Next 100 Days of Ukraine War

M. K. BHADRAKUMAR

JUNE 13, 2022

The New York-based Council on Foreign Relations held a videoconference on May 31 titled Russia’s War in Ukraine: How does it end? The president of the think tank Richard Haas chaired the panel of distinguished participants — Stephen Hadley, Prof. Charles Kupchan, Alina Polyakova and Lt. Gen. (Retd) Stephen Twitty. It was a great discussion dominated by the liberal internationalist stream that has so far guided President Biden’s national security team, which wants to help Ukraine fight a long war against Russia. 

Why It’s Hard To Take America’s Word on the Summit of the Americas

Ted Snider

June 16, 2022

President Biden has made the battle between autocracy and democracy a theme of his presidency. He invoked that theme again last week to explain to Latin America and the world why Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua were cut from the list of nations invited to the US hosted Summit of the Americas. The State Department explained that "It’s the president’s decision, but I think the president has been very clear about the presence of countries that by their actions do not respect democracy – they will not receive invitations."

But by Biden’s actions, it is difficult to take the US at its word that the Summit snubs were about democracy.

Why Russian intellectuals are hardening support for war in Ukraine

Anatol Lieven

June 6, 2022

Dr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until the Russian government closed it in April, was for many years one of the most important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the West and the “westernization” of Russia. He was one of the few Russian figures still to retain some of Gorbachev’s hopes for a “common European home.” (I should say that I have known Dr Trenin since I was a British journalist in Moscow in the 1990s, and I was his colleague at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 2000 and 2004).

 

Biden Refuses to Mention the Worsening Dangers of Nuclear War. Media and Congress Enable His Silence.

Norman Solomon

June 10, 2022

I’ve just finished going through the more than 60 presidential statements, documents and communiqués about the war in Ukraine that the White House has released and posted on its website since Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in early March. They all share with that speech one stunning characteristic – the complete absence of any mention of nuclear weapons or nuclear war dangers. Yet we’re now living in a time when those dangers are the worst they’ve been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

 

America’s Gun Fetish

 June 7, 2022 By Chris Hedges

There will be no gun control, not only because of the gun lobby and a corrupt political class, but because for many white Americans the idea of the gun is the only power they have left.

Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7.

By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting.

 

New York Times Opinion Piece: What Biden Is Telling Putin

Ted Snyder

June 6 ,2022

When the President of the United States writes an opinion piece in The New York Times, he is talking to Americans, but, as he is aware as he is writing it, he is also talking to Putin. Officials in Russia will be analyzing the short text, decoding the messages.

What message is Biden sending? And why now?

 

رضا شاه

نقدی بر نوشته صادق زیباکلام

در مورد رضا شاه کتابهای بسیاری منتشر شده است. کتابهائی که در زمان دومین و آخرین پادشاه پهلوی به چاپ میرسید، به وضوح از ترقیات زمان رضا شاه، و تبدیل ایران در زمان او از یک کشور عقب افتاده به ورود به دنیای علم و پیشرفت سخن میگفت. سرا سلسله پهلوی البته در زمانی‌ میزیست که دنیا به سرعت در حال تحول بود. به همان درجه ای که در رژیم سابق نوشته های بسیاری در خدمت رضا شاه به نشر میرسید، به همان درجه در رژیم فعلی‌ در ذم او سخن میرود. ولی صادق زیبا کلام که شاید به دلیل اعتقادش به اسلام میتواند در دانشگاه درس دهد و کتابی متباین با تبلیغات رژیم بنویسد، با اطمینان می‌توان گفت که با گزارش پیگیر و مطالعه کتب مختلف شرح حالی در مورد زندگی اولین پادشاه پهلوی نوشته است، که قابل مطالعه است. در اینکه رضا شاه در زمان بسیار حساسی وارد ایران شد و تحولی که در ایران صورت داد، و پسرش آنرا ادامه داد تا ایران به یک کشور متمدن و مترقی تبدیل شوید شکی‌ نیست. پرسش این است که اگر مظفر‌الدین شاه عمر بیشتری داشت، و یا محمد علی شاه با مشروطیت مخالفت نمیکرد، و یا احمد شاه به پادشاهی علاقه داشت، کشور ما به تبعیت از سایر کشورهای دنیا سیر تحول خود را نمی‌پیمود؟

The unpalatable truth in Ukraine

 ANDREW LATHAM

June 2, 2022

At one point in the novel “Sign of the Four,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inimitable detective Sherlock Holmes explains and demonstrates to Dr. Watson his method of observation and deduction. Confronted with an apparently inexplicable circumstance, Dr. Watson is utterly perplexed. He simply cannot understand how the event in question came to pass, given the facts as he understands them and the laws of nature. Slightly irritated at his plodding companion’s bafflement, Holmes once again shares with him the methodological key to solving all such mysteries: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Biden tweaks Ukraine narrative

 June 1, 2022

Bhadra Kumar

The US President Joe Biden’s op-Ed in the New York Times on Tuesday on the Ukraine war starts with a bluff. He says President Vladimir Putin had thought Russia’s special operation would only last days. How Biden arrived at such an estimation is unclear. Like the US narrative on the war, it is largely presumptive.

The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to Stop. And the U.S. Deserves Much of the Blame

Christopher Caldwell

5/31/2022

In the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro this month, Henri Guaino, a top adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president of France, warned that Europe’s countries, under the shortsighted leadership of the United States, were “sleepwalking” into war with Russia. Mr. Guaino was borrowing a metaphor that the historian Christopher Clark used to describe the origins of World War I.

How Does It End? Fissures Emerge Over What Constitutes Victory in Ukraine

 David E. Sanger, Steven Erlanger and Eric Schmitt

May 26, 2022

WASHINGTON — Three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America and its allies are quietly debating the inevitable question: How does this end?

In recent days, presidents and prime ministers as well as the Democratic and Republican Party leaders in the United States have called for victory in Ukraine. But just beneath the surface are real divisions about what that would look like — and whether “victory” has the same definition in the United States, in Europe and, perhaps most importantly, in Ukraine.

30 Years With No Strategy Brought Us the War in Ukraine

Douglas Macgregor

May 23, 2022

Washington DC has not excelled in grand strategy; the art and science of cost-effectively employing the diplomatic, economic, and informational powers of the United States in combination with its armed forces to secure its national goals and interests. Most of the strategic decisions to use American military power that were made over the last 30 years resulted in one of two strategic outcomes: abject failure (Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq) or a new regional status quo that is untenable without a permanent U.S. military presence far from America’s borders (the Balkans).

No Way Out But War

Chris Hedges

May 23, 2022

 The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable COVID relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

Washington’s Tolerance of Death Squad ‘Democracies’

 Ted Galen Carpenter

May 21, 2022

The U.S. government has had a long, dishonorable history of forging and sustaining close relations with murderous dictatorships – as long as they supported Washington’s foreign policy. Such authoritarian US allies as the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, and a succession of South Korean and Guatemalan military rulers (among others) were confirmation of that cynical approach throughout the Cold War. US administrations (especially Ronald Reagan’s administration) also looked the other way or even offered quiet support as the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina executed brutal, indiscriminate crackdowns.

Biden and the Democrats pivot to proxy war

James Carden

May 12, 2022

WASHINGTON – The Russian war on Ukraine has seen ‘the Blob’ reassert itself with a vengeance in the 11 weeks since Russia announced the commencement of hostilities on February 24.

This article will examine the forces shaping President Joe Biden’s approach to the Ukraine crisis, and then move on to explore the state of foreign policy debate, or lack thereof, within Biden’s Democratic Party.

Former high-ranking military officials, intelligence analysts and diplomats who served at various points during the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations paint a picture in recent conversations with Asia Times of the likely policy options being presented to President Biden as he faces the gravest crisis on the European continent since the Second World War.

Finland and Sweden will join NATO at the expense of everything

 Anatol Lieven

5/13/2022

There is a sad and rather pathetic irony about the expected application of Finland and Sweden to join NATO.

Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union was a military superpower, it occupied most of central Europe, its troops were stationed in the heart of Germany, and Soviet Communism— for a while at least  — seemed to be a genuine threat to Western capitalist democracy. Throughout those decades however, Finland and Sweden remained officially neutral.

I led talks on Donbas and Crimea in the 90s. Here’s how the war should end

 John Quigley

MAY 9, 2022

As the war in Ukraine continues to take thousands of lives, distressingly little attention is being devoted to bringing it to an end.

Negotiations are stalled, and other governments are not pushing for a resumption. At some point, however, hopefully sooner than later, there will be a negotiated settlement that will need to deal with the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine. The Donbas was the focus of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decree he issued three days before invading recognizing the claimed separate status of the region’s two provinces.

Bret Stephens: Can we still be optimistic about America?

 Bret Stephens

 May 14, 2022, 10:00 a.m.

The pessimism comes in many flavors. There is progressive pessimism: The country is tilting toward MAGA-hatted fascism or a new version of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” There is conservative pessimism: The institutions, from primary schools to the Pentagon, are all being captured by wokeness. There is Afropessimism: Black people have always been excluded by systemic, ineradicable racism. There is the pessimism of the white middle and working classes: The country and the values they’ve known for generations are being hijacked by smug, self-dealing elites who view them with contempt.

Biden’s Folly In Ukraine

APRIL 5, 2022DOUGLAS MACGREGORAmericans find it difficult to determine whether the Biden administration’s policy decisions regarding Ukraine are the product of a deliberate strategy, extraordinary incompetence, or some combination of both. Threatening Russia, a nuclear armed power, with regime change and then annunciating a nuclear weapons policy that allows for the United States’ first-strike use of nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances”—responding to an invasion by conventional forces, or chemical or biological attacks—suggests President Biden and his administration really are out of touch with reality.

Five Reasons To Be Increasingly Worried About the War in Ukraine

Ted Snider

May 7, 2022

The New York Times reported on May 1 that "the Biden administration" – the same one that ignored Putin’s warnings about Russia’s red line regarding NATO expansion to Ukraine – "increasingly casts aside fears expressed by some early in the war that too much American assistance to Ukraine risked a direct conflict with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia."

As direct assistance to Ukraine by the US, UK and its other allies intensifies dramatically, there are several reasons to be increasingly concerned.