George Beebe, Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the Quincy Institute talks with James Carden and David Speedie. George spent more than two decades in government as an intelligence analyst, diplomat, and policy advisor, including as director of the CIA’s Russia analysis, director of the CIA’s Open Source Center, and as a staff advisor on Russia matters to Vice President Cheney. He and our colleague at The American Committee, Anatol Lieven have a new piece for Harpers magazine titled Peace Now in Ukraine.
Analysis
Pavel Devyatkin: Can Russian-US Scientific Cooperation Be Restored?
Yuri Pushchaev: The Philosophy of the Ones Who Left: An Experiment in Intellectual Autism
In the following essay, which first appeared in Russkaya Istina (Jan. 8, 2024), Russian philosopher Yuri Pushchaev takes issue with a group of émigré Russian writers who have written a book sharply condemning their home country for the war in Ukraine. According to Pushchaev, these émigré authors have shut their eyes to history. They write as if the war in Ukraine began quite out of the blue on Feb. 24, 2022, and that its outbreak was due solely to Russian malevolence. He accuses his opponents, in short, of being intellectually dishonest.
Ted Galen Carpenter: Ending the Second Cold War
We should not want another period of multiple decades marked by hostility and a lack of normal economic relations. Let’s see if the current generation of policymakers can be wiser than their predecessors.
Victor Taki: Containment 2.0 Makes the U.S. Resemble the Very Thing it Claimed to be Fighting During the Cold War
It has become customary in certain quarters to contrast the current international imbroglio to the good old days of the Cold War: in comparison with the present-day protagonists, the two superpowers of yore might indeed appear as paragons of self-restraint. By the same token one might be tempted to contrast George Kennan’s foreign political wisdom to the collective folly of the mainstream media experts in the West. However, I would emphasize the continuity.
Anatol Lieven and George Beebe: Coming to Terms
More than two years into Russia’s invasion, it is increasingly clear that the Ukrainian army is not capable of reconquering the territories lost to Russia; instead, without continued and massive Western aid, the Ukrainians will suffer eventual defeat owing to Russia’s huge economic and demographic superiority, and the long-term continuation of such aid cannot be guaranteed.
Hartung and Gledhill: The Pentagon keeps failing up — on your dime
The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War.
David Swanson: What Does NATO Have to Do with the Genocide in GAZA?
For those who care about life on Earth, or who are upset by the horrors and risks of one of the current wars in Gaza or Ukraine, taking steps to move humanity away from the course plotted by the largest military alliance ever to exist may seem an obvious to-do-list item.
Ambassador Chas Freeman: What Can We Learn from our Forever War in Ukraine?
They say that a mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it. Our country has recently made a lot of mistakes in its foreign policies. Sadly, we don’t seem to be learning much of anything from this experience. We have instead invented something uniquely American called a “forever war.” Such wars routinely fail. Still, we keep launching them.
Marc Polonsky: Defeat of the West? Emmanuel Todd and the Ukraine War
Emmanuel Todd, now 72, is one of the few who predicted the end of the Soviet Union. In La chute finale: Essai sur la decomposition de la sphere soviétique (1976) he analysed infant mortality, suicide rates, economic productivity and other indicators, and concluded that the USSR’s long stagnation would soon culminate in collapse.
VIDEO: Nicolai N. Petro on the New Cold War
In a discussion with Dialogue Works, Professor Petro discusses the tensions between NATO and Russia and the ongoing risks of escalation.
Martin Seiff: Diplomacy Matters
The current president of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, Sachs noted, recently tweeted, “Russia must be destroyed.”
Latvia is a tiny postage stamp country of less than 1.9 million people. It would not make more than a tiny proportion of New York City, Washington, London, Los Angeles or Paris. It could not maintain its prosperity and security for five seconds without enormous inputs every year from the European Union, the United States and NATO. Yet there it is, with its president and diplomats eagerly – even enthusiastically – fanning the flames for thermonuclear war between America and Russia. This is no mere joke: It is an obscenity.
VIDEO: Part II of Katrina vanden Heuvel’s Interview with Pascal Lottaz of Neutrality Studies
The dynamic of mass-psychology in the West has reached a perverse level at which not only advocacy for deescalation is blamed as an act of treason, but the decrepit state of domestic economies is pinned on the enemy, which only reinforces calls for the ‘necessity of fighting’ the imaginary devil at the gates of the shining city on the hill. But the obsession goes even further than that… this is part 2 of an interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel.
Ed Lozansky: Inside Washington Blob
At a recent seminar sponsored by the two primary Washington think tanks, one American and another European, the subject of the war in Ukraine was discussed, as was how two upcoming significant elections in the European Parliament in June and the U.S. President in November might affect Western support for Ukraine and thus the course of the war.
James W. Carden: Leading Armenia Down the Primrose Path
Washington may not like it, but if Armenia has any chance at a happy future—and a magnificent, ancient Christian civilization like Armenia certainly deserves one—we need to stop meddling in the Caucasus and limit the damage we have already done in the post-Soviet space.
Christopher Caldwell: Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Money. It’s a Terrible Idea.
Bradley Devlin: BIG SCOOP: The Biden Administration Just Admitted It Has Massively Undercounted Ukraine Aid
When Sen. JD Vance and other conservatives in Congress started pressing the Biden administration to provide the real cost of the Ukraine war in January 2023, the lawmakers estimated the U.S. had spent “a minimum of $114 billion.” Now, with added information from the OMB, Vance and company estimate the current total of aid to Ukraine amounts to at least $125 billion—$14 billion over what the OMB had previously claimed.
YouGov Poll: Most Americans think there will be another world war within the next decade
A new YouGov survey asked Americans about the possibility of another world war, the role that other countries might play, the roles they themselves might play, and how the U.S. should respond to hypothetical nuclear attacks abroad and at home. The majority of Americans believe that another world war is at least somewhat likely to happen in the next five to 10 years, but most don’t think they would volunteer to serve in military roles or non-combatant roles if the U.S. were to be involved.
John Zavales: Congress needs answers before sending more aid to Ukraine
VIDEO: The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel: How Neocons, Neolibs, and their Media Collude for War
This is the first part of a discussion between Katrina vanden Heuvel and Neutrality Studies’ Pascal Lottaz. For a quarter of a century, vanden Heuvel was the editor in chief of the progressive magazine The Nation; she is currently The Nation’s publisher and editorial director, a widely read columnist as well as president of ACURA. As such, she has been and remains pivotal in giving alternative voices a place to speak, especially when it came to US involvements in wars.