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href="http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate"
target=_blank>http://www.thenation.com/<WBR>article/179579/cold-war-<WBR>against-russia-without-debate</A><BR></DIV>
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<H2
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War Against Russia—Without Debate</H2>
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<P
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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.</P></DIV>
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style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/katrina-vanden-heuvel"
target=_blank>Katrina vanden Heuvel</A> and <A
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen" target=_blank>Stephen F.
Cohen</A> </DIV> <SPAN
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style="COLOR: rgb(204,204,204)">May 1,
2014</SPAN> | <SPAN
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123)"><A
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="http://www.thenation.com/issue/may-19-2014" target=_blank>This article
appeared in the May 19, 2014 edition of The Nation.</A></SPAN></DIV><SPAN
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<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px"><EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">President <A
style="COLOR: rgb(82,106,131)"
href="http://www.thenation.com/section/barack-obama?lc=int_mb_1001"
target=_blank>Barack Obama</A> delivers a speech at Palais des Beaux-Arts
in Brussels, Belgium, March 26, 2014. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)</EM></P></DIV>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">Future
historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end
of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia—and that,
in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was scarcely a public word
of debate, much less opposition, from the American political or media
establishment.</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">The
Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a front-page <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">New
York Times</EM>story by Peter Baker on April 20. According to the report,
President Obama has resolved, because of the Ukraine crisis, that he can “never
have a constructive relationship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin and will
instead “ignore the master of the Kremlin” and focus on “isolating…Russia by
cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world…effectively
making it a pariah state.” In short, Baker reports, the White House has adopted
“an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.” He might have
added, a very extreme version. The report has been neither denied nor qualified
by the White House.</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">No
modern precedent exists for the shameful complicity of the American
political-media elite at this fateful turning point. Considerable congressional
and mainstream media debate, even protest, were voiced, for example, during the
run-up to the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq and, more recently, proposed wars
against Iran and Syria. This Cold War—its epicenter on Russia’s borders;
undertaken amid inflammatory American, Russian and Ukrainian media
misinformation; and unfolding without the stabilizing practices that prevented
disasters during the preceding Cold War—may be even more perilous. It will
almost certainly result in a new nuclear arms race, a prospect made worse by
Obama’s provocative public assertion that “our conventional forces are
significantly superior to the Russians’,” and possibly an actual war with Russia
triggered by Ukraine’s looming civil war. (NATO and Russian forces are already
mobilizing on the country’s western and eastern borders, while the US-backed
Kiev government is warning of a “third world war.”)</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">And
yet, all this has come with the virtually unanimous, bipartisan support, or
indifference, of the US political establishment, from left to right, Democrats
and Republicans, progressives (whose domestic programs will be gravely
endangered) and conservatives. It has also been supported by mainstream media
that shape and reflect policy-making opinion, from the <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">Times</EM> and <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">The
Washington Post </EM>to <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">The
Wall Street Journal</EM>, from <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">The
New Republic</EM> to <EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px">The
Weekly Standard</EM>, from MSNBC to Fox News, from NPR to commercial radio news.
(There are notable exceptions, including this magazine, but none close enough to
the mainstream to be “authoritative” inside the Beltway.)</P>
<P
style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; COLOR: rgb(191,14,21); FONT-SIZE: 14px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold"><A
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<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">To
be more specific, not one of the 535 members of Congress has publicly expressed
doubts about the White House’s new “Cold War strategy of containment.” Nor have
any of the former US presidents or presidential candidates who once advocated
partnership with post-Soviet Russia. Before the Ukraine crisis deepened, a
handful of unofficial dissenters did appear on mainstream television, radio and
op-ed pages, but so few and fleetingly they seemed to be heretics awaiting
banishment. Their voices have since been muted by legions of cold warriors.</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">Both
sides in the confrontation, the West and Russia, have legitimate grievances.
Does this mean, however, that the American establishment’s account of recent
events should not be questioned? That it was imposed on the West by Putin’s
“aggression,” and this because of his desire “to re-create as much of the old
Soviet empire as he can” or merely to “maintain Putin’s domestic rating.” Does
it mean there is nothing credible enough to discuss in Moscow’s side of the
story? That twenty years of NATO’s eastward expansion has caused Russia to feel
cornered. That the Ukraine crisis was instigated by the West’s attempt, last
November, to smuggle the former Soviet republic into NATO. That the West’s
jettisoning in February of its own agreement with then-President Viktor
Yanukovych brought to power in Kiev an unelected regime so anti-Russian and so
uncritically embraced by Washington that the Kremlin felt an urgent need to
annex predominantly Russian Crimea, the home of its most cherished naval base.
And, most recently, that Kiev’s sending of military units to suppress protests
in pro-Russian eastern Ukraine is itself a violation of the April 17 agreement
to de-escalate the crisis.</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">Future
historians will certainly find some merit in Moscow’s arguments, and wonder why
they are being widely debated in, for example, Germany, but not in America. It
may already be too late for the democratic debate the US elite owes our nation.
If so, the costs to American democracy are already clear.</P>
<P
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 24px; FONT-FAMILY: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(29,29,29); FONT-SIZE: 15px">Read
Next:<EM
style="PADDING-BOTTOM: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 0px; PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 0px"> Nation
in the News: <A style="COLOR: rgb(82,106,131)"
href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/179531/are-we-new-cold-war"
target=_blank><SPAN style="COLOR: rgb(178,34,34)">Are We in a New Cold
War?</SPAN></A></EM></P></DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT-STYLE: italic; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia, Times, serif; COLOR: rgb(82,106,131); FONT-SIZE: 15px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold"><A
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/katrina-vanden-heuvel"
target=_blank>Katrina vanden Heuvel</A> and <A
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123)"
href="http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen" target=_blank>Stephen F.
Cohen</A> </DIV> <SPAN
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-SIZE: 10px"></SPAN>
<DIV
style="LINE-HEIGHT: 12px; FONT-STYLE: italic; DISPLAY: inline; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia, Times, serif; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); FONT-SIZE: 10px"><SPAN
style="COLOR: rgb(204,204,204)">May 1,
2014</SPAN> | <SPAN
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123)"><A
style="COLOR: rgb(70,96,123); TEXT-DECORATION: none"
href="http://www.thenation.com/issue/may-19-2014" target=_blank>This article
appeared in the May 19, 2014 edition of The
Nation.</A></SPAN></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>