Dear Friends,

I’ve corresponded little while organizing by far the most complex trip to Russia of CCI’s 34-year history. We depart May 10 for ten regions in Russia on an assessment mission to uncover what’s fact and what’s fiction about Russia today.

While in the land of fairybook palaces and ballets, we have no cultural events on our schedule. Our time is organized to hear how Russian experts and business and professional Russians interpret events surrounding Russia’s role in the world today––what they think their government is up to and what they believe needs to happen to avoid nuclear annihilation. We hope to have time to post to this site daily while traveling. Eric Thierman, videographer, will capture presentations, discussions, debates and the words of Russians who are counterpart professionals to you readers of this site.

However in the interim, since information is coming out that isn’t in mainstream media, I’ll take time to share a bit of it with you. I’m particularly interested in the Veteran Intelligency Professionals, those who each served America for decades in the CIA, NSA and a splay of America’s top Intelligence operations. While our mainstream media, both Democrats and Republicans, are joining each other to support another war (perhaps WWIII), these American experts with long years of intelligence service are nowhere to be heard. Robert Parry, Harvard’s recipient of the Neiman Award for being the epitome of Investigative Journalism, brings us a very strong statement from 24 veteran American Intelligence officers.

We need to take these officers 15-points into consideration when taking in whatever shows up on our TV screens and print media.

Please slow down and study the information below,
Sharon

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Consortiumnews.com
April 11, 2017

Trump Should Rethink Syria Escalation

April 11, 2017

Friends, are we seeing a trilogy by accident here?  I think so ….
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD, with US and Belgian passports comments on the Foreign Affairs article.  Gil is an astute watcher of international affairs, particularly US-Russia relations. He gives us his immediate impressions after having just read the Foreign Affairs tome by Robert English and the NYT article by Boykewich.  Note that neither of these two articles is written by the usual crowd.  Are they floated out to test the mood of the country?  I think so …
Sharon

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Lalibreblogs
March 18, 2017

Clearing space for a new foreign policy: the Establishment begins to stir

In this essay we consider why Foreign Affairs has just published an article on U.S. policy towards Russia that trashes the positions of all their featured contributors these past several years

Clearing space for a new foreign policy:  the Establishment begins to stir

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

On March 10, the online edition of Foreign Affairs magazine published an article by Robert English, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, that all readers should look up to stay abreast of the fast evolving realignments within the U.S. foreign policy establishment  and to see better where we may be headed, even as many of his supporters are giving up too early on Donald Trump’s commitment and ability to change direction away from promotion of regime change and permanent warfare as the world’s sole policeman to a policy of détente and years of peace ahead.

See https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2017-03-10/russia-trump-and-new-d-tente 

The fact is that no about-face on US foreign and defense policy is possible without substantial support from the US political class.   We are not a dictatorship; we do not have an authoritarian system where the boss in the White House calls all the shots. The fight over foreign policy direction goes on in the public arena, and there have to be two sides in the ring with their dukes up. If Trump were to impose a new, radically different position without the ground being prepared in Congress, in the foreign policy community and through them in the broad public, he would be instantly thwarted and well on his way to impeachment.

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Friends,

Is this article and the one in the NYTimes sent yesterday, heralding a new look at our relationship with Russia?  There are a few other less obvious aspects happening like Merkel going to Moscow to confer with Putin, Europe uncertain about how it will be led in the future, and other hints that things are not well with America’s role in the world.
However, I’m shocked that this scholarly piece below has been read, accepted and printed in Foreign Affairs, the American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, membership organization and think tank specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs.
For years, Foreign Affairs has held to the tenets that America is exceptional (in many ways it is), that its incursions into other countries’ politics has been necessary and that the unipolar world makes perfect sense to all thinking people.
Below, they allow Robert English, a distinguished thinker, the ability to go public with very different points of view––points usually not mentioned in their pages. He takes on the warped views of Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman and sloughs them off with the twist of a word or two. He knows where in he speaks about the horrendous decade of Russia’s 90s, which Clinton and Harvard intellects aided and abetted––which others in Washington and New York haven’t admitted.
In one after another, English sheds light on stereotypes that have been repeated ad nauseam for decades now. After mentioning “Distaste for Putin’s harsh rule” in earlier paragraphs, he gets to another assessment of Putin in the last paragraph which seems to me gives a perspective that meshes with those held by many who have worked with Putin over a period of years.
Enjoy and puzzle with me ….

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Foreign Affairs
10 March 2017

Russia, Trump, and a New Détente

Fixing U.S.-Russian Relations
By Robert David English

ROBERT DAVID ENGLISH is Associate Professor of International Relations, Slavic Languages & Literature, and Environmental Studies at the University of Southern California.

In his first press conference as president of the United States, Donald Trump said no fewer than seven times that it would be “positive,” “good,” even “great” if “we could get along with Russia.” In fact, for all the confusion of his policies toward China, Europe, and the Middle East, Trump has enunciated a clear three-part position on Russia, which contrasts strongly with that of most of the U.S. political elite. First, Trump seeks Moscow’s cooperation on global issues; second, he believes that Washington shares the blame for soured relations; and third, he acknowledges “the right of all nations to put their own interests first,” adding that the United States does “not seek to impose our way of life on anyone.”
The last of these is an essentially realist position, and if coherently implemented could prove a tonic. For 25 years, Republicans and Democrats have acted in ways that look much the same to Moscow. Washington has pursued policies that have ignored Russian interests (and sometimes international law as well) in order to encircle Moscow with military alliances and trade blocs conducive to U.S. interests. It is no wonder that Russia pushes back. The wonder is that the U.S. policy elite doesn’t get this, even as foreign-affairs neophyte Trump apparently does.

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*If the “Continue Reading” link does not show up in full you may try this secondary source.

 

Dear Friends,

COULD  CHANGE BE IN THE AIR?

The New York Times printed the following article that I NEVER would have thought possible.

Stephen Boykewich’s piece is so honest, so insightful and so challenging to the deeply entrenched NeoCon Wolfowitz Doctrine enthusiasts, it seems impossible that this article appears in print.  Now in 2017, at least a decade after Putin’s speech at Munich rattled the unipolar world supporters, the whole structure is being questioned in our “paper of record” by Boykewich.  Amazing.
A few days ago the venerated Foreign Affairs publication printed a long dissertation featuring the same openness, with a willingness to take a look at Washington’s demonizing Putin and Russia.  It follows tomorrow.
Let’s hope these two confessional pieces will provide a measure of cover for others who have kept silent for fear of being ostracized by their colleagues.
Please send this article to your friends, colleagues and family who have swallowed the Kool-Aid of the past decade or two.

Sharon

If you have time, I encourage you to delve into the book Boykewich recommends, The American Mission and the Evil Empire, by Rutgers’ historian, David Foglesong.  The history is so painfully clear.

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The New York Times
March 13, 2017

Angels and Demons in the Cold War and Today

Stephen Boykewich

LOS ANGELES — George Kennan knew how to bring down the house. His lecture audiences started off skeptical about whether Russia really wanted to be remade on the American model. Then he told them about the Russian political prisoners who spent the weeks before the Fourth of July scrounging bits of cloth in red, white and blue. When the holiday came, they met their jailers by waving a sea of tiny hand-sewn stars and stripes through the bars.

It sounds like the perfect Cold War propaganda tale. But the Fourth of July that Kennan was referring to wasn’t during the 1950s — it was in 1876. And the George Kennan telling the story wasn’t the famous Cold War-era diplomat, but his distant relative and namesake, a journalist who had spent time in Russia before going on the lecture circuit in the 1880s.

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Friends, please read Ambassador Jack Matlock’s latest.

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JackMatlock.com
March 4, 2017

Contacts with Russian Embassy