Cold War Against Russia – Without Debate
A prophetic conversation from 2006 with professor Stephen F. Cohen (1938-2020)
March 31, 2022
Read also, carefully
Cold War Against Russia – Without Debate (2014)
By Katrina vanden Heuvel & Stephen F. Cohen
The Obama administration’s decision to isolate Russia, in a new version of “containment,” has met with virtually unanimous support from the political and media establishment.
And then ask yourself why Western mainstream media and politicians start their history on February 24, 2022, and insist that everything is the fault of Russia and Putin, the latter having gone mad on February 23.
My conclusion is based on this and lots of conflicts being reported in these media the last 20+ years:
• You are being deceived.
• There is a purpose behind that.
• It serves Western self-righteousness and to cover up the Himalayan Western mistake to a) break all promises to Russia (Gorbachev at the time) and 2) expand NATO instead of having closed it down and creating – back then – a new common security and peace structure in Europe with Russia.
• The NATO/EU re-action to Russia’s indeed unacceptable and illegal invasion of Ukraine is totally out of proportion. Its real purpose is regime change in Moscow but that will not succeed; instead, it will have devastating consequences for the West itself – all of which, of course, will be blamed on Russia/Putin.
Jan Oberg
The NATO-Russia conflict played out in Ukraine and the Obvious Complicity of the US/NATO added by JO on
View all posts by JO →
Thank you very much Jan, for posting this. It brought me the chance to get to learn a bit about the extraordinary scholar Stephen F. Cohen, who has fought his whole adult life to be an advocate of an intelligent discourse about how to use the end of the cold war progressively. He was one of America’s foremost Russia experts, a tenured professor at Princeton and New York University, he has briefed US presidents and was a friend of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Unlike today, he lamented, during the first cold war despite in general being a terrible time there was an intelligent conversation going on in the US among congress men, in main stream media and news channels about how to change the geopolitical situation, and start a new era of collaboration between the two superpowers. Sadly, in his later years he was vilified as a Putin apologizer and was mostly left out of any official conversation in the US.
Stephen Cohen predicted already before 2014 the devastating consequences the Ukraine/NATO crisis would set in motion, and he was probably more right than he imagined at the time of his death in 2020. He contributed to The Nation with a column for many years, he also wrote several books about Russia and its relations to the West. The latest “War with Russia” from 2019 can be bought from Amazon.com as a kindle book for $1.99, and it is absolutely worth reading. If you are interested in understanding and knowing more about the history of the Sovjet Union in its early years, Cohen wrote a book called “Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution” than can be downloaded for free at pdf.com
I can recommend reading his obituary in The Nation by Lev Golinkin, one of the new generation of free thinkers emerging nowadays in the west.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/stephen-cohen-ukraine/