Cold war

  By Gareth Porter TFF Associate October 25, 2018 The idea promoted by the NYT’s Shane & Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the 2016 election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely, reports Gareth Porter.   In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the 2016 election, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times painted a picture of highly effective Russian government exploitation of social media for that purpose. Shane and Mazzetti asserted that “anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference” in the election. “What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come,” they write elsewhere in the 10,000-word article. Originally published at consortiumnews.com But an investigation of the data they cite to show that the...

In examining the future, we must look to the past. As we watch the media today, we are spoon fed more and more propaganda and fear of the unknown, that we should be afraid of the unknown and have full faith that our government is keeping us safe from the unknown. But by looking at media today, those of us who are old enough will be reminded of the era of Cold War news articles, the hysteria of how the Russians would invade and how we should duck and cover under tables in our kitchens for the ensuing nuclear war. Under this mass hysteria, all Western governments were convinced that we should join Western allies to fight the unknown evil that lies to the east. Later through my travels in Russia during the height of the Cold War with a peace delegation, we were shocked by the poverty of the...

    From ancient Greece onward, the West has used the Eastern other as an enemy through which to identify itself.   Marco Carnelos August 22, 2018 US President Donald Trump’s administration seems to be intent on confronting the rest of the world. With a few exceptions, such as Russia (as far as Trump himself is concerned), Israel and Saudi Arabia, almost every other nation in the world has felt the rage and contempt of the current American president. Originally published on middleeasteye.net August 17, 2018 Bonds with traditional US allies have been questioned and the many principles, pillars, and rules of the liberal world order, itself conceived and shaped by the United States, are now disowned.   Little knowledge These developments can’t simply be attributed to Trump and Trump alone. The president’s thinking is shared by a significant section of the American people, who have little knowledge of the...

Everything gets said, nothing gets done. When President Donald Trump met President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month we were promised all sorts of goodies- progress in reconciliation in Ukraine and Syria, and not least nuclear disarmament. If there is progress behind the scenes it’s not noticeable to the naked eye. People talk about Trump being in Putin’s pocket yet when, soon after Trump became president, Putin suggested major cuts in nuclear weapons Trump turned him down. This would have been a fantastic way to start his presidency. He could have upped Barack Obama’s achievement of getting the arsenal down to 1550 warheads each. In nearly everything else he wants to destroy Obama’s legacy or minimize it. This would have been a way to do it. This doesn’t sound to me like Putin, the supposed puppet master, was pulling the strings on his marionette, Trump. Let that be, maybe we’ll...

U.S Vice President Mike Pence, left, joined by Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic during a joint press conference in Villa Gorica in Podgorica, Montenegro on August 2, 2017. (AP Photo / Risto Bozovic)   Did Montenegro’s NATO accession increase the collective defense of the West or merely protect a corrupt regime? When Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently asked President Donald Trump why the United States should defend Montenegro, Trump responded by saying that if Montenegrins decided to “get aggressive.… Congratulations, you’re in World War III.” The subsequent outcry was predictable; a New York Times editorial quickly attacked Trump’s comments as revealing “another facet of his ignorance of and disdain for America’s historic place in the world and its alliances.” Yet Trump’s comments—inarticulately expressed as they were—were in fact in line with the thinking of past American presidents leery of getting the country involved in foreign problems with no bearing...

  Two mistakes, committed on President Barack Obama’s watch, were the triggers for the end of the long post-Cold War period of good relations with Russia. They were the attack on Libya by the US, France and the UK and the subsequent killing of its long-time dictator, Muammar Gadhafi. The second was the crisis in Ukraine. Russia was very angry about the first. Having been persuaded by Western diplomacy that the reason for their would-be intervention was essentially humanitarian to forestall any more mass killing in the Libyan civil war, the US and NATO double-crossed Russia. After having gained Russia’s abstention in a UN Security Council vote on a resolution authorizing military intervention the Western powers set about hunting Gadhafi. With the second, Ukraine, Russia felt undermined. This was the result of the twin policies of NATO expansion up to Russia’s border – which the US, Germany, France and the...

Photo: US President George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at the Moscow Summit 1991 By Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images Over the last four month, ten articles about the new Cold War have been published on the TFF Associates blog. And on our social media you’ll find hundreds of brilliant, informative posts written by others. While this new Cold War is certainly different from the first Cold war that ended in 1989, we are not in doubt that there is a new such tragic war and that the risk of military confrontation between Russia and NATO countries in Europe has increased. We also happen to think it could have been avoided. This Cold War has to do with, among many other things, NATO’s counterproductive expansion since 1994, the way Yugoslavia broke down and was broken up, with Ukraine and now Syria as well as – perhaps surprisingly to some – the...

  By Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev June 16, 2018 • Russia and the United States are not condemned to confrontation. We must now make up for lost time! Mikhail Gorbachev’s Address to Participants in the Conference Marking the 30th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Visit and the Moscow Summit. Originally published at the homepage of the Gorbachev Foundation on June 4, 2018 I welcome all who have gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Moscow and the US-Soviet summit. I think it was a truly historic event. It was a kind of summing up of the work we had done, starting in Geneva and then going through Reykjavik and Washington to Moscow. It was not an easy path. Its first major milestone was the Joint US-Soviet Statement which declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that “the two sides will...

  By Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister July 14, 2018 Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has shared his view on what would be an “ideal” outcome of a Trump-Putin meeting, in an interview with Larry King that covered a wide range of topics, from Crimea to NATO and Syria. Relations between the US and Russia are now at such a low point that a mere resumption of a normal dialog following a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin could already be regarded as a success, Lavrov told the veteran TV host, on his show Politicking, aired on RT America. Read the article and see the interview here at RT Question More.   Note The Transnational conveys important peace-oriented research about our world. Its aim is, however, not research for the sake of research, it is to assist in public education and, not the least serve...

• On the occasion of the NATO Summit in Brussels and the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki This analysis comes in two parts – one critical and one constructive: This one on “NATO’s crisis and the Transatlantic conflict” and the second on “Make NATO civilian and civilised.” My apologies for writing a bit long, it isn’t comme il faut nowadays. But I happen to be a researcher who believes in knowledge, background and intellectual arguments in fields such as defence, security and peace – in other words, belonging to a race threatened by extinction in the era of fake and marketing. Indeed, so old fashioned am I that I don’t believe in world security matters being dealt with in Twitter- or spin doctor- style or in narratives and diplomacy conducted through advertisement videos. The follow-up second part of this analysis can be found here. • • When the Berlin Wall came...

Ten ways the new US-Russian Cold War is increasingly becoming more dangerous than the one we survived. By Stephen F. Cohen June 21, 2018 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 instalments, 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 too, 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...

  We must end this Russophobic insanity   By Jack F. Matlock, Jr. June 4, 2018 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. Originally published by The Nation on June 1, 2018, here The New York Times, of course, is not the only offender. Its editorial attitude has been duplicated or exaggerated by most other media outlets in the United States, electronic and print. Unless there is a mass shooting in progress, it can be hard to find a discussion of anything else on CNN. Increasingly, both in Congress and in our media, it has been...