The first episode of Kelley’s new podcast, Trip The Beltway Fantastic, featured a discussion of progressive foreign policy and the anti-war movement in the age of Russia-gate and Trump with Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden.
Geoffrey Roberts: Putin’s Trump Card: Ukrainian Membership of NATO
President Vladimir Putin started the Ukraine war and he could – and should – end it by negotiating a peace deal that includes Ukraine’s membership of NATO.
April 25: “Meeting on the Elbe” Anniversary: A Message from Ed Lozansky
Dear Friends,
Every year on April 25, we celebrate the anniversary of the historical “Meeting on the Elbe” in 1945 on the eve of our joint victory over Nazi Germany. This year, we decided to have a flash mob Zoom meeting with 1-minute greetings from around the world.
To resolve the enormous logistical problems of coordinating Zoom with many speakers worldwide, why not make the prerecorded statements and send them to me by return mail to be shown on April 25.
Please consider recording 1 minute to present your name, city, and country, and short message in your language. This is, of course, if you share the ideas expressed in our AD in the Washington Times that the “Elbe Spirit” helps to meet the global challenges on our planet jointly.
Read more at Washington Times.
DOCUMENTARY: The story of the grand conspiracy. Who seized control of Russia in the 1990s?
The video investigation explores how Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich looted Russia during the 1990s and who facilitated their endeavors. How did the nation’s primary TV channel fall into the hands of an oligarch? How could a president grant an oil company to oligarch with a single decree? Maria Pevchikh narrates the origin of Russian corruption in the premiere episode of our series.
VIDEO: Anatol Lieven on BBC on the latest tranche of US aid to Ukraine
How will the passage of the latest US aid bill to Ukraine effect developments on the ground? Lieven discusses with the BBC.
VIDEO: ACURA’s Jack Matlock on Russia, Ukraine and The West’s Incompatible Narratives (2015 Fulbright Lecture)
In this lecture, Jack Matlock suggests that Western policies have exacerbated Ukraine’s internal problems and estranged Russia. The lecture was part of an initiative by the Fulbright Commission and the University to enhance mutual cultural understanding between the UK and US through educational exchange.
Ted Snider: Is Putin Bent on Conquering Europe?
It is important to not merely accept axiomatically that Putin, like all autocrats, is bent on aggression and expansion.
ACURA ZoomCast: Today we talk with the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe
George Beebe, Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the Quincy Institute talks with James Carden and David Speedie. George spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis, director of the CIA’s Open Source Center, and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. He and our colleague at The American Committee, Anatol Lieven have a new piece for Harpers magazine titled Peace Now in Ukraine.
Pavel Devyatkin: Can Russian-US Scientific Cooperation Be Restored?
Yuri Pushchaev: The Philosophy of the Ones Who Left: An Experiment in Intellectual Autism
In the following essay, which first appeared in Russkaya Istina (Jan. 8, 2024), Russian philosopher Yuri Pushchaev takes issue with a group of émigré Russian writers who have written a book sharply condemning their home country for the war in Ukraine. According to Pushchaev, these émigré authors have shut their eyes to history. They write as if the war in Ukraine began quite out of the blue on Feb. 24, 2022, and that its outbreak was due solely to Russian malevolence. He accuses his opponents, in short, of being intellectually dishonest.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Ending the Second Cold War
We should not want another period of multiple decades marked by hostility and a lack of normal economic relations. Let’s see if the current generation of policymakers can be wiser than their predecessors.
Victor Taki: Containment 2.0 Makes the U.S. Resemble the Very Thing it Claimed to be Fighting During the Cold War
It has become customary in certain quarters to contrast the current international imbroglio to the good old days of the Cold War: in comparison with the present-day protagonists, the two superpowers of yore might indeed appear as paragons of self-restraint. By the same token one might be tempted to contrast George Kennan’s foreign political wisdom to the collective folly of the mainstream media experts in the West. However, I would emphasize the continuity.
Anatol Lieven and George Beebe: Coming to Terms
More than two years into Russia’s invasion, it is increasingly clear that the Ukrainian army is not capable of reconquering the territories lost to Russia; instead, without continued and massive Western aid, the Ukrainians will suffer eventual defeat owing to Russia’s huge economic and demographic superiority, and the long-term continuation of such aid cannot be guaranteed.
Hartung and Gledhill: The Pentagon keeps failing up — on your dime
The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War.
David Swanson: What Does NATO Have to Do with the Genocide in GAZA?
For those who care about life on Earth, or who are upset by the horrors and risks of one of the current wars in Gaza or Ukraine, taking steps to move humanity away from the course plotted by the largest military alliance ever to exist may seem an obvious to-do-list item.
Ambassador Chas Freeman: What Can We Learn from our Forever War in Ukraine?
They say that a mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it. Our country has recently made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policies. Sadly, we don’t seem to be learning much of anything from this experience. We have instead invented something uniquely American called a “forever war.” Such wars routinely fail. Still, we keep launching them.
Marc Polonsky: Defeat of the West? Emmanuel Todd and the Ukraine War
Emmanuel Todd, now 72, is one of the few who predicted the end of the Soviet Union. In La chute finale: Essai sur la decomposition de la sphere soviétique (1976) he analysed infant mortality, suicide rates, economic productivity and other indicators, and concluded that the USSR’s long stagnation would soon culminate in collapse.
VIDEO: Nicolai N. Petro on the New Cold War
In a discussion with Dialogue Works, Professor Petro discusses the tensions between NATO and Russia and the ongoing risks of escalation.
Martin Seiff: Diplomacy Matters
The current president of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, Sachs noted, recently tweeted, “Russia must be destroyed.”
Latvia is a tiny postage stamp country of less than 1.9 million people. It would not make more than a tiny proportion of New York City, Washington, London, Los Angeles or Paris. It could not maintain its prosperity and security for five seconds without enormous inputs every year from the European Union, the United States and NATO. Yet there it is, with its president and diplomats eagerly – even enthusiastically – fanning the flames for thermonuclear war between America and Russia. This is no mere joke: It is an obscenity.
VIDEO: Part II of Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Interview with Pascal Lottaz of Neutrality Studies
The dynamic of mass-psychology in the West has reached a perverse level at which not only advocacy for deescalation is blamed as an act of treason, but the decrepit state of domestic economies is pinned on the enemy, which only reinforces calls for the ‘necessity of fighting’ the imaginary devil at the gates of the shining city on the hill. But the obsession goes even further than that… this is part 2 of an interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel.