Dear Friends,

A brilliant 18 minute TED Talk, Is war between China and the US inevitable?, was presented just over a month ago, and it’s already had over 1.8 million hits.

The subject: whether the US will resort to war that will go global … as China becomes the world hegemon within the next few years.  Across the centuries, there have been 16 times when one nation rose and another fell from power; a massive war occurred in 12 of them, killing millions of ordinary citizens.

Graham Allison, eminent Professor of Political Science at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and part of the “Establishment,” explains the phenomenal miracle occurring in China which at this moment, shortens the very notion of America’s No.1 place in the world. This YouTube SHOCKS the senses, both in how fast China is rising and how soon this change of power will take place.

Allison provides no magic bullets. He coolly presents the world’s history with such circumstances and then questions how a US-China war (that would be the last on planet earth) could be avoided … and whether we will be aware enough to search for ways to live constructively with this rapidly escalating situation?

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Friends,

Professor Stephen F. Cohen, America’s rigorous and courageous historian on all things Soviet and Russian, speaks out in his latest book, War with Russia?, a book he never intended to write.

By bluff, accident or design, we may be headed toward a nuclear war in the near future. Everything we hold dear could be vaporized in an instant.  The rhetoric coming out of Washington and the Deep State must be changed or our future is predictable.

U.S. mainstream media and a predominance of our Congressional leaders mouth ill-put-together rumors regarding Russia, the only country on the planet that could obliterate us. They jump on scant unverified facts and reflexively blame Russia. How many times do they have to “cry wolf” for Americans to wake up?

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CCI Friends,

America’s top Russian historian, Stephen F. Cohen, “hits the nail on the head,” as he adroitly ticks off six points that our current policy makers in both parties need to take into consideration. Makes us wonder … are they caught in the trap of taking special interest monies and can’t extricate themselves?

Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives

The Nation
November 21, 2018

Russian Diplomacy Is Winning the New Cold War

Washington’s attempt to “isolate Putin’s Russia” has failed and had the opposite effect. 

By Stephen F. Cohen

(Audio from the John Batchelor show is 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. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

On the fifth anniversary of the onset of the Ukrainian crisis, in November 2013, and of Washington “punishing” Russia by attempting to “isolate” it in world affairs—a policy first declared by President Barack Obama in 2014 and continued ever since, primarily through economic sanctions—Cohen discusses the following points:

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