered Moscow’s “behavior” in ways that were intended. Or that they adversely affected Russia’s ruling political or financial elites. Any pain inflicted fell on ordinary citizens, who nonetheless rallied “patriotically” around the Kremlin leadership, most recently around President Putin. Historically, sanctions were not problem-solving measures advancing American national security but more akin to temper tantrums or road rage, making things worse, than to real policy-making.

Why, then, Washington’s new bout of sanction mania against Moscow, especially considering the very harsh official Russian reaction expressed by Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev—Obama’s onetime “reset” partner and generally considered the most pro-Western figure in Russia’s political hierarchy? Medvedev called the Senate’s proposed measures “a declaration of economic war” and promised that the Kremlin would retaliate.

One explanation is an astonishing assumption recently stated by Michael McFaul, the media-ubiquitous former US ambassador to Moscow and a longtime Russia scholar: “To advance almost all of our core national security and economic interests, the US does not need Russia.”¹⁰³ Such a statement by a former or current policy-maker and intellectual may be unprecedented in modern times—and is manifestly wrong.

US “core” interests “need” Russia’s cooperation in many vital ways. They include avoiding nuclear war; preventing a new and more dangerous arms race; guarding against the proliferation of weapons and materials of mass destruction; coping with international terrorists; achieving lasting peace in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East; fostering prosperity and stability in Europe, of which Russia is a part; promoting better relations with the Islamic world, of which Russia is also a part; and avoiding a generation-long confrontation with a formidable new alliance that already includes Russia, China, Iran, and other non-NATO countries. If McFaul’s assumption is widespread in Washington, as it seems to be, we are living in truly unwise and perilous times.

A second assumption is no less myopic and dangerous: the Kremlin is weak and lacks countermeasures to adopt against the new sanctions being advocated in Washington. Consider, however, the following real possibilities:

Moscow could sell off its billions of dollars of US Treasury securities and begin trading with friendly nations in non-dollar currencies, both of which it has already begun to do. It could restrict, otherwise undermine, or even shut down many large US corporations long doing profitable business in Russia, among them Citibank, Cisco Systems, Apple, Microsoft, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor Co., and even Boeing. It could end titanium exports to the United States, which are vital to American civilian and military aircraft manufacturers, including Boeing. And terminate the sale of rocket engines essential for NASA space travel and US satellite operations. The world’s largest territorial country, Russia could charge US airlines higher tariffs for their regular use of its air space or ban them altogether, making them uncompetitive against other national carriers. Politically, the Kremlin could end its own sanctions on Iran and North Korea, alleviating Washington’s pressure on those governments. And it could end the Russian supply transit to US troops fighting in Afghanistan used since the early 1990s.

None of this seems to have been considered by Washington’s sanction zealots. Nor have four other circumstances:

Sanctions against Russia’s “oligarchs” actually help Putin, whom the US political-media establishment so despises and constantly indicts. For years, he has been trying to persuade many of the richest oligarchs to repatriate their offshore wealth to Russia. Few did so. Now, fearful of having their assets abroad frozen or seized by US measures, more and more are complying.

Second, new sanctions limiting Moscow’s ability to borrow and finance investment at home will retard the country’s still meager growth rate. But the Kremlin coped after the 2014 sanctions and will do so again by turning away even more from the West and toward China and other non-Western partners, and by developing its own capacity to produce sanctioned imports. (Russian agricultural production, for example, has surged in recent years, becoming a major export industry.)

Third, already unhappy with existing economic sanctions against Russia, European multinational corporations—and thus Europe itself—may tilt even farther away from their capricious “transatlantic partner” in Washington, who is diminishing their vast market in the East.

And fourth, waging “economic war” is one impulsive step from breaking off all diplomatic relations with Russia. This too is actually being discussed by Washington zealots. Such a rupture would turn the clock back many decades, now in an era when there is no “globalization,” or international security, without Russia.

What reason do Washington’s fanatical Cold Warriors, most of them in the Senate, give for imposing new sanctions? Their professed reasons are various and nonsensical. Some say Russia must be sanctioned for Ukraine, but those events happened four years ago and have already been “punished.” Others say for “Russia’s aggression in Syria,” but it was Putin’s military intervention that destroyed the Islamic State’s terrorist occupation of much of the country and ended its threat to take Damascus, an intervention that greatly benefited America and its allies, including Europe and Israel. Still others insist the Kremlin must be sanctioned for its “nerve agent” attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK. But the British government’s case against the Kremlin is less than cogent, as a reader of articles in Johnson’s Russia List will understand.

Ultimately, the new bout of sanction mania is in response to Russia’s alleged “attack on American democracy” during the 2016 presidential election. In reality, there was no “attack”—no Pearl Harbor, no 9/11, no Russian parachuters descending on Washington—only the kind of “meddling” and “interference” in the other’s domestic politics that both countries have practiced, almost ritualistically, for nearly a hundred years. Whatever “meddling” Russian actors did in 2016 may well have been jaywalking compared to the Clinton administration’s highly intrusive political and financial intervention on behalf of Russian President Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 1996.

We are left with the actual and perverse reason behind the new anti-Russian sanctions campaign: to thwart and punish President Trump for his policy of “cooperation with Russia.” And Putin for having met and cooperated with Trump at their July Helsinki summit. This bizarre reality is more than a whisper. According to a New York Times “news analysis,” as well as other published reports, a “bipartisan group of senators, dismayed that Mr. Trump had not publicly confronted Mr. Putin over Russia’s election meddling, released draft legislation” of new sanctions against Moscow. “Passage of such a bill would impose some of the most damaging sanctions yet.”¹⁰⁴

Leave aside that it is not Russian “meddling” which is delegitimizing our elections but instead these fact-free allegations themselves. Remember instead that for doing what every American president since Eisenhower has done—meet with the sitting Kremlin leader in order to avoid stumbling into a war between the nuclear superpowers—in effect both Trump and Putin are being condemned by the Washington establishment, including by members of Trump’s own intelligence agencies.

Who, as a result, will avert the prospect of war with Russia, a new Cuban missile–like crisis, conceivably in the Baltic region, Ukraine, or Syria? Not any leading representative of the Democratic Party. Not the current Russophobic “bipartisan” Senate. Not the most influential media outlets that amplify the warmongering folly almost daily. In this most existential regard, there is for now, like it or not, only President Donald Trump.

What the Brennan Affair Reveals

JOHN BRENNAN, FORMER PRESIDENT OBAMA’S CIA director, is back in the news. When President Trump met with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, he was scathingly criticized by much of the US political-media establishment. Brennan, however, went much farther, characterizing Trump’s press conference with Putin as “nothing short of treasonous.” Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance, the continuing access to classified information usually accorded to former security officials. In the political-media furor that followed, Brennan was widely heroized as an avatar of civil liberties and free speech and Trump denounced as their enemy.

Leaving aside the missed occasion to discuss the “revolving door” involving former US security officials using their permanent clearances to enhance their lucrative positions outside government, what the subsequent political-media furor obscures is truly important and ominous.

Brennan’s allegation was unprecedented. No US top-level intelligence official had ever before accused an American president of treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment charges against Presidents Nixon and Clinton, I have already noted, did not involve Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge: “Treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and to aid and abet the enemy.” Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of dark secrets, as he strongly hinted, his accusation was fraught with alarming implications.^{105, 106}

Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump’s impeachment, but in another time, and in many other countries, his allegation would suggest Trump should be removed from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American democracy. (On July 19, 2016, the Los Angeles Times saw fit to print an article, by James Kirchik, suggesting that the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.)

Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk making a charge that might reasonably be interpreted as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the godfather of the entire Russiagate narrative, as I suggested back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan’s unvarnished views on Russia.

They were set out, alarmingly, in a New York Times article on August 17. Brennan’s views are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western “politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives… not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation… I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power… These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.”

All this, Brennan assures readers, is based on his “deep insight.” All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly vulnerable to “Russian puppet masters” under our beds, at work, in our relationships, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no “cooperation” with the Kremlin’s grand “Puppet Master,” as Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when President Obama knew about the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep a person like Brennan so close for so long.)

And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though some said they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligence agencies’ Russiagate allegations against him.

It’s a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden “deep state.” In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential branch of government. This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of that branch—such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the the Washington Post—have been in full voice.^{107, 108}

The result is to further criminalize any advocacy of “cooperating with Russia,” or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki with Putin. A Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and—pending actual evidence against her—those who engineered the arrest of the young Russian woman Maria Butina (imagine how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to senators preparing new “crippling sanctions” against Moscow and editors and producers at the Times, Post, CNN, MSNBC, and other media outlets. As the dangers of actual war with Russia grow, the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly diminished. To be fair, Brennan may be only a symptom of this American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.

There was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats, could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and spreading neo-McCarthyism. (Brennan’s defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan’s charge of treason without any evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved—and not only Brennan’s and Trump’s.

But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic media are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with few exceptions. A generally liberal historian tells CNN viewers that “Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much.” In the same vein, two Post reporters write of the FBI’s “once venerated reputation.”^{109, 110}

Is this the historical amnesia I pointed out earlier? Is it professional incompetence? A quick Google search would reveal Brennan’s less than “impeccable” record, FBI misdeeds under and after Hoover, as well as the Senate’s 1976 Church Committee report of CIA and other intelligence agencies’ very serious abuses of their power. Or have liberals’ hatred of Trump nullified their own principles? The critical-minded Russian adage would say, “All three explanations are worst.”

“Vital” US Moles in the Kremlin

FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS, MOSTLY VACUOUS, malignant Russiagate allegations have drowned out truly significant news directly affecting America’s place in the world. In recent days, for example. French President Emmanuel Macron declared: “Europe can no longer rely on the United States to provide its security.” He called instead for a broader kind of security “and particularly doing it in cooperation with Russia.”¹¹¹ About the same time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Putin met to expand and solidify a crucial energy partnership by agreeing to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, despite US attempts to abort it. Earlier, on August 22, the Afghan Taliban announced it would attend its first ever major peace conference—in Moscow, without US participation.

Thus does the world turn, and not to the wishes of Washington. Such news would normally elicit extensive reporting and analysis in the American mainstream media. But amid all this, on August 25, the ever-eager New York Times published yet another front-page Russiagate story—one that if true would be sensational. Hardly anyone seemed to notice.

According to the Times’ regular Intel leakers, US intelligence agencies, presumably the CIA, has had multiple “informants close to… Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial details” about Russiagate for two years. Now, however, “the vital Kremlin informants have largely gone silent.” The Times laced the story with the usual misdeeds attributed to Putin and equally untrustworthy commentators, as well as the mistranslated Putin statement incorrectly having him say all “traitors” should be killed. But the article’s sensation is that the US government had moles in Putin’s office.

Skeptical or credulous readers will react to the Times story as they might. Actually, a lesser version of it first appeared, which I noted earlier, in the Washington Post, an equally hospitable Intel platform, on December 15, 2017. I found it implausible for much the same reasons I had previously found implausible the Steele dossier, also purportedly based on “Kremlin sources.” But the Times’ expanded version of the mole story raises new questions.

If US intelligence really had such a priceless asset in Putin’s office—the Post story implied only one, the Times writes of more than one—imagine what they could reveal about Enemy No. 1 Putin’s perhaps daily intentions abroad and at home. Why, then, would any American Intel official disclose this information to any media at the risk of being charged with a treasonous capital offense? And now more than once? Or, since “the Kremlin” closely monitors US media, at risk of having the no less treasonous Russian informants identified and severely punished? Presumably, this why the Times’ leakers insist that the “silent” moles are still alive, though how they know we are not told. All of this is even more implausible, and the Times article asks no critical questions.

Why leak the mole story again, and now? Stripped of extraneous financial improprieties, failures to register as foreign lobbyists, tacky lifestyles, and sex having nothing to do with Russia, the gravamen of the Russiagate narrative remains what it has always been: Putin ordered Russian operatives to “meddle” in the US 2016 presidential election in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and Putin is now plotting to “attack” the November congressional elections in order to get a Congress he wants. The more Robert Mueller and his supporting media investigate, the less actual evidence turns up. And when it seemingly does, it has to be massaged or misrepresented, lest it seem to be Russiagate without Russia.

Nor are “meddling” and “interfering” in the other’s domestic policy new in Russian-American relations. Tsar Aleksandr II intervened militarily on the side of the Union in the American Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to fight the Reds in the Russian Civil War. The Communist International, founded in Moscow in 1919, and its successor organizations financed American activists, electoral candidates, ideological schools, and pro-Soviet bookstores for decades in the United States. With the support of the Clinton administration, American electoral advisers encamped in Moscow to help rig Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996.

And that’s the more conspicuous “meddling” apart from the decades-long “propaganda and disinformation” churned out by both sides, often via forbidden short-wave broadcasts to Soviet listeners. Unless some conclusive evidence appears, Russian social media and other meddling in the 2016 presidential election was little more than old habits in modern-day forms. (Not incidentally, the Times story suggests that US Intel had been hacking the Kremlin, or trying to do so, for many years. This too should not shock us.)

The real novelty of Russiagate is the allegation that a Kremlin leader, Putin, personally gave orders to affect the outcome of an American presidential election. In this regard, Russiagaters have produced even less evidence, only suppositions without facts or much logic. With the Russiagate narrative being frayed by time and fruitless investigations, the “mole in the Kremlin” may have seemed a ploy needed to keep the conspiracy theory moving forward toward Trump’s removal from office by whatever means. Hence the temptation to play the mole card again now as yet more investigations generate smoke but no smoking gun.

The pretext of the Times story is that Putin is preparing an attack on the November 2018 elections, but the once “vital,” now silent, moles are not providing the “crucial details.” Even if the story is entirely bogus, consider the damage it is doing. Russiagate allegations have already delegitimized a presidential election and a presidency in the minds of many Americans. The Times’ expanded version may do the same to congressional elections and the next Congress. If so, there is an “attack on American democracy”—not by Putin or Trump, as we saw previously, but by whoever godfathered and repeatedly inflated Russiagate.

As I have argued earlier, such evidence that exists seems to point to John Brennan and James Clapper, President Obama’s head of the CIA and of National Intelligence respectively, even though attention has been focused on the FBI. If nothing else, the Times’s new “mole” story reminds us of how central “intelligence” actors have been in this saga.

Arguably, Russiagate has brought us to the worst American political crisis since the Civil War and the most dangerous relations with Russia in history. Until Brennan, Clapper, their closest collaborators, and others deeply involved are required to testify under oath about the real origins of Russiagate, these crises will continue to grow.