[Peace-discuss] Cold War Against Russia—Without Debate

Mon Aug 11 23:15:34 EDT 2014

    Cold War Against Russia—Without Debate

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.

Katrina vanden Heuvel 
<http://www.thenation.com/authors/katrina-vanden-heuvel> and Stephen F. 
Cohen <http://www.thenation.com/authors/stephen-f-cohen>

Barack Obama 
<http://www.thenation.com/sites/default/files/obama_russia_ukraine_rtr_img.jpg> 

/President Barack Obama 
<http://www.thenation.com/section/barack-obama?lc=int_mb_1001> delivers 
a speech at Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, Belgium, March 26, 2014. 
(Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)/

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.

The Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a 
front-page /New York Times /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.

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.”)

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 /Times/ and /The Washington Post /to /The Wall Street 
Journal/, from /The New Republic/ to /The Weekly Standard/, 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.)

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.

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.

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.

  *
    Avatar <http://disqus.com/the_widower/>
    the widower
    <http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate#>
    • 3 months ago
    <http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate#comment-1362874046>

    The encirclement of Russia with missiles, & the violation of the
    agreement between Gorbachev & Reagan not to expand NATO into the
    formerly Warsaw Pact countries tells you all you need to know. Yes.
    today we have no one of the caliber of Senators Morse or Fulbright
    to show how idiotic our foreign policy is. Plus we have have a
    corporate controlled press which is just as full of propaganda as
    the Soviet press ever was under Communism.

      o
        Avatar <http://disqus.com/cedarcat/>
        Cedar Cat
        <http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate#>
        the widower
        <http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate#comment-1362874046>
        • 3 months ago
        <http://www.thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate#comment-1365850756>

        When I lived in Moscow in the early 1990s, the Russians used to
        say that the big difference between Americans and Russians was
        that the Americans didn't realize that the news was propaganda.

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