Dear CCI friends,

I hope you will take the time to scan Professor Nicolai Petro’s important analysis: Are We Reading Russia Right?

Increasing numbers of American experts on Russia have begun speaking out on the absurdity of reading Russia “wrongly.”

Discrediting and demonizing Russia has come into being slowly over two decades or more. Americans have absorbed it as logical and true. However, much of it has been pure fake news––designed to carry out objectives totally unknown to the average citizen.

The lid is coming off of the boiling pot of disastrous decision making, and the result could be a civilization-ending nuclear exchange. Experts like Professors Steve Cohen and Nicolai Petro, alarmed by the handwriting on the wall, are speaking out. Professor Petro spent the academic year 2013-2014 in Ukraine as a Fulbright Research Scholar.

Nicolai Petro: Are We Reading Russia Right

TheNation
May 23, 2018

McCarthyism and firsthand recollections of Soviet surveillance practices.

(Audio available here.)

By Stephen F. Cohen

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments of these conversations, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Cohen has several reactions to the recent revelation that a longtime CIA-FBI “informant,” professor emeritus Stefan Halper, had been dispatched to “interact” with several members of Donald Trump’s campaign organization in 2016. He discusses each of them:

[Continue Reading]

Friends,

A more apt and honest statement regarding how we have ended up so close to World War III hasn’t surfaced until now.

Many of us onlookers watched in horror as seemingly unrelated events were taking place––it was near impossible to make sense of these happenings. Even now looking back, it’s hard to put the details together in a cohesive framework. Yet James Carden has done this work for us.

My self-appointed task was to try to provide business education for the class of Russians who seemed to be most capable of building the “New Russia”. They were the well-educated and desperate young men and women who were reinventing themselves while trying to build small businesses to feed their families.

I am deeply grateful that Carden has put this history together. Read … and marvel at how and why the situation turned out like it has!

All the best,

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

---

American Affairs
May, 2018

The Cold War Culture War

by James Carden

How to explain the current nadir in U.S.-Russia relations?

The litany of oft-cited causes is by now familiar and includes, but is certainly not limited to, the expansion of NATO, the dispute over Kosovo, the American abandonment of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Russo-Georgian War, and the war in Ukraine, as well as allegations (by both governments1) of election meddling. Over the course of the past decade and a half, U.S.-Russia relations have also been shaped—and not for the better—by the disparate foreign policy approaches taken by American and Russian governments.

Less well known, however, is that America’s growing animus towards all things Russia is also characterized by the hostility borne of a frustrated project of liberal cultural imperialism. In the years following the end of the Soviet Union, the idea that Russia was “ours to lose” gained wide currency in American foreign policy circles. The Clinton administration sought to dismantle the remaining state apparatus of Soviet-era Russia and replace it with a new liberal civil society that took its cues from Washington. In that way, it was believed, Russia could never again pose a challenge to the West.2 Of course, such efforts did not succeed, but our “culture war” approach to foreign policy has only intensified since then. The failure of this project has contributed significantly to the present animus towards Russia and continues to hinder more reasonable diplomatic relations.

[Continue Reading]

Friends of CCI,  please get this excellent article by Ambassador Jack Matlock to as many of your friends, colleagues and families as is possible.

Ambassador Matlock is respected as America’s greatest living Ambassador.  Our nation must listen to his respected voice … even though he is locked out of the New York Times and other mainstream media.

This is the state of affairs that we have come to.  Those with the most credibility in our nation cannot be heard in mainstream media, but those who promote ungrounded rumors get national headlines.

Into what is it leading us? WWIII? Are we like lemmings going to the sea, or do we have the courage to speak out?

Please call your Congress members, tell them your urgency, send them emails.  Ask your friends to pass this information to their e lists. It’s the only way sanity can be regained in our country.  It will not be done from top down, it must be bottom up from us citizens!

writing from St.Petersburg

---

TheNation
June 1, 2018

Amid “Russiagate” Hysteria, What Are the Facts?

We must end this Russophobic insanity.

By Jack F. Matlock Jr.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

That saying—often misattributed to Euripides—comes to mind most mornings when I pick up The New York Times and read the latest “Russiagate” headlines, which are frequently featured across two or three columns on the front page above the fold. This is an almost daily reminder of the hysteria that dominates our Congress and much of our media.

A glaring example, just one of many from recent months, arrived at my door on February 17. My outrage spiked when I opened to the Times’ lead editorial: “Stop Letting the Russians Get Away With It, Mr. Trump.” I had to ask myself: “Did the Times’ editors perform even the rudiments of due diligence before they climbed on their high horse in this long editorial, which excoriated ‘Russia’ (not individual Russians) for ‘interference’ in the election and demanded increased sanctions against Russia ‘to protect American democracy’?”

[Continue Reading]