The New Cold War

“War With Russia?  From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate,” by Stephen Cohen, 2019

This book is a series of somewhat repetitive blog posts between 2014-2018 opposing the new Cold War between the U.S. and Russia.  Cohen was at one time a prominent historian, Russia scholar, journalist and academic who promoted ‘détente’ between the USSR and the U.S. He now laments that there is almost no force in the U.S. – in either Party, in the captive media, in the national security state, even among the capitalist class – that wants a normal ‘big power’ relationship between the two nuclear nations. He targets U.S. aggressiveness as the cause of the ‘new’ Cold War.  Cohen quit the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018 after they endorsed the new Cold War against Russia.  Like Chris Hedges, he is another refugee from the increasingly narrow ruling intelligentsia in the U.S.

It Can't Happen Here

Cohen is a past sympathizer of Nicolai Bukharin’s, but this book is not couched in ideological terms, or indeed any Marxist terms at all.  It ignores the growing ‘cold war’ with China, or the capitalist economic & imperialist rationales behind the demonization of Putin, of Russians or of Russian foreign policy.  But he does see the New Cold war and Russiagate as the policies of U.S. elites, not the population.  Surveys show that a large majority of U.S. citizens want better relations with Russia.  However, the opinions of the population have no role in the foreign policy of the U.S. government.  Cohen thinks Trump is about the only barrier to even more severe actions that might bring a wider conflict.  Trump has been pressured into increasing hostility in response to the Russiagate claims, though he ran as a ‘détente’ candidate.

The new Cold war is actually a product of aggression by the U.S. security state and its wider military wing, NATO.  These are its roots:

A.  Now copious public documentation shows that the U.S. and NATO made promises to Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would not move ‘one inch further east.’  At present, Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries are either in NATO or getting NATO aid – all on the border with Russia.  Tallinn in Estonia is 198 air miles from St. Petersburg. 

B.  George Bush unilaterally canceled the ABM nuclear treaty with Russia in 2002. 

C.  The U.S. and NATO backed an early Georgian proxy-war with Russia in 2008 over South Ossetia on the Russian border.

D.  In 2011 Obama made promises to Russia that Russian ally Gaddafi would not be deposed in NATO’s regime change plans.  A lie, celebrated by Hillary Clinton.

E.  The U.S and NATO backed a militarized regime change coup against the elected and corrupt president of Ukraine in 2014. The shootings in Maidan Square were actually carried out by the Right Sector – then blamed on the government.  The final push came from armed ultra-right and neo-fascist Ukrainian groups like the Right Sector and the Banderist Svoboda Party, who installed another corrupt oligarch, still in power today. 

F.  The U.S. has ignored the Minsk Agreement between Ukraine, Russia and the EU, which would have de-militarized Ukraine, allowed some home rule for Donbass and agreed to Ukraine having economic ties with east and west.

G.  The 2014 ‘annexation’ of Crimea was by an overwhelming popular vote of its nearly all-Russian ethnic population.  This in the face of anti-Russian ethnic laws and terror by the new Kiev coup government, including a massacre of pro-Russian protesters in Odessa. It was actually similar to what the U.S./ NATO did in Kosovo in 1999, when they split Kosovo from Serbian Yugoslavia. 

H.  U.S. & NATO-backed Ukrainian armed forces, including neo-fascist units, are waging a proxy war in Donbass against the Russian ethnic population there.  The neo-fascist Azov Legion has been incorporated into the Ukrainian army.  Anti-Jewish incidents in Ukraine are the highest in Europe.

I.    The legal Russian intervention in Syria overturned another regime change project by the U.S. security state.  It led to the defeat of Daesh and of jihadist groups backed by the Saudis, like Al-Nusra and the polyglot “Free” Syrian Army.  At present, it ‘seems’ to be protecting the Syrian Kurds from a Turkish invasion of Syria.

J.  NATO’s military role in the world since the fall of the USSR has been disastrous.  It started ‘mildly’ with the bloody bombing and breakup of Yugoslavia. Then amped up with invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the failed regime change plan in Syria and now the destabilization of Ukraine and Georgia.   

K.  What Cohen calls ‘media malpractice’ by the New York Times and the Washington Post and their echo chambers at CNN, MSNBC, NPR & PBS has made the thinly or falsely sourced Russiagate story a page one, 24-hour headline for years.  It is a clear example of a full-on propaganda offensive.

L.  Obama stopped negotiations over nuclear issues like ‘no first strike’ and MAD, then passed a massive and expensive ‘updating’ of U.S. nuclear forces in 2016. 

M.  Trump unilaterally left another nuclear treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2018, a goal of the national security state and neo-cons like John Bolton.

N.  Continuing economic warfare sanctions to ‘isolate’ Russia passed by Obama and Trump are viewed by Europeans as actually preventing Russian products from the European market, in favor of U.S. ones.

The Resistance in league with ...the Pentagon?

That is the story of the U.S. initiated and amplified new Cold War against Russia.  These are some of Cohen’s more general points below:

1. There are various forces in the Kremlin and Putin is actually more pro-Europe/U.S. than hardliners who do not trust the U.S. or Europe in any shape or form.  He has shown far more restraint in Syria for instance, where Russian planes were shot down, soldiers killed and airbases bombed by U.S. forces.

2.  Putin is actually more of a statesman than nearly anyone in the U.S. government and is able to get agreements between hostile countries – like the Iran deal.  Obama played a diplomatic but vacillating role, as he too responded to pressure from the U.S. security state. 

3.  Trump’s discussions with Russia ‘were’ and ‘are’ normal procedures for presidents since Eisenhower, including pre-election contacts.

4.   Hysterical ‘traitor’ talk floods the media after condemnations issued by former or present CIA or FBI sources like Brennan, Comey & Clapper.  These actors are not part of a ‘deep state’ – they are part of a very public national security state, which has been obvious since Wilson sent troops into Russia to defeat the Soviet revolution in 1918.  Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept took their arguments apart in his analysis of what Constitutional ‘treason’ legally means.

5.  Russia’s economic outlook was to have a good trading relationship with the EU and even the U.S.  So the idea that Russia is ‘attacking western democratic values’ makes no sense to their economic plans.  They have recently signed deals with Merkel and Macron.

6.  Putin has much more support in Russia (77% in last election) than new cold-warrior Hillary Clinton had in the U.S.  Her political line was revealed early, in August 2016 when she called Trump “Putin’s puppet’ at an electoral debate, long before the propaganda offensive reached its peak, but indicative of the future angle to be taken. 

7.  Cohen questions the allegation that Democratic e-mails were ‘hacked‘ instead of being an inside job.  He also questions the Steele dossier and the national security assessment that was not issued by 17 intelligence agencies. He also briefly looks at the Skripal, Nemtsov, Politkovskya and Litvinenko cases.  He calls all of this ‘Intelgate.’  Convictions so far in the investigation into Russiagate are all about other issues.  In all this, he says there is no actual way to prove that the Russians swayed the election.

8.  The list of hysterical insults by prominent Democrats and some Republicans against Russia or Putin is long and off-base.  “Crime of the Century,”  “another 9/11;” “Pearl Harbor,” “We are at war,” “Trump-Putin axis,” “the Red Menace of Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” and “fascist Putin” are all quotes from U.S. politicians  The latter insult is especially incorrect, as Russia actually played the main role in DEFEATING fascism in WWII.

9.  Cohen does not talk about money-laundering, bribes, quid pro quos or Trump’s building projects in Moscow or loans from Russians to his companies.  Cohen does not ‘follow the money.’ This corrupt behavior is similar what other capitalist corporations in the world do. Corruption is endemic to international capital, no matter what FinCen rules say.  Look at the treatment of the money-laundering bank HSBC, for instance.

10. Cohen counters the inaccurate ‘neo-Stalinist’ verbiage about Putin by mentioning the recent establishment of both a state-sponsored museum and a memorial in Moscow to the victims of the Stalinist gulag.

11.  Neo-McCarthyism in the U.S. has returned in Democratic and Republican attacks on anyone who disagrees with the national security state line on Russia.

12.  Since 1991 and the fall of the USSR, Russia has been treated by triumphalist and ‘indispensable’ U.S. politicians as a defeated and inconsequential nation. 

The hostility to Russia and China (and Iran/Venezuela/Cuba/Syria/N Korea and …) is being manufactured by the U.S. ruling class as it attempts to increase its failing imperial control of the whole world.  If you do not understand imperialism, then you cannot understand world politics.  This book, while only pro-détente, will help.

Other prior reviews on this subject, below:  “Coleen Rowley,” “Doublespeak,” US/EU Meddling,” “Why Are U.S. Oil Prices Dropping,” “Dressed Up For a Riot,” “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives,” (Cohen); “Look at the War-Monger Facts.”   Use blog search box, upper left.

P.S. - Link to Intercept article published today on resignation of William Arkin as reporter, related to national security state role in present media:  https://theintercept.com/2019/01/03/veteran-nbcmsnbc-journalist-blasts-the-network-for-being-captive-to-the-national-security-state-and-reflexively-pro-war-to-stop-trump/

P.P.S. - and then there are the crickets in Cuba... more anti-Russian disinformation debunked. 

PPPS - "+ Even the Washington Post seems to have thrown in the towel. In an underplayed story by Philip Bump, the paper concedes that the Russian SM trolling operation during the 2016 election wasn’t “sophisticated, specific or targeted.” This was obvious to anyone who took even 10 minutes to actually look at the ads…anyone but Rachel Maddow, that is." – Jeffrey St. Clair, 1/11/2019

PPPPS - 12/21, Re: #10 above, Putin and his courts will close Memorial and imprison its director for 15 years on trumped up charges.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

January 4, 2019