Dear CCI Friends,

Excuse that this article is a bit late. I’ve been traveling in Russia. There was little time for anything other than constant activity with yet another terrific delegation of Americans, this time Sister Cities International leaders.  Gratefully, information like the below is as relevant today as when it was first printed.  Hopefully a Summit between Trump and Putin is underway, but one can never tell until their planes take flight.

Professor Steve Cohen dissects the reasons why this particular presidential Summit in 2018 is so critical. I personally believe if the two of them sit down together, the results may be good for us all.  Their personalities are very, very different.  Their modes of operating are polls apart, yet Trump may instinctively trust Putin’s INTJ demeanor. Does anyone want to guess what Trump’s Myers-Briggs personality type might be?

Cohen is deeply concerned about the future of our planet, as is every thinking person, and he offers 10 reasons why this hoped for Summit is absolutely crucial.

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

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The Nation
June 6, 2018

The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit

Ten ways the new US-Russian Cold War is increasingly becoming more dangerous than the one we survived.

By Stephen F. Cohen

(Audio available here.)

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, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Recent reports suggest that a formal meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is being seriously discussed in Washington and Moscow. Such ritualized but often substantive “summits,” as they were termed, were frequently used during the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War to, among other things, 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 extraordinarily toxic political circumstances, even leaving aside powerful opposition in Washington (including inside the Trump administration) to any cooperation with the Kremlin, we may wonder if anything positive would come from a Trump-Putin summit. But it is necessary, even imperative, that Washington and Moscow try.

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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:

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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

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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.

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