Russia is on the front line of the coronavirus crisis in that it shares a very long territorial border with China/Asia. Nonetheless, many of its official reactions are similar to those in the United States.

Citizens are being told to self-isolate. New responsibilities, authority, and public prominence are being devolved to regional governors and mayors of large cities, particularly Sergei Sobyanian, the already accomplished and widely admired mayor of Moscow.  And leaders at all levels are suddenly relying heavily on, and deferring to, the expert opinion of medical authorities and other specialists.

But at this moment in Russian history, something else is being tested: not only Vladimir Putin’s personal leadership but the efficacy of the political-administrative system he has created since 2000—the “vertical” stretching from the Kremlin to all of the regions and cities of the world’s largest territorial country. Though Putin and his evolving system have faced previous crises—in particular, the Chechen War—this is the most serious and ramifying.

The health crisis also comes amid a national discussion as to how—not if—Putin will remain the No. 1 leader after his constitutionally permitted two consecutive terms as president expire in 2024. Various solutions are being discussed, including constitutional changes that would eliminate such limits or create a new position for Putin and whether such changes would require a national referendum—and indeed whether one could be held given the health crisis.

Larger, long-term issues are also involved. How, for example, would further empowering Putin impact plans to democratize the political system by transferring more power from the Kremlin to the parliament (Duma). One proposal, apparently made with Putin’s support, had been to give the Duma the power to name Russia’s president. Whatever the outcome, it is notable that no public figures, including oppositionists, seem to be able to imagine an alternative to Putin himself at this time.

Nor is the role of the United States missing from the discussion. Increasingly, Russian public figures are drawing a parallel with the World War II US-Russian alliance against fascism and calling for such an anti-viral alliance today. But even if President Trump understood this necessity and sought to act on it, as he should, it is not clear he would be permitted to do so in Washington.

Listen to the podcast here.

The US media’s three-year obsession with the mostly fictitious allegations of “Russiagate” has all but obscured, even deleted, important, potentially historic, developments inside that nation itself, still the world’s largest territorial country. One of the most important is the Putin government’s decision to invest $300-to-$400 billion of “rainy day” funds in the nation’s infrastructure, especially in its vast, underdeveloped provinces, and on “national projects” ranging from education to health care and family services to transportation and other technology. If successfully implemented, Russia would be substantially transformed and the lives of its people significantly improved.

Not surprisingly, however, the plan has aroused considerable controversy and public debate in Russia’s policy elite, primarily for two reasons. The funds were accumulated largely due to high world prices for Russia’s energy exports and the state’s budgetary austerity during the decade after Putin came to power in 2000, and they have been hoarded as a safeguard against Western economic sanctions and/or a global economic depression. (Russia’s economic collapse in the Yeltsin 1990s, perhaps the worst modern-day depression in peacetime, remains a vivid memory for policy-makers and ordinary citizens alike.)

There is also the nation’s long, sometimes traumatic, history of “modernization from above,” as it is termed. In the late 19th century, the czarist regime’s program to industrialize the country, “to catch up” with other world powers, had unintended consequences that led, in the accounts of many historians, to the end of czarism in the 1917 revolution. And Stalin’s “revolution from above” of the 1930s, based on the forced collectivization of the peasantry, which at the time accounted for more than 80 percent of the population, along with very rapid industrialization, resulted in millions of deaths and economic distortions that burdened Soviet and post-Soviet Russia for decades.

Nor are Russia’s alternative experiences of modernization from below inspiring or at least instructive. In the 1920s, during the years known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP, the victorious Bolsheviks pursued evolutionary economic development through a semi-regulated market economy. It had mixed—and still disputed—results, and it was brutally abolished by Stalin in 1929. Decades later, Yeltsin’s “free-market reforms” were widely blamed for the ruination and widespread misery of the 1990s, which featured many aspects of actual de-modernization.

With all this “living history” in mind, Putin’s plan for such large-scale (and rapid) investment has generated the controversy in Moscow and resulted in three positions within the policy class. One fully supports the decision on the essentially Keynesian grounds that it will spur Russia’s annual economic growth, which has lagged below the global average for several years. Another opposes such massive expenditures, arguing that the funds must remain in state hands as a safeguard against the US-led “sanctions war” (and perhaps worse) against Russia. And, as usual in politics, there is a compromise position that less should be invested in civilian infrastructure and less quickly.

Running through the discussion is also Russia’s long history of thwarted implementation of good intentions. To paraphrase a prime minister during the 1990s, Viktor Chernomyrdin, “We wanted things to turn out for the best, but they turned out as usual.” In particular, it is often asked, what will be the consequences of putting so much money into the hands of regional and other local officials in provinces where corruption is endemic? How much will be stolen or otherwise misdirected?

Nonetheless, Putin seems to be resolute. He is also insistent that his ambitious plan to transform Russia requires a long period of international peace and stability. Here again is plain evidence that those in Washington who insist Putin’s primary goal is “to sow discord, divisions, and instability” in the world, especially in the West, where he hopes to find “modernizing partnerships,” do not care about or understand what is actually unfolding inside Russia—or Putin’s vision of his own historical role and legacy.

Listen to the podcast here.

As with its 40-year predecessor, the new US-Russian Cold War has characteristic features, including sharply conflicting historical memories. Some of them are absurdly inaccurate and politically dangerous. Consider a recent ramifying example.

On January 23, Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Israel to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet (mostly Russian) army. Representatives of many other countries also attended the solemn events, including US Vice President Mike Pence, but according to the Times of Israel, Putin was “the most formidable and dominant presence.” The reason, widely acknowledged in Israel though scarcely in the United States today, is that the Soviet army, more than any other, saved the surviving Jews of Europe as it defeated Nazi Germany in route from Stalingrad to Berlin.

Ukrainians, most of them then Soviet citizens, played a large role in those historical events, both as Holocaust victims and as soldiers in the Soviet army. Nonetheless, at about the same time as the ceremonies in Israel were underway, the inveterate bipartisan anti-Russian lobby in Washington—notably at this moment Democratic Representative Adam Schiff and a predictable slew of other lawmakers and impeachment witnesses—were declaring Ukraine today’s front line against Russia’s “new aggression.” Among other things, this was not the peace with Russia promised, and indeed sought since his election, by Ukraine’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky.

At the very moment when peace between Ukraine and Russia is within reach, and with it the possibility of saving many lives, warmongering—an ugly but appropriate word—intensifies in Washington. On December 4, for example, in a formulation rarely heard since the early 1950s, a pro-impeachment witness, not known for any Russia, Ukraine, or related expertise, told Congress that the United States must make “sure that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front lines so they fight the Russians there and we don’t have to fight them here.” By January 22, this had become a warfare mantra in Congress, with Democratic Representative Jason Crow, an impeachment manager, also assuring members that America must “fight Russia over there so we don’t have to fight Russia here.” Whatever the merits of the impeachment process, its legacy, as I have warned from the outset, is likely to be an ever-worsening new Cold War and thus conceivably something even more dire.

Yet these fateful issues cannot be candidly discussed in Washington because they are widely regarded, as NBC’s Chuck Todd mindlessly characterized them, as “Russian talking points” and “disinformation.” By implication, and sometimes in direct accusations, anyone who does raise them is a “Kremlin apologist.”

Such continues to be the state of American discourse about this new and more perilous Cold War. Will any of the current Democratic presidential candidates change the discourse­­—or be permitted to do so by “moderators” of their debates? Or must we rely almost entirely on President Trump’s continuing, and substantially thwarted, effort to implement his campaign promise to “cooperate with Russia”?

Looking ahead, Putin has invited Trump to join him on Red Square on May 9, Russia’s “Victory Day,” a sacred commemoration of immense importance to the Kremlin and for most of Russia’s people. Certainly, President Trump should accept, if only to honor the estimated 27 million Soviet citizens who died in World War II. But here, too, will Washington politics and media discourage him from doing so?

Listen to the podcast here.

President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where, he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente (“cooperation”) with Moscow.

And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.

Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president’s thinking about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.

How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon John Bolton, briefly Trump’s national security adviser. But this doesn’t explain why the president would accept or long tolerate such appointees.

A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a “Kremlin puppet.” Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump’s political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive.

The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington’s permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a “deep” or “secret” state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington’s foreign-policy “blob,” as even an Obama aide termed it, will remain.

Listen to the podcast here.

For centuries and still today, Russia and large parts of Ukraine have had much in common—a long territorial border; a shared history; ethnic, linguistic, and other cultural affinities; intimate personal relations; substantial economic trade; and more. Even after the years of escalating conflict between Kiev and Moscow since 2014, many Russians and Ukrainians still think of themselves in familial ways. The United States has almost none of these commonalities with Ukraine.

Which is also to say that Ukraine is not “a vital US national interest,” as most leaders of both parties, Republican and Democrat alike, and much of the US media now declare. On the other hand, Ukraine is a vital Russian interest by any geopolitical or simply human reckoning.

Why, then, is Washington so deeply involved in Ukraine? (The proposed nearly $400 million in US military aid to Kiev would mean, of course, even more intrusive involvement.) And why is Ukraine so deeply involved in Washington, in a different way, that it has become a pretext for attempts to impeach President Donald Trump?

The short but essential answer is Washington’s decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to expand NATO eastward from Germany and eventually to Ukraine itself. Ever since, both Democrats and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine is a “vital US national interest.” Those of us who opposed that folly warned it would lead to dangerous conflicts with Moscow, conceivably even war. Imagine Washington’s reaction, we pointed out, if Russian military bases began to appear on Canada’s or Mexico’s borders with America. We were not wrong: An estimated 13,000 souls have already died in the Ukrainian-Russian war in the Donbass and some 2 million people have been displaced.

Things are likely to get worse. Democrats are sharply criticizing Trump for withholding large-scale military aid to Kiev (even though President Obama, despite strong pressure, wisely did so). Ukraine’s recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, having been drawn into the Washington scandal, is no longer as free to negotiate peace with Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he hoped and promised during his campaign. And candidates for the 2020 US Democratic presidential nomination, with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, are likely to compete for the role of Kiev’s biggest military booster. Here, as generally in US-Russian relations, Democrats are becoming a war party.

Meanwhile, as I have reported before, Russian leader Vladimir Putin continues to be accused by hard-liners in Moscow of passivity in the face of “American aggression in Ukraine.” Is it irony or tragedy that the often-maligned Trump and Putin may stand between us and something much worse—between a fragile Cold War peace and the war parties in their respective countries?

Listen to the podcast here.

Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about Donald Trump’s life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:

§ The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core “Russiagate” allegation that “Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election” on Trump’s behalf—an “attack” so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no “attack” in 2016, only, as I have previously explained, ritualistic “meddling” of the kind that both Russia and America have undertaken in the other’s elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the allegation or belief that one has been “attacked by a hostile” entity. And yet this myth and its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party’s discourse, campaigning, and fund-raising.

§ We have also learned that the heads of America’s intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this operation “Intelgate,” and it has since been well documented by other writers, including Lee Smith in his new book. Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.

§ We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream “free press” cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media—leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular—chose to cover and report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr’s critics accuse him of fabricating a “conspiracy theory” on behalf of Trump. But the real, or grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin, an accusation that was—or should have been—discredited by the Robert Mueller report.

§ And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia’s new “hyper-sonic” missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did his predecessors in the White House, given the “Putin puppet” and “Kremlin stooge” accusations still being directed at him? Similarly, as I have asked repeatedly, if confronted with a US-Russian Cuban missile–like crisis—anywhere Washington and Moscow are currently eyeball-to-eyeball militarily, from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria—will Trump be as free politically as was President John F. Kennedy to resolve it without war? Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to negotiate with Russia’s Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)

The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here—a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation of Russiagate allegations—and that in turn requires learning how such allegations originated.

Opponents of Barr’s investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to “investigate the investigators.” But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been.

However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump’s attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It’s time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.

The transcript of President Trump’s July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine’s recently elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public, which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed issues:

§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.

§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture, geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a “vital US national interest” and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of “Russian aggression against Ukraine.” But the “aggression” cited is Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow’s eyes, it was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led “aggression.” In any event, as opponents of eastward expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one’s security, only diminished security throughout the region bordering Russia.

§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400 million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)

§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though the role of Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented.

We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they should be encouraged to do so. As I’ve argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imagine, for example, a Cuban missile–like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump’s presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?

Two years ago, I asked, “Will Russia Leave the West?” The world’s largest territorial country—sprawling from its major European city St. Petersburg to its vast Far Eastern territories and long border with China—Russia cannot, of course, depart the West geographically. But it can do so politically, economically, and strategically. Indeed, where Russia belongs, where it should seek its identity, security, and future—in the East or in the West—has divided the nation’s policy-makers and intellectual elites for centuries.

In our times, as I also pointed out two years ago, a Russia departed, or driven, from the West would likely mean “a Russia—with its vast territories, immense natural resources, world-class sciences, formidable military and nuclear power, and UN Security Council veto—allied solidly with all the other emerging powers that are not part the US-NATO Western ‘world order’ and even opposed to it. And, of course, it would drive Russia increasingly afar from the West’s liberalizing influences, back toward its more authoritarian traditions.”

That’s why the controversy provoked by President Trump (and French President Emmanuel Macron) in seeking that Russia be readmitted to the G7/8, from which it was in effect expelled in 2014 for its annexation of Crimea, is so important—and so uninformed. Purportedly, the (now) G7 is the elite club of prosperous functioning democracies. In reality, Russia under President Boris Yeltsin was neither when it was admitted in 1997. The decision was political—to assure Moscow that Russia was welcome in the West and indeed part of it, potentially including its security arrangements.

Expelling Russia sent the opposite message, as did moving the metaphorical “Iron Curtain” from Berlin to Russia’s border through a myriad of other exclusions and sanctions. And as did, above all, expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, the exceedingly unwise policy begun by President Bill Clinton and continued under President Obama. The result has already been two wars, in Georgia in 2008 and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and a Russian-Chinese relationship so close and expansive that its current leaders refer to each other as “best friends.” (Having come to power in 2000 as a pro-Western modernizer, Putin’s own evolution in response to these developments should be clear to any fair-minded observer.)

Underpinning these Washington follies was the notion, also promoted by President Obama and apparently still widespread in the sanction-happy US Congress, that Russia could and should be “isolated” in world affairs. Suffice it to point out that today it is said that the United States is being isolated in international relations. Meanwhile, Russia’s seemingly tireless foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, may be busier diplomatically than any of his counterparts around the world, certainly among the major powers.

Little if any of this seems to be understood by the US political-media establishment. Astonishingly, though perhaps not, US-Russian relations, still Washington’s single most important bilateral relationship, not only because of their nuclear arsenals, was not an issue in the recent Democratic presidential debates. We can therefore only guess whether or not any of the featured candidates would as president seek to reverse Russia’s drift away from the West—the one candidate who says she would do so, Tulsi Gabbard, having been excluded from the debates.

It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he “colluded” with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election—and, still more, that Vladimir Putin’s regime, “America’s No. 1 threat,” had compromising material on Trump that made him its “puppet.” Or a more fraudulent accusation.

Even leaving aside the misperception that Russia is the primary threat to America in world affairs, no aspect of this allegation has turned out to be true, as should have been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now infamous Steele Dossier, on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely “unverified” but plainly implausible.

Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the US political establishment relied on Steele’s allegations for nearly three years, even heroizing him—and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.

Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible evidence has been produced that Russia’s “interference” affected the result of the 2016 presidential election in any significant way. Nor was Russian “meddling” in the election anything akin to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton’s political and financial “interference” undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.

Nonetheless, Russiagate’s core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life—in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began—by whom, when, and why.

Officially, at least in the FBI’s version, its operation “Crossfire Hurricane,” the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This too is not believable, as I pointed out previously. Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn’t the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being another.)

But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign? A reflexive answer might be because candidate Trump promised to “cooperate with Russia,” to pursue a pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive, advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.

So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers—or not. Barr has already leveled procedural charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and briefly under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits. The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and thus not hard to investigate, as Barr has already shown. The others, particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr has suggested they are resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has brought in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.

Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own careers include associations with US intelligence agencies, determined to uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate? And can they really do so fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr make public their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or will he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his authority to declassify the findings as the 2020 presidential election approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama’s presidency and its would-be heirs?

Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the Barr-Durham investigation and its findings? Having driven the Russiagate narrative for so long and so misleadingly—and with liberals perhaps finding themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue intelligence agencies—will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?

It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable, and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.

There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) At every “debate” or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy—what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.

Ukraine, as I have often emphasized, is the epicenter of the new US-Russian Cold War, and its location directly on Russia’s border makes it much more dangerous than was Berlin during the preceding 40-year confrontation. Some 13,000 people have reportedly already died in Donbass in fighting between forces backed by Washington and Moscow. For many on both sides of the border, the war is a personal tragedy due also to the at least tens of millions of intermarried Ukrainian-Russian families. (The names of some of them will be familiar to readers, such as Khrushchev and Gorbachev.)

The election of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who won decisively throughout most of the country, represents the possibility of peace with Russia, if it—and he—are given a chance. His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, notably provisions associated with the European-sponsored Minsk Accords. Zelensky, on the other hand, has made peace (along with corruption) his top priority and indeed spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on July 11. The nearly six-year war having become a political, diplomatic, and financial drain on his leadership, Putin welcomed the overture.

But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist—some would say quasi-fascist—detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky’s initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. (Washington has previously had some shameful episodes of collusion with these Ukrainian neo-Nazis.) As for Putin, who does not fully control the Donbass rebels or its leaders, he “can never be seen at home,” as I pointed out more than two years ago, “as ‘selling out’ Russia’s ‘brethren’ anywhere in southeast Ukraine.” Indeed, his own implacable nationalists have made this a litmus test of his leadership.

Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev’s government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his “point man” for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine’s centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. 

Our hope should be that Trump breaks with that long-standing bipartisan policy, as he did with policy toward North Korea, and puts America squarely on the side of peace in Ukraine. (For now, Zelensky has set aside Moscow’s professed irreversible “reunification” with Crimea, as should Washington.) A new US policy must include recognition, previously lacking, that the citizens of war-ravaged Donbass are not primarily “Putin’s stooges” but people with their own legitimate interests and preferences, even if they favor Russia. Here too Zelensky is embarking on a new course. Poroshenko waged an “anti-terrorist” war against Donbass: the new president is reaching out to its citizens even though most of them were unable to vote in the election.

Biden, however, has a special problem—and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama’s disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing “debates” are an opportunity to ask the question—and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

William Barr, a two-time attorney general who served at the CIA in the 1970s, would seem to be an ultimate Washington insider. According to his Wikipedia biography, he has—or he had—“a sterling reputation” both among Republicans and Democrats. That changed when Barr announced his ongoing investigation into the origins of Russiagate, a vital subject I, too, have explored.

As Barr explained, “What we’re looking at is: What was the predicate for conducting a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign.… How did the bogus narrative begin that Trump was essentially in cahoots with Russia to interfere with the U.S. election?” Still more, Barr, who is empowered to declassify highly sensitive documents, made clear that his primary focus was not the hapless FBI under James Comey but the CIA under John Brennan. Evidently this was too much for leading Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who assailed Barr for having “just destroyed…the scintilla of credibility that he had left.” Not known for a sense of irony, Schumer accused Barr of using “the words of conspiracy theorists,” as though Russiagate itself is not among the most malign and consequential conspiracy theories in American political history.

More indicative is the reaction of the generally liberal pro-Democratic New York Times and Washington Post, the country’s two most important political newspapers, to Barr’s investigation. Leaning heavily on the “expert” opinion of former intelligence officials and McCarthy-echoing members of Congress such as Adam Schiff, both papers went into outrage mode. The Times bemoaned Barr’s “drastic escalation of [Trump’s] yearslong assault on the intelligence community” while rejecting “the president’s unfounded claims that his campaign had been spied on,” even though some forms of FBI and CIA infiltration and surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign are now well documented. (See, for example, Lee Smith’s reporting.)

Unconcerned by the activities of either agency, the papers warned ominously that Barr’s probe “effectively strips [the CIA] of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which remain hidden.” It “could be tremendously damaging to the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies.” Not surprisingly, given the Times’ three-year role in promulgating Russiagate allegations, it preempted Barr’s investigation by declaring that US intelligence agencies’ covert actions were part of “a lawful investigation aimed at understanding a foreign power’s efforts to manipulate an American election.” Considering what is now known, this generalization seems a whitewash both of the Times’ coverage and the agencies’ conduct. (In the Post, see coverage by Toluse Olorunnipa and Shane Harris.)

Hillary Clinton, also not surprisingly, agreed. As paraphrased by Matt Stevens in the Times on May 3, she accused Barr of diverting attention “from what the real story is. The real story is the Russian interference in our election.” According to the defeated Democratic candidate, “the Russians were successful in sowing ‘discord and divisiveness’ in the country, and helping Mr. Trump.” But who has actually sowed more “discord and divisiveness” in America—the Russians or Mrs. Clinton and her supporters, by still refusing to accept the legitimacy of her electoral loss and Trump’s victory?

Unfortunately, but predictably, Barr’s investigation has become polarizing, with Fox News, for example, bannering each new unsavory Russiagate revelation and the Times and the Post mostly ignoring them altogether. In particular, the Democratic Party, once traditionally skeptical of intelligence agencies, is becoming the party of an intel cult and thus of the new US-Russian Cold War. Only a few of the party’s leaders, notably presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, demur from this dangerous folly. (Might Democratic reticence also be due to the circumstance that the intelligence chiefs now under investigation were appointees of former President Obama, who has been remarkably silent about the entire Russiagate saga? What, as I have asked previously, did Obama know, when did he know it, and what did he do?)

Everyone who cares about the quality of American political life, no matter what they think about Trump, should encourage Barr’s probe. To resort to a familiar cliché, Russiagate allegations have become a spreading cancer in American politics, with Democratic congressional candidates raising funds by promising, despite the exculpatory findings of Robert Mueller regarding “collusion,” to fight evil “Trump-Putin” forces in Washington. Meanwhile, some Republicans, despite ample contrary evidence, preposterously blame Russia itself—for the infamous Steele Dossier, for example. (By the way, for more irony, Trump is regularly accused in the above-cited news accounts of “siding with” Russian President Vladimir Putin in denying that any “collusion” determined the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, a conclusion also reached by Mueller, thereby putting Trump, Putin, and Mueller on the same “side.”)

Ideally, we would have an investigation of the intelligence agencies entirely independent of the White House and headed by an eminent political figure who is not a presidential appointee, as was the 1975 Senate Church Committee. For now, we have only Trump’s attorney general, William Barr. Nonetheless, we should support him, however conditionally. Rogue intelligence agencies subvert democracy, and the next candidate they target—as they did Trump—may be yours.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Despite determined attempts in Washington to sabotage such a “summit,” as I reported previously, President Trump and Russian President Putin are still scheduled to meet at the G-20 gathering in Japan this week. Iran will be at the top of their agenda. The Trump administration seems determined to wage cold, possibly even hot, war against the Islamic Republic, while for Moscow, as emphasized by the Kremlin’s national security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, on June 25, “Iran has been and will be an ally and partner of ours.”

Indeed, the importance of Iran (along with China) to Russia can hardly be overstated. Among other reasons, as the West’s military alliance encroaches ever more along Russia’s western borders, Iran is a large, vital non-NATO neighbor. Still more, Teheran has done nothing to incite Russia’s own millions of Muslim citizens against Moscow. Well before Trump, powerful forces in Washington have long sought to project Iran as America’s primary enemy in the Middle East, but for Moscow it is a necessary “ally and partner.”

In normal political circumstances, Trump and Putin could probably diminish any potential US-Russian conflict over Iran—and the one still brewing in Syria as well. But both leaders come to the summit with related political problems at home. For Trump, they are the unproven but persistent allegations of “Russiagate.” For Putin, they are economic.

As I have also previously explained, while there was fairly traditional “meddling,” there was no “Russian attack” on the 2016 American presidential election. But for many mainstream American commentators, including the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, it is an “obvious truth” and likely to happen again in 2020, adding ominously that Trump is still “cozying up to the chief perpetrator, Russian President Vladimir Putin.” A New York Times columnist goes further, insisting that Russia “helped to throw the election” to Trump. Again, there is no evidence whatsoever for these allegations. Also consider the ongoing assault on Attorney General William Barr, whose current investigation into the origins of “Russiagate” threatens to conclude that the scandal originated not with Russia but with US intelligence agencies under President Obama, in particular with the CIA under John Brennan.

We should therefore not be surprised, despite possible positive national security results of the Trump-Putin summit in Japan, if the US president is again widely accused of “treason,” as he so shamefully was following his meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, and as I protested at that time. Even the Times’ once-dignified columnist pages thundered, “Trump, Treasonous Traitor” and “Putin’s Lackey,” while senior US senators, Democrat and Republican alike, did much the same.

Putin’s domestic problem, on the other hand, is economic and social. Russia’s annual growth rate is barely 2 percent, real wages are declining, popular protests against officialdom’s historically endemic corruption are on the rise, and Putin’s approval rating, while still high, is declining. A public dispute between two of Putin’s advisers has broken out over what to do. On the one side is Alexei Kudrin, the leading monetarist who has long warned against using billions of dollars in Russia’s “rainy day” funds to spur investment and economic growth. On the other is Sergei Glaziev, a kind of Keynesian, FDR New Dealer who has no less persistently urged investing these funds in new domestic infrastructure that would, he argues, result in rapid economic growth.

During his nearly 20 years as Kremlin leader, Putin has generally sided with the “rainy day” monetarists. But on June 20, during his annual television call-in event, he suddenly, and elliptically, remarked that even Kudrin “has been drifting towards” Glaziev. Not surprisingly, many Russian commentators think this means that Putin himself is now “leaning toward Glaziev.” If so, it is another reason why Putin has no interest in waging cold war with the United States—why he wants instead, indeed even needs, a historic, long-term détente.

It seems unlikely that President Trump or any of the advisers currently around him understand this important struggle—and it is a struggle—unfolding in the Russian policy elite. But if Trump wants a major détente (or “cooperation,” as he has termed it) with Russia, anyone who cares about international security and about the well-being of the Russian people should support him in this pursuit. Especially at this moment, when we are told by the director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research that “the risks of the use of nuclear weapons…are higher now than at any time since World War Two.”

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Occasionally, a revelatory, and profoundly alarming, article passes almost unnoticed, even when published on the front page of The New York Times. Such was the case with reporting by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, bearing the Strangelovian title “U.S. Buries Digital Land Mines to Menace Russia’s Power Grid,” which appeared in the print edition on June 16. The article contained two revelations.

First, according to Sanger and Perlroth, with my ellipses duly noted, “The United States is stepping up digital incursions into Russia’s electric power grid.… Advocates of the more aggressive strategy said it was long overdue…” The operation “carries significant risk of escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.” Though under way at least since 2012, “now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense…with the placement of potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness that had never been tried before.” At this point, the Times reporters add an Orwellian touch. The head of the U.S. Cyber Command characterizes the assault on Russia’s grid, which affects everything from the country’s water supply, medical services, and transportation to control over its nuclear weapons, as “the need to ‘defend forward,’” because “they don’t fear us.”

Nowhere do Sanger and Perlroth seem alarmed by the implicit risks of this “defend forward” attack on the infrastructure of the other nuclear superpower. Indeed, they wonder “whether it would be possible to plunge Russia into darkness.” And toward the end, they quote an American lawyer and former Obama official, whose expertise on the matter is unclear, to assure readers sanguinely, “We might have to risk taking some broken bones of our own from a counter response.… Sometimes you have to take a bloody nose to not take a bullet in the head down the road.” The “broken bones,” “bloody nose,” and “bullet” are, of course, metaphorical references to the potential consequences of nuclear war.

The second revelation comes midway in the Times story: “[President] Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place ‘implants’…inside the Russian grid” because “he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials.” (Indeed, Trump issued an angry tweet when he saw the Times report, though leaving unclear which part of it most aroused his anger.)

What is the significance of this story, apart from what it tells us about the graver dangers of the new US-Russian Cold War, which now includes, we are informed, a uniquely fraught “digital Cold War”? Not so long ago, mainstream liberal Democrats, and the Times itself, would have been outraged by revelations that defense and intelligence officials were making such existential policy behind the back of a president. No longer, it seems. There have been no liberal, Democratic, or for the most part any other, mainstream protests, but instead a lawyerly apologia justifying the intelligence-defense operation without the president’s knowledge.

The political significance, however, seems clear enough. The leak to the Times and the paper’s publication of the article come in the run-up to a scheduled meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting in Japan on June 28–29. Both leaders had recently expressed hope for improved US-Russian relations. On May 4, Trump again tweeted his longstanding aspiration for a “good/great relationship with Russia”; and this month Putin lamented that relations “are getting worse and worse” but hoped that he and Trump could move their countries beyond “the games played by intelligence services.”

As I have often emphasized, the long historical struggle for American-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) détente, or broad cooperation, has featured many acts of attempted sabotage on both sides, though most often by US intelligence and defense agencies. Readers may recall the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting that was to take place in Paris in 1960, but which was aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US spy plane over the Soviet Union, an intrusive flight apparently not authorized by President Eisenhower. And more recently, the 2016 plan by then-President Obama and Putin for US-Russian cooperation in Syria, which was aborted by a Department of Defense attack on Russian-backed Syrian troops.

Now the sabotaging of détente appears be happening again. As the Times article makes clear, Washington’s war party, or perhaps zealous Cold War party, referred to euphemistically by Sanger and Perlroth as “advocates of the more aggressive strategy,” is on the move. Certainly, Trump has been repeatedly thwarted in his previous détente attempts, primarily by discredited Russiagate allegations that continue to be promoted by the war party even though they still lack any evidential basis. (It may also be recalled that his previous summit meeting with Putin was widely and shamefully assailed as “treason” by influential segments of the US political-media establishment.)

Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world. No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take—in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia’s electric grid—to shock US Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

It cannot be emphasized too often: Russiagate—allegations that the American president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the White House—is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to calculate the damage Russiagate has inflicted on America’s democratic institutions, including the presidency and the electoral process, and on domestic and foreign perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian relations at a critical moment when both sides, having “modernized” their nuclear weapons, are embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported arms race.

Rational (if politically innocent) observers may have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible “obstruction” by Trump—nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement altered that conclusion—Russiagate would fade away. If so, they were badly mistaken. Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House from Trump, Russiagate promoters—liberal Democrats and progressives foremost among them—have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russiagaters continues to mount, with no end in sight.

One way to end Russiagate might be to discover how it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since the allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem to be at least three hypothetical possibilities:

1. One is the orthodox Russiagate explanation: Early on, sharp-eyed top officials of President Obama’s intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, detected truly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever that may mean, considering that the presidential administration employs hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately led to the full-scale “counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July 2016. Indeed, Mueller documented various foreigners who contacted, or who sought to contact, the Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does not tell us, and we do not know, if the number of them was unusual.

Many foreigners seek “contacts” with US presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the Clinton campaign?

If readers think the answer is because the foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1986, when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he went to Russia—still Communist Soviet Russia—to make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if any, adverse US media reaction.)

2. The second explanation—currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere—is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier. As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that “researchers” in the United States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign) were supplying him with the fruits of their research.

3. The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate—is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.

US Attorney General William Barr now proposes to investigate the origins of Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special prosecutor, John Durham, to do so, but the power to decide the range and focus of the investigation will remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s expressed intention to investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies, not just the FBI, which obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John Brennan and Brennan’s partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence. As I argued in The Nation, Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of Russiagate, a thesis for which more evidence has since appeared. We should hope that Barr intends to exclude nothing, including the two foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate narrative: the Steele Dossier and, directly related, the contrived but equally ramifying Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not coincidentally, they were made public at virtually the same time, inflating Russiagate into an obsessive national scandal.)

Thus far, Barr has been cautious in his public statements. He has acknowledged there was “spying,” or surveillance, on the Trump campaign, which can be legal, but he surely knows that in the case of Papadopoulos (and possibly of General Michael Flynn), what happened was more akin to entrapment, which is never legal. Barr no doubt also recalls, and will likely keep in mind, the astonishing warning Senator Charles Schumer issued to President-elect Trump in January 2017: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” (Indeed, Barr might ask Schumer what he meant and why he felt the need to be the menacing messenger of intel agencies, wittingly or not.)

But Barr’s thorniest problem may be understanding the woeful role of mainstream media in Russiagate. As Lee Smith, who contributed important investigative reporting, has written: “The press is part of the operation, the indispensable part. None of it would have been possible…had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives.” How does Barr explore this “indispensable” complicity of the media in originating and perpetuating the Russiagate fraud without impermissibly infringing on the freedom of the press?

Ideally, mainstream media—print and broadcast—would now themselves report on how and why they permitted intelligence officials, through leaks and anonymous sources, and as “opinion” commentators, to use their pages and programming to promote Russiagate for so long, and why they so excluded well-informed, nonpartisan alternative opinions. Instead, they have almost unanimously reported and broadcast negatively, even antagonistically, about Barr’s investigation, and indeed about Barr personally. (The Washington Post even found a way to print this: “William Barr looks like a toad…”) Such is the seeming panic of the Russiagate media over Barr’s investigation, which promises to declassify related documents, that The New York Times again trotted out its easily debunked fiction that public disclosures will endanger a purported US informant, a Kremlin mole, at Putin’s side.

Finally, but most crucially, what was the real reason US intelligence agencies launched a discrediting operation against Trump? Was it because, as seems likely, they intensely disliked his campaign talk of “cooperation with Russia,” which seemed to mean the prospect of a new US-Russian détente? Even fervent political and media opponents of Trump should want to know who is making foreign policy in Washington. The next intel target might be their preferred candidate or president, or a foreign policy they favor.

Nor, it seems clear, did the CIA stop. In March 2018, the current director, Gina Haspel, then deputy director, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did. Several non–mainstream media outlets have reported the true story. Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.

We are left, then, with this paradox, formulated in a tweet on May 24 by the British journalist John O’Sullivan: “Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.”

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Now in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent political scandal in modern American history. It rests on two related core allegations: that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an “attack on American democracy” during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and that Trump and his associates willfully colluded, or conspired, in this Kremlin “attack.” As I have argued from the outset—see my regular commentaries posted at TheNation.com and my recent book War With Russia?—and as recently confirmed, explicitly and tacitly, by special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report, there is no factual evidence for either allegation.

Nonetheless, these Russiagate allegations, not “Putin’s Russia,” continue to inflict grave damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the integrity of the presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many Democratic members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the Democratic Party and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst episodes of journalistic malpractice in modern times.

But equally alarming, Russiagate continues to endanger American national security by depriving a US president, for the first time in the nuclear age, of the diplomatic flexibility to deal with a Kremlin leader in times of crisis. We were given a vivid example in July 2018, when Trump held a summit with the current Kremlin occupant, as every president had done since Dwight Eisenhower. For that conventional, even necessary, act of diplomacy, Trump was widely accused of treasonous behavior, a charge that persists. Now we have another alarming example of this reckless disregard for US national security on the part of Russiagate zealots.

On May 3, Trump called Putin. They discussed various issues, including the Mueller report. (As before, Putin had to know if Trump was free to implement any acts of security cooperation they might agree on. Indeed, the Russian policy elite openly debates this question, many of its members having decided that Trump cannot cooperate with Russia no matter his intentions.) A major subject of the conversation was unavoidably the growing conflict over Venezuela, where Washington and Moscow have long-standing economic and political interests. Trump administration spokespeople have warned Moscow against interfering in America’s neighborhood, ignoring, of course, Washington’s deep involvement for years in the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia. Kremlin representatives, on the other hand, have warned Washington against violating Venezuela’s sovereignty. Increasingly, there is talk, at least in Moscow policy circles, of a Cuban Missile–like crisis, the closest the United States and Russia (then Soviet Russia) ever came to nuclear war.

To the extent, however remote, that Venezuela might grow into a Cuba-like US-Russian military confrontation, would Trump be sufficiently free of Russiagate allegations to resolve it peacefully, as President John Kennedy did in 1962? Judging by mainstream media commentary on the May 3 phone conversation, the answer seems to be no. Considering the mounting confrontation in Venezuela, Trump was right, even obligated, to call Putin, but he got no applause, only condemnation. To take some random examples:

§ Democratic Representative David Cicilline asked CNN’s Chris Cuomo rhetorically on May 3, “Why does the president give the benefit of doubt to a person who attacked our democracy?” while assailing Trump for not confronting Putin with the Mueller report.

§ The same evening, CNN’s Don Lemon editorialized on the phone call: “The president of the United States had just a normal old call with his pal Vladimir Putin. Didn’t tell him not to interfere in the election. Like he did in 2016, like he did in 2018, like we know he is planning to do again in 2020…. You just don’t seem to want us to know exactly what was said…. Nothing to see when the president talks for more than an hour with the leader of an enemy nation. One that has repeatedly attacked our democracy and will do so again.” (Lemon did not say on what he based the expanded, serial charges against Putin and thus against Trump or his allegation about the 2018 elections, which congressional Democrats mostly won, or his foreknowledge about 2020 or generally and with major ramifications why he branded Russia an “enemy nation.”)

§ We might expect something more exalted from James Risen, once a critical-minded investigative reporter, who found it suspicious that “Trump and Putin were both eager to put the Mueller report behind them,” even for the sake of needed diplomacy.

§ Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Eric Swalwell, both candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, also expressed deep suspicion regarding the Trump-Putin phone talk. Swalwell was sure it meant that Trump “acts on their behalf,” that he “is putting the Russians’ interests ahead of the United States’ interests.” (Voters may wonder if these candidates and quite a few others who continue to promote extremist Russiagate allegations are emerging American statesmen.)

§ Not surprisingly, a Washington Post opinion writer argued that the phone call meant “Trump is counting on Russian help to get reelected.”

None of these “opinion leaders” mentioned the danger of a US-Russian military confrontation over Venezuela or elsewhere on the several fraught fronts of the new Cold War. Indeed, retired admiral James Stavridis, once supreme allied commander of NATO forces and formerly associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, all but proposed war on Russia in retaliation for its “attack on our democracy,” including “unprecedented measures” such as cyberattacks.

Russiagate’s unproven allegations are an aggressive malignancy spreading through America’s politics to the most vital areas of national security policy. A full nonpartisan investigation into their origins is urgently needed, but US intelligence agencies were almost certainly present at their creation, which is why I have long argued that Russiagate is actually Intelgate. If so, James Comey, then FBI director, was present at the creation, though initially in a lesser role than were President Barack Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and intelligence overlord James Clapper.

Comey recently deplored Attorney General William Barr’s declaration that US intelligence agencies resorted to “spying” on the Trump campaign. (In fact, Barr mischaracterized what happened: The agencies, first and foremost Brennan’s CIA, it seems, ran an entrapment operation against members of the campaign.) Comey warned Barr that he will discover that Trump “has eaten your soul.”

It would be more accurate to say—and certainly more important—that baseless Russiagate allegations are eating America’s national security.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III’s two-volume “Report on the Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election” is not an easy read—not unlike those manuals that come boxed with “easy to assemble” multipart children’s toys on Christmas Eve. Nonetheless, considering the exceedingly damaging effects Russiagate has had on America at home and abroad for nearly three years, the report will long be studied for what it reveals and does not reveal, what it includes and does not include.

Because of my own special interest in Russia, I read carefully the first volume, which focuses on that country’s purported role in the scandal. I came away with as many questions about the report as about the role of Moscow and that of candidate and then President Donald Trump. To note a few:

§ Mueller begins, on Page 1, with this assertion: “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” Maybe so, but Mueller, who is not averse to editorializing and contextualizing elsewhere in the report, gives readers no historical background or context for this large generalization. In particular, was the interference—or “meddling,” as media accounts characterize it—more or less “sweeping and systematic” than was Washington’s military intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918 or its very intrusive campaign to reelect Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996—or, on the other side of the ledger, the role of the Soviet-backed American Communist Party in US politics in the 20th century? That is, what warranted a special investigation of this episode in a century of mutual American-Russian interference in the other’s politics? Put somewhat differently: Readers might wonder if, had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, there even would have been a Russiagate and Mueller investigation.

§ It has occasionally been suggested that Russiagate was originated by high-level US officials who disliked candidate Trump’s pledge to “cooperate with Russia.” This suspicion remains unproven, but throughout, Mueller repeatedly attributes to Trump campaign members and Russians who interacted in 2016, potentially in sinister or even criminal ways, a desire for “improved U.S.-Russian relations,” for “bringing the end of the new Cold War,” for a “new beginning with Russia.” Even Russian President Vladimir Putin is reported to have wanted “reconciliation between the United States and Russia.” (See, for example, pp. 5, 98, 105, 124, 157.) The result is, of course, to discredit America’s once-mainstream advocacy of détente. Mueller even brands American pro-détente views—as Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan held in the 20th century—as “pro-Russia foreign policy positions” (p. 102). Does this mean that Americans who hold pro-détente views today, as I and quite a few others do, are to be investigated for their “contacts” with Russians in pursuit of better relations? Mueller seems to say nothing to offset this implication, which has already adversely affected a few Americans mentioned and not mentioned in his report.

§ As reflected in the text and footnotes, Mueller relies heavily on reports by US intelligence agencies, but without treating the recorded misdeeds of those agencies, particularly the CIA under John Brennan, in promoting the Russiagate saga. He also relies heavily on contemporary media accounts of Russiagate as it unfolded, but without taking into account their journalistic malpractices, as abundantly documented by Matt Taibbi, who equates the malpractice with news reports leading up to the US invasion of Iraq.

§ Nor does Mueller consider alternative scenarios and explanations, as any good historical or judicial investigation must do. For example, he accepts uncritically the Clinton/Democratic National Committee allegation that Russian agents hacked and disseminated their emails in 2016. Again, maybe so, but why did he not do his own forensic examination or even mention the alternative finding by VIPS that they were stolen and leaked by an insider? Why did he not question Julian Assange, who claimed to know how and through whom the emails reached WikiLeaks? And how to explain Mueller’s minimal interest in the shadowy professor Joseph Mifsud, who helped entrap George Papadopoulos in London? Mueller reports that Mifsud “had connections to Russia” (p. 5), although a simple Google search suggests that Mifsud was indeed an “agent” but not a Russian one, as widely alleged in media accounts.

§ Though he may do so in the second volume of the report, Mueller oddly does not focus in the first volume on the Steele dossier, where it surely belongs as a foundational Russiagate document and whose anti-Trump “information” is now widely acknowledged to have been “salacious and unverified.” At one point, however, Mueller delivers a telling report: “Trump would not pay for opposition research” (p. 61). Can this be anything other than a damning, if oblique, judgment on the Clinton campaign, which is known to have paid for the Steele dossier?

§ Toward the end of the first volume (pp. 144, 146), Mueller produces a truly stunning revelation, though he seems unaware of it. After the 2016 US presidential election, the Kremlin “appeared not to have preexisting contacts…with senior officials around the President-Elect.” Even more, “Putin spoke of the difficulty faced by the Russian government in getting in touch with the incoming Trump Administration…. Putin indicated that he did not know with whom formally to speak and generally did not know the people around the President-Elect.”

So much for all the shameful Russiagate allegations of Trump-Putin collusion, conspiracy, even treason. Surely it means the United States needs another, different investigation, one into the actual origins and meaning of this fraudulent, corrosive, exceedingly dangerous, and still unending American political scandal.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

A major theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is twofold: The United States is in a new Cold War with Russia, but one more dangerous, more fraught with possibilities of actual war, than was the 40-year Cold War the world survived. I began arguing the first proposition nearly 20 years ago, long before Donald Trump became a presidential candidate and even before Russian President Vladimir Putin became so widely demonized. For many years, it was dismissed by American commentators, though now it is generally accepted.

My second and more important proposition remains generally unacknowledged, even denied, as do the ways in which nearly three years of unsubstantiated Russiagate allegations—against both Trump and Putin—have escalated the new Cold War and made efforts to diminish it through traditional détente-like policies exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible. In particular, those allegations have virtually criminalized the kinds of “cooperation” and “contacts” that kept the nuclear peace between the United States and Soviet Russia in the 20th century. They have misrepresented present-day Russia as a “threat” so ominous that it “attacked American democracy” during the 2016 presidential election. And they have vilified both Trump and Putin to the extent that neither is regarded by much of the US political-media establishment as a legitimate diplomatic partner, even in the event of an existential crisis such as the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

For the legion of anti-Trump Russiagate promoters, Mueller’s findings can do “nothing,” as they have already made clear, to diminish their allegations, however false. (See, for example, Bob Cesca in Salon.) For them, Russiagate has long since become a cult belief with with all the trappings that entails. Thus, Attorney General William Barr’s brief summary, made public on March 24, reporting that Mueller had found no collusion, or conspiracy, between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin was dismissed and Barr himself slurred. But for critical-minded people, how the Mueller report answers, or does not answer, the following questions should be of vital importance:

§ Barr reported that Mueller investigated at length “Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.” Mueller should treat this as little more than another episode in the long history of both Washington and Moscow habitually “meddling” in the other’s internal politics. But if Mueller presents it—as Russiagate zealots do—as an “attack” comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, it will greatly embolden today’s American cold warriors and their demands for some kind of counter-attack against Russia.

§ Considering its damage to American political institutions and to US and international security, Russiagate is the most egregiously fraudulent political scandal in modern American history. We therefore need to know exactly when, how, and why it began. Barr himself is on record as saying that US intelligence services “spied” on the Trump campaign, seemingly implying this involved primarily top FBI officials. But considerable evidence suggests it was more than that, a fuller operation, and points to President Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan (abetted by his overseer James Clapper), as the actual godfather of Russiagate. Unless the Mueller report fully explores the role of all US intelligence agencies in the origins and promotion of Russiagate, including whether Trump’s campaign pledge to “cooperate with Russia” animated them, a full inquiry comparable to the 1976 Senate Church Committee investigation will be imperative.

§ In this connection, what Mueller says, or again does not say, about the falsified “Steele dossier” is crucial. No document played a more consequential and woeful role in the entire Russiagate saga, apart from the almost equally dubious January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” to which it directly led. Indeed, the dossier was the charter document in false allegations against both Putin and Trump. (Trump’s ardent supporter Sean Hannity persists in characterizing the dossier as “a pack of Russian lies,” even though there is no evidence or logic to support Steele’s claim that his “information” came from Kremlin sources.)

§ How Mueller treats Trump’s long history of pursuing business in Moscow is also of considerable consequence. Scores of American corporations have been doing business in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union, from John Deere, Procter & Gamble, and ExxonMobil to Starbucks and Wendy’s. They too inescapably had to have dealings with “Russian oligarchs” and with “the Kremlin”—that is, the vast Presidential Administration bureaucracy that oversees political and economic life in Russia, including major foreign investments, licenses, and other permits. Except for having failed, how did Trump’s efforts in Russia differ significantly from theirs? In any event, Russiagate allegations regarding Trump’s hotel aspirations in Russia have cast a shadow over all US corporations operating there, at least potentially.

§ Similarly, how will the Mueller report interpret Trump’s various “contacts” with Russia over the years? Those of us who have dealt professionally with Russia for decades may have had many more such “contacts” with Russians of all kinds, official and unofficial, than did all Trump’s people combined. Certainly, I have, including with Russian oligarchs, Kremlin staffers, and intelligence officers. If “contacts” are sinister—because of them, several American lives have already been badly impaired, if not ruined—what remains of US-Russian relations (political, economic, academic, cultural, diplomatic, social), except the growing danger of war?

§ Finally, will Mueller dare report on the woeful role played by mainstream American media in originating, inflating, and prolonging false, or at least unverified, Russiagate allegations? If so, he will not be treated kindly by those media outlets. If not, his “Russia investigation” will be very far from complete.

Meanwhile, leading American enemies of détente, worried that the Mueller report might free Trump for another attempt to “cooperate with Russia,” have already issued dire warnings against any such reengagement with the other nuclear superpower. The New York Times even found a CIA associate to equate Russia’s alleged “attack” in 2016 with “terrorism.” Authoritative analysts in the Times and The Washington Post have begun to brand Trump’s cooperation approaches to Moscow as “appeasement,” thereby adding a new toxic dimension to Russiagate, and the new Cold War, no matter Mueller’s findings. Overlooked in the impending Mueller report frenzy is a warning by the American supreme NATO military commander in Europe that “Washington and Moscow are in danger of stumbling into an armed confrontation that…could lead to nuclear war.”

Instead, CNN’s Moscow correspondent reports that both Trump and Putin commented on the Barr-Mueller finding of no collusion and cites these perfectly reasonable separate references by the two leaders as new evidence of Trump-Putin “collusion.”

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Today’s perilous reality is unprecedented and twofold. On the one hand, never have Washington-Moscow relations been so multiply fraught with the possibilities of war. American and Russian forces are in close and increasingly hostile military proximity from Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Georgia to Syria, and now possibly Venezuela. On the other hand, the “cooperation” and “contacts” known as détente that kept the United States and Soviet Union safe from war in the 20th century, conceivably nuclear war, have been anathematized, even criminalized, by nearly three years of false Russiagate allegations. So much so that a 2018 Trump summit meeting with the Kremlin leader, a traditional presidential practice since President Eisenhower, was called “treason,” and more recently his diplomacy with Russia generally branded “appeasement.”

None of these allegations is more recklessly dangerous or fictitious than that “Russia attacked America during the 2016 presidential election”—an act repeatedly equated with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. If true, America, like any great power, must eventually strike back, which would mean we are now living in a state of impending war with Russia, again conceivably nuclear war.

But it isn’t true. No Russian missiles, planes, bombs, paratroopers, submarines, or warships descended on the United States in 2016. None even threatened the nation from afar. Did Russia “meddle” in the US election? Yes, but not significantly unlike the ways in which both sides have “interfered” in each other’s internal politics during the past 100 years. And certainly not as amply as Washington intervened to help rig Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996. With the single exception of US military intervention in the Russian civil war in 1918, no one thought to call those acts of habitual, often ritualistic, meddling “war.”

Nonetheless, even—or perhaps especially—after the attorney general’s March 24 summary of the Mueller “Russian investigation” exonerated President Trump of “collusion,” the legion of diehard Russiagate fanatics have doubled down on the pernicious myth of a “Russian attack” in 2016. Leave aside today’s neo-McCarthyites with regular national platforms like Representative Adam Schiff, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, and too many others. Take instead a progressive magazine journalist who replayed at length his own longstanding fiction of “Putin’s war on America.” Or the foreign editor of The Daily Beast, who warned that “Mueller’s report has Moscow in ecstasy, opening the way for more Putin plots.” These and dozens of other media accounts were doing little more than echoing a US senator who had recently issued a virtual declaration of war against “Putin’s Russia,” which, he insisted, “is an outlaw regime hell-bent on…destroying the US-led liberal global order.”

Still worse, Barr’s summary makes clear that Mueller’s full report includes a major section on “Russian Interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election.” We can only hope that Mueller himself has not merely reiterated the episodes regularly cited as examples of the “Russian attack on America.” Most of these claims, well-known to readers, are hypocritical, mendacious, or outright ignorant of the facts. For example:

§ No forensic evidence has ever been produced to support the allegation that Putin’s Kremlin hacked the DNC in 2016 and gave the incriminating e-mails to Wikileaks. Indeed, then –FBI Director James Comey did not even examine the DNC computers. Nor, so far as is known, has the FBI ever done so. On the other hand, a group of former US intelligence officials known as VIPS has twice produced its own forensic conclusion that the e-mails stolen from the DNC were not a hack but an inside job, a leak. If so—thus far VIPS’s findings have yet to be given the expert scrutiny they require—there never was any “Russia” in Russiagate.

§ Mueller indicted a group of Russian intelligence officials for hacking and other social-media misdeeds during the election. This allegation has become widely known as the “Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election.” But indictments are not proof, only accusations. Moreover, two independent journalists examined Mueller’s evidence and found it seriously lacking. Still more, no one has shown that any Russian social-media “attack” had any effect on the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

§ The infamous Trump Tower meeting between leading members of Trump’s campaign and a motley crew of Russians is invariably cited as part of the “Russian attack.” As a well-informed former Moscow journalist has pointed out, the Russians were hardly “credible as Kremlin emissaries.” More significantly, who is really shocked that a political campaign might seek “dirt” on its opponent? But surely Russian “dirt” is profoundly ominous. If so, at that very time, mid-2016, the now-discredited “dirt” compiled by Christopher Steele, purportedly based on high-level “Kremlin sources” and paid for by the Clinton campaign, was already being circulated to US media. The Trump campaign paid no money and got no “dirt”; the Clinton campaign paid and got plenty of “dirt.” If this was an “attack on America,” it was launched by the Clinton campaign, not Russia. (It seems unlikely, by the way, that Steele actually got any of his “information” from sources inside Russia.) Nor did Trump’s people invent a false cover-story about “orphans” and “adoptions.” The Russian lawyer present really did suggest easing the recent Kremlin ban on American adoptions, depriving many families of the Russian orphans they had all but adopted, in return for sanctions relief for the Russian company she represented. (Evidently, none of the Trump representatives at the meeting or the US media that reported the event as having been exceptionally sinister knew this history.)

§ But surely Paul Manafort’s working for the “pro-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych” was part of a coordinated “Russian attack?” Here we encounter either mendacity or ignorance. At that time, Manafort was advising Yanukovych to pivot away from Russia to the West by accepting a European Union trade agreement that excluded Moscow. That is, at the time of the “attack,” Manafort, later briefly Trump’s campaign manager, was pro-American and anti-Russian. (And, it might be added, his subsequent convictions by Mueller were for financial crimes committed primarily in Ukraine, not Russia, which would suggest Ukrainegate, not Russiagate.)

§ It is widely said that part of the “Russian attack” took the form of corrupting Trump through his long-standing wish to build a hotel in Moscow. But how to explain that many American and other Western franchises have major hotels in Moscow today—Sheraton, Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, among others—and Trump does not? His effort failed, apparently for a lack of “collusion.” If the Kremlin really wanted to “attack America,” surely it would have given Trump the hotel he badly wanted. And what does this allegation say about the scores of large US corporations operating profitably in Russia today? Admittedly, their CEOs are not would-be American presidents—except one, Howard Schultz, whose Starbucks franchise is dotted across Russia. Like Trump, all of these American CEOs had to deal with very high-level Russian officials, many of them “Kremlin-linked,” and, yes, “Russian oligarchs.”

§ It is also true that Trump had the Republican National Convention change its 2016 program plank on Ukraine, deleting a section calling for an escalation of US military assistance to Kiev. Surely this is plain evidence of a Russian “attack on America.” But all the change did was to bring the Republican platform into conformity with the official position of the Obama administration, which was resisting pressure to send more weapons to Kiev.

§ Finally, and most often, the “Russian attack” is said to be evidenced by “back-channel communications” between President-elect Trump and his team, notably Gen. Michael Flynn, and the Kremlin. There was nothing wrong or unprecedented in this, whether attempted by Flynn or others on behalf of the incoming president. Every American president-elect since Nixon, possibly since Eisenhower and Kennedy, had opened such secret communications before taking office. It was a long-established practice, even a tradition.

In short, there was no “Russian attack on America” in 2016. And yet, the fiction, the myth, whatever its origins, persists as a profoundly grave war-risking danger, a ticking time bomb wound ever tighter by Russiagate zealots. States have gone to war due to fictions and myths, but not yet nuclear superpowers against each other. If the adage “There is first time for everything” is true, it is long past time to end Russiagate completely.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

The very few of us who publicly challenged and deplored Russiagate allegations against candidate and then President Donald Trump from the time they first began to appear in mid-2016 should not gloat or rejoice over the US attorney general’s summary of Robert S. Mueller’s key finding: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election.” (On the other hand, those of us repeatedly slurred as Trump and/or Putin “apologists” might feel some vindication.)

But what about the legions of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers, television producers, and other opinion-makers, and their eager media outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this unprecedented political scandal in American history—those who did not stop short of accusing the president of the United States of being a Kremlin “agent,” “asset,” “puppet,” “Manchurian candidate,” and who characterized his conduct and policies as “treasonous”? (These and other examples are cited in my book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate, and in a recent piece by Paul Starobin in City Journal.) Will they now apologize, as decency requires, or, more importantly, explain their motives so that we might understand and avoid another such national trauma?

Shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union, in 1985, he released a banned film, Repentance, that explored the underlying institutional, ideological, and personal dynamics of Stalinism. The film set off a nationwide media trial and condemnation of that murderous era. Though Russiagate has generated in America some Soviet-like practices and ruined a number of lives and reputations, it is, of course, nothing even remotely comparable to the Soviet Stalinist experience. By comparison, therefore, some introspective repentance on the part of Russiagate perpetuators should not be too much to ask. But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller’s “Russia investigation” appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate “investigations.” Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves engaged in “a cover-up.”

Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal, nor does Mueller’s exculpatory finding actually mean that “Russiagate…is dead” and indeed that “it expired in an instant.” Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate’s toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy—damage done not by an alleged “Trump-Putin axis” but by Russsigate’s perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate, I will only note them here.

§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin “attacked our elections” and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere—national, state, and local. If true, or even suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to “secure our elections from hostile powers”— a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems—can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process. Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?

§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a “Kremlin puppet” and thus “illegitimate” were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an “agent of a hostile foreign power” could occupy the White House once, a “Manchurian candidate,” why not again? Will Republicans be able to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign manager, Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a “next time.”

§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents—the so-called Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment—but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi has given us a meticulously documented account of that systematic malpractice, concluding that Mueller’s failure to confirm the media’s Russiagate allegations “is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”

Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times published on its front page an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether “normal standards” should apply to candidate Trump, he explained that they should not: “You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.” Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably factual “journalism” that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway. In either case, this remarkable—and ramifying—Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten. Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller’s finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, “have no regrets.”

§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of “The Resistance.” With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop—and therefore further abetted—the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. As for Mueller’s finding,the party’s virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred. Rachel Maddow continues to hype “the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us.” By any reasonable definition of “attack,” no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller’s full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)

§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized “Putin’s Russia,” thwarted Trump’s necessary attempts to “cooperate with Russia” as somehow “treasonous,” criminalized détente thinking and “inappropriate contacts with Russia”—in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be “derisive and scornful” toward our political life.

The scarce good news it is that some Russian officials hope Mueller’s Russiagate exoneration of Trump will enable the president to resume his attempts to cooperate with Moscow. The bad institutional news is that Congress has invited, on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s initiative, NATO’s secretary general to address it on April 3. That figurehead has announced a renewed attempt to bring the former Soviet republic of Georgia into the military alliance. The last such attempt led to the US-Russian proxy war in Georgia in 2008. When it was tried in Ukraine in 2013, it produced the still ongoing Ukrainian civil and proxy war.

The editor of The New Yorker, itself an ardent Russiagate publication, asks whether “the moral and material corruption [Trump] has inflicted will be with us for a long while.” Perhaps. But the institutional costs of Russiagate are likely to be with us for even longer.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recently weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Heedless of the consequences, or perhaps welcoming them, America’s Cold Warriors and their media platforms have recently escalated their rhetoric against Russia, especially in March. Anyone who has lived through or studied the preceding 40-year Cold War will recognize the ominous echoes of its most dangerous periods, when actual war was on the horizon or a policy option. Here are only a few random but representative examples:

§ In a March 8 Washington Post opinion article, two American professors, neither with any apparent substantive knowledge of Russia or Cold War history, warned that the Kremlin is trying “to undermine our trust in the institutions that sustain a strong nation and a strong democracy. The media, science, academia and the electoral process are all regular targets.” Decades ago, J. Edgar Hoover, the policeman of that Cold War, said the same, indeed made it an operational doctrine.

§ Nor is the purported threat to America only. According to (retired) Gen. David Petraeus and sitting Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, also in the Post on the following day, the “world is once again polarized between two competing visions for how to organize society.” For Putin’s Kremlin, “the existence of the United States’ rule-of-law world is intrinsically threatening.” This is an “intensifying worldwide struggle.” So much for those who dismissed post–Soviet Russia as merely a “regional” power, including former President Barack Obama, and for the myopic notion that a new Cold War was not possible.

§ But the preceding Cold War was driven by an intense ideological conflict between Soviet Communism and Western capitalism. Where is the ideological threat today, considering that post–Soviet Russia is also a capitalist country? In a perhaps unprecedented nearly 10,000-word manifesto from March 14 in the front news pages of (again) the Post, Robert Kagan provided the answer: “Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the great challenge facing the liberal democratic world—a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge.” That is, “authoritarianism” has replaced Soviet Communism in our times, with Russia again in the forefront.

The substance of Kagan’s “authoritarianism” as “an ideological force” is thin, barely enough for a short opinion article, often inconsistent and rarely empirical. It amounts to a batch of “strongman” leaders (prominently Putin, of course), despite their very different kinds of societies, political cultures, states, and histories, and despite their different nationalisms and ruling styles. Still, credit Kagan’s ambition to be the undisputed ideologist of the new American Cold War, though less the Post for taking the voluminous result so seriously.

The 40-year Cold War often flirted with hot war, and that, too, seems to be on the agenda. Words, as Russians say, are also deeds. They have consequences, especially when uttered by people of standing in influential outlets. Again, consider a few examples that might reasonably be considered warmongering:

§ The journal Foreign Policy found space for disgraced former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to declare: “It is not a question of whether [Putin] will attack, but where.” (Saakashvili may be the most discredited “democratic” leader of recent times, having brought the West close to war with Russia in 2008 and since having had to flee his own country and then decamp even from US-backed Ukraine.)

§ NBC News, a reliable source of Cold War frenzy, reported, based on Estonian “intelligence,” an equally persistent source of the same mania, that “Russia is most likely to attack the Baltic States first, but a conflict between Russia and NATO would involve attacks on Western Europe.”

§ Also in March, in The Economist, another retired general, Ben Hodges, onetime commander of the US army in Europe, echoes that apocalyptic perspective: “This is not just about NATO’s eastern front.” (Readers may wish to note that “eastern front” is the designation given by Nazi Germany to its 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia. Russians certainly remember.)

§ Plenty of influential American Cold War zealots seem eager to respond to the bugle charge, among them John E. Herbst, a stalwart at the Atlantic Council (NATO’s agitprop “think tank” in Washington), and the Post’s deputy editorial-page editor, Jackson Diehl. Both want amply armed US and NATO warships sent to what Russians sometimes call their bordering “lakes,” the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. To do so would likely mean the “war” NBC envisages.

Lest readers think all this is merely the “chattering” of opinion-makers, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once termed it, consider a summary of legislation being prepared by a bipartisan US Senate committee, pointedly titled and with a fearsome acronym, DASKA (the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019). Again, Russia is ritualistically accused of “malign influence” and “aggression” around the world, the quality of the committee’s thinking succinctly expressed by one of the Republican senators: “Putin’s Russia is an outlaw regime that is hell-bent on undermining international law and destroying the US-led liberal global order.” There is no evidence for these allegations—Russian policy-makers are constantly citing international law, and the US “liberal global order,” if it ever existed, has done a fine job of undoing itself—but with “an outlaw regime,” there can be no diplomacy, nor do the senators propose any, only war.

A recurring theme of my recently published book War with Russia? is that the new Cold War is more dangerous, more fraught with hot war, than the one we survived. All of the above amply confirms that thesis, but there is more. Histories of the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War tell us that both sides came to understand their mutual responsibility for the conflict, a recognition that created political space for the constant peace-keeping negotiations, including nuclear arms control agreements, often known as détente. But as I also chronicle in the book, today’s American Cold Warriors blame only Russia, specifically “Putin’s Russia,” leaving no room or incentive for rethinking any US policy toward post-Soviet Russia since 1991. (See, for example, Nataliya Bugayova’s recent piece for the Institute for the Study of War.)

Still more, as I have also long pointed out, Moscow closely follows what is said and written in the United States about US-Russian relations. Here too words have consequences. On March 14, Russia’s National Security Council, headed by President Putin, officially raised its perception of American intentions toward Russia from “military dangers” (opasnosti) to direct “military threats” (ugrozy). In short, the Kremlin is preparing for war, however defensive its intention.

Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold War. This too is a major theme of my book and another reason why this Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. In the 1970s and 1980s, advocates of détente were well-organized, well-funded, and well-represented, from grassroots politics and universities to think tanks, mainstream media, Congress, the State Department, and even the White House. Today there is no such opposition anywhere.

A major factor is, of course, “Russiagate.” As evidenced in the sources I cite above, much of the extreme American Cold War advocacy we witness today is a mindless response to President Trump’s pledge to find ways to “cooperate with Russia” and to the still-unproven allegations generated by it. Certainly, the Democratic Party is not an opposition party in regard to the new Cold War. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of its old guard, needlessly initiated an address to Congress by NATO’s secretary general, in April, which will be viewed in Moscow as a provocation. She also decried as “appalling” Trump’s diplomacy with Russian President Putin, whom she dismissed as a “thug.” Such is the state of statesmanship today in the Democratic Party.

Its shining new pennies seem little different. Beto O’Rourke, now a declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, promises to lead our “indispensable country,” an elite conceit that has inspired many US wars and cold wars. Another fledgling would-be Democratic leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seems to have bought into Russiagate’s iconic promotion of US intelligence agencies, tweeting on January 12, “The FBI had to open inquiry on whether the most powerful person in the United States is actually working for Russia.” Evidently, neither she nor O’Rourke understand that growing Cold War is incompatible with progressive policies at home, in America or in Russia.

Among Democrats, there is one exception, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, who is also a declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Not surprisingly, for lamenting Russiagate’s contribution to the worsening new Cold War and calling for new approaches to Russia itself, Gabbard was shrilly and misleadingly slurred by NBC News. (For a defense of Gabbard, see Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.) Herself a veteran of the US military forces, Representative Gabbard soldiers on, the only would-be Democratic president calling for an end to this most dangerous new Cold War.

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Russiagate allegations that the Kremlin has a subversive hold over President Trump, and even put him in the White House, have poisoned American political life for almost three years. Among other afflictions, it has inspired an array of media malpractices, virtually criminalized anti–Cold War thinking about Russia, and distorted the priorities of the Democratic Party. And this leaves aside the woeful impact Russiagate has had in Moscow—on its policymakers’ perception of the US as a reliable partner on mutually vital strategic issues and on Russian democrats who once looked to the American political system as one to be emulated, a loss of “illusions” I previously reported.

Contrary to many expectations, even if the Mueller report, said to be impending, finds, as did a Senate committee recently, “no direct evidence of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Russiagate allegations are unlikely to dissipate in the near future and certainly not before the 2020 presidential election. There are several reasons this is so, foremost among them the following:

§ The story of a “Kremlin puppet” in the White House is so fabulous and unprecedented it is certain to become a tenacious political legend, as have others in American history despite the absence of any supporting evidence.

§ The careers of many previously semi-obscure Democratic members of Congress have been greatly enhanced—if that is the right word—by their aggressive promotion of Russiagate. (Think, for example, of the ubiquitous media coverage and cable-television appearances awarded to Representatives Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Maxine Walters, and to Senators Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal.) If Mueller fails to report “collusion” of real political substance, these and other Russiagate zealots, as well as their supporters in the media, will need to reinterpret run-of-the-mill (and bipartisan) financial corruption and mundane “contacts with Russia” as somehow treasonous. (The financial-corruption convictions of Paul Manafort, Mueller’s single “big win” to date, did not charge “collusion” and had to do mainly with Ukraine, not Russia.) Having done so already, there is every reason to think Democrats will politicize these charges again, if only for the sake of their own careers. Witness, for example, the scores of summonses promised by Jerrold Nadler, the new Democratic chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

§ Still worse, the top Democratic congressional leadership evidently has concluded that promoting the new Cold War, of which Russiagate has become an integral part, is a winning issue in 2020. How else to explain Nancy Pelosi’s proposal—subsequently endorsed by the equally unstatesmanlike Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, and adopted—to invite the secretary general of NATO, a not-very-distinguished Norwegian politician named Jens Stoltenberg, to address a joint session of Congress? The honor was once bestowed on figures such as Winston Churchill and at the very least leaders of actual countries. Trump has reasonably questioned NATO’s mission and costs nearly 30 years after the Soviet Union disappeared, as did many Washington think tanks and pundits back in the 1990s. But for Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, there can be no such discussion, only valorization of NATO, even though the military alliance’s eastward expansion has brought the West to the brink of war with nuclear Russia. Anything Trump suggests must be opposed, regardless of the cost to US national security. Will the Democrats go to the country in 2020 as the party of investigations, subpoenas, Russophobia, and escalating cold war—and win?

Readers of my new book War With Russia?, which argues that there are no facts to support the foundational political allegations of Russiagate, may wonder how, then, Russiagate can continue to be such a major factor in our politics. As someone has recently pointed out, the Democrats and their media are now operating on the Liberty Valance principle: When the facts are murky or nonexistent, “print the legend.”

This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen’s most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.

Even though the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found “no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Russiagate allegations of “collusion” between candidate and then–President Donald Trump and the Kremlin have poisoned American politics for nearly three years. They are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, due not only to the current subpoena-happy Democratic chairs of House “investigative” committees.

At the core of the Russiagate narrative is the allegation that the Kremlin “meddled” in the 2016 US presidential election. The word “meddle” is nebulous and could mean almost anything, but Russiagate zealots deploy it in the most ominous ways, as a war-like “attack on America,” a kind of “Pearl Harbor.” They also imply that such meddling is unprecedented when in fact both the United States and Russia have interfered repeatedly in the other’s internal politics, in one way or another, certainly since the 1917 Russian Revolution.

For context, recall that such meddling is an integral part of Cold War and that there have been three Cold Wars between America and Russia during the past one hundred years. The first was from 1917 to 1933, when Washington did not even formally recognize the new Soviet government in Moscow. The second is, of course, the best known, the 40-year Cold War from about 1948 to 1988, when the US and Soviet leaders, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, declared it over. And then, by my reckoning, the new, ongoing Cold War began in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration initiated the expansion of NATO toward Russia’s borders and bombed Moscow’s longtime Slav and political ally Serbia.

That’s approximately 85 years of US–Russian Cold War in a hundred years of relations and, not surprisingly, a lot of meddling on both sides, even leaving aside espionage and spies. The meddling has taken various forms.

In the period from 1917 to 1933, such interference was extreme on both sides. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson sent approximately 8,000 US troops to Siberia to fight against the “Reds” in the Russian Civil War. For its part, Moscow founded the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 and urged the American Communist Party to pursue revolutionary regime change in the United States, an historical analogue of the “democracy promotion” later pursued by Washington. During these years, both sides eagerly generated, and amply funded, “disinformation” and “propaganda” directed at and inside the other country.

During the second Cold War, from 1948 to 1988, the “meddling” was expanded and institutionalized. At least until the McCarthyite attempted purge of such activities, the American Communist Party, now largely under the control of Moscow, was an active force in US politics, with some appeal to intellectuals and others, as well as bookstores and “schools”—all amply supplied with English-language Soviet “propaganda” and “disinformation”—in many major cities.

US meddling during those years took various forms, but the most relevant in terms of the role of social media in Russiagate were nearly around-the-clock Russian-language short-wave radio broadcasts. When I lived in Moscow off and on from 1976 to 1982, every Russian I knew had a short-wave radio as well as a nearby place where reception was good. Many were enticed by the then-semi-forbidden rock music—Elton John was the rage, having surpassed The Beatles—but stayed tuned for the editorial content, which was, Soviet authorities complained, “disinformation.”

Suspect “contacts” with the other side was another Cold War precursor of Russiagate. Here too I can provide first-hand testimony. By 1980, my companion Katrina vanden Heuvel—now my wife and publisher and editor of The Nation—joined me on regular stays in Moscow. Most of our social life was among Moscow’s community of survivors of Stalin’s Gulag and the even larger community of active dissidents. In mid-1982, both of us were suddenly denied Soviet visas. I appealed to two sympathetic high-level Soviet officials. After a few weeks, both reported back, “I can do nothing. You have too many undesirable contacts.” (Our visas were reissued shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985.)

In the post-Soviet era since 1992, at least until Russiagate allegations began in mid-2016, almost all of the “meddling” has been committed by the United States. During the 1990s, under the banner of “democracy promotion,” there was a virtual American political invasion of Russia. Washington openly supported, politically and financially, the pro-American faction in Russian politics, as did American mainstream media coverage. US government and foundation funding went to desirable Russian NGOs. And the Clinton administration lent ample support, again political and financial, to President Boris Yeltsin’s desperate and ultimately successful reelection campaign in 1996. (For more on the 1990s, see my Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.) Conversely, there was almost no Russian meddling in American politics in the 1990s, apart from the pro-Yeltsin lobby, largely made up of Americans, in Washington.

As for Russia under Vladimir Putin, since 2000, again there was virtually no notable Russian “meddling” in American politics until the Russiagate allegations began. (Not surprisingly, in light of the history of mutual “meddling,” Russian social media were active during the 2016 US election, but with no discernible impact on the outcome, as Aaron Maté has shown and as Nate Silver has confirmed.) American meddling in Russia, on the other hand, continued apace, or tried to do so. Until more restrictive Russian laws were passed, US funding continued to go to Russian media and NGOs perceived to be in US interests. Hillary Clinton felt free in 2011 to publicly criticize Russian elections, and, the same year, then–Vice President Joseph Biden, while visiting Moscow, advised Putin not to return to the presidency. (Imagine Putin today advising Biden as to whether or not to seek the US presidency.)

Indeed, the Kremlin may be more tolerant of American “meddling” today than Washington is of Russian “interference.” Maria Butina, a young Russian woman living in the United States, has been in prison for months, much of the time in solitary confinement, charged with “networking” on behalf of her government without having registered as a foreign agent. Hundreds of Americans have “networked” similarly in Russia since the 1990s, myself among them, to the indifference of the Kremlin, though this may now be changing, largely in reaction to US policies.

How should we feel about US-Russian “meddling” of the kind that involves dissemination of their respective information and points of view? We should encourage it on both sides. Attempts to suppress it is leading to censorship in both countries, while the more conflicting information and dialogue we have the better—better understanding and better policy-making and more and better democracy on both sides. (Disclosure: All of my own books and many of my articles have been published in Moscow in Russian-language translations. The reactions of Russian readers are exceptionally valuable to me, as they should be to any American author.)

Having studied Soviet political history for decades and having lived off and on in that repressive political system before Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms—in Russia under Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s—I may be unduly concerned about similar repressive trends I see unfolding in democratic America during three years of mounting Russiagate allegations. Or I may exaggerate them. Even if I am right about Soviet-like practices in the United States, they are as yet only adumbrations, and certainly nothing as repressive as they once were in Russia.

And yet, ominous trends are not to be discounted and still less ignored. I have commented on them previously, on the official use of “informants” to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, and such practices have now multiplied. Consider the following:

Soviet authorities, through the KGB, regularly charged and punished dissidents and other unacceptably independent citizens with linguistic versions of “collusion” and “contacts” with foreigners, particularly Americans. (Having inadvertently been the American in several cases, I can testify that the “contacts” were entirely casual, professional, or otherwise innocent.) Is something similar under way here? As the former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out, to make allegations of Trump associates’ “collusion” is to question “everyone who had interacted with Russia in the last quarter-century.” In my case and those of not a few scholarly colleagues, it would mean in the last half-century, or nearly. Nor is this practice merely hypothetical or abstract. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to an American professor and public intellectual demanding that this person turn over “all communications [since January 2015] with Russian media organizations, their employees, representatives, or associates,” with “Russian persons or business interests,” “with or about US political campaigns or entities relating to Russia,” and “related to travel to Russia, and/or meetings, or discussions, or interactions that occurred during such travel.” We do not know how many such letters the Committee has sent, but this is not the only one. If this is not an un-American political inquisition, it is hard to say what would be. (It was also a common Soviet practice, though such “documents” were usually obtained by sudden police raids, of which there have recently been at least two in our own country, both related to Russiagate.)

In this connection, Soviet authorities also regularly practiced selective prosecution, which is persecution intended to send a chilling signal to other would-be offenders. For example, in 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested for publishing their literary writings abroad under pseudonyms, an emerging practice the Kremlin wanted to stop. And in 1972, an important dissident figure, Pytor Yakir, was held in solitary confinement until he “broke” and signed a “confession,” even naming some of his associates, which greatly demoralized the dissident movement. Paul Manafort is no American dissident, literary or otherwise, and he well may be guilty of the financial misdeeds and tax evasion as charged. But he is facing, at nearly age 70, in effect a life sentence in prison and, through fines imposed, the bankruptcy of his family. We may reasonably ask: Is this selective prosecution/persecution? How many other hired US political operatives in foreign countries in recent years have been so audited and onerously prosecuted? Or has Manafort been singled out because he was once Trump’s campaign manager? We may also ask why a young Russian woman living in Washington, Maria Butina, was arrested and kept in solitary confinement until she confessed—that is, pleaded guilty. (She is still in prison.) Her offense? Publicly extolling the virtues of her native Russian government and advocating détente-like relations between Washington and Moscow without having registered as a foreign agent. Americans living in Russia frequently do the same on behalf of their country. Certainly, I have often done so. Are patriotism and promoting détente as an alternative to the new and more dangerous Cold War now a crime in the United States, or is the selective prosecution of Butina a response to Trump’s call for “cooperation with Russia”?

Now we have an even more alarming Soviet-like practice. Former acting head of the FBI  Andrew McCabe tells us that in 2017, he and other high officials discussed a way to remove President Trump from office. As Alan Dershowitz, a professor of constitutional law, remarked, they had in mind an “attempted coup d’état.” Which may remind students of Soviet history that two of its leaders were targets of a bureaucratic or administrative “coup”—Nikita Khrushchev twice, in 1957 and 1964, the latter being successful; and Gorbachev in August 1991, though perhaps several other plots against him may still be unknown. Khrushchev and Gorbachev were disruptors of the bureaucratic status quo and its entrenched interests—very much unlike President Trump, but disruptors nonetheless.

Finally, at least for now, there is the role media censorship played in Soviet repression. To a knowing reader who could read “between the lines,” the Soviet press actually provided a lot of usable information. Equally important, though, was what it excluded as taboo—particularly news and other information that undermined the official narrative of current and historical events. (All this ended with Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost in the late 1980s.) In the era of Russiagate, American mainstream media are practicing at least partial censorship by systematically excluding voices and other sources that directly challenge their orthodox narrative. There are many such malpractices in leading newspapers and on influential television programs, but they are the subject of another commentary.

These examples remind us that we are also living in an age of blame—particularly blaming Russia for mishaps of our own making, for electoral outcomes and other unwelcome developments elsewhere in the world. Drawing attention to Soviet precedents is not to blame that long-gone nation state. Instead, we again need Walt Kelly’s cartoon philosopher Pogo, who told us decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This commentary is based on the most recent weekly discussion between Cohen and the host of The John Batchelor Show. (The podcast is here. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.)

Manichaean Cold War myopia and ludicrous Russiagate allegations have produced one of the worst periods of American “geopolitical” thinking in recent decades. Consider President Trump’s recently announced withdrawals of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan. Instead of applauding these long-overdue steps, the bipartisan US political-media establishment has denounced them as “Trump’s gifts to Putin.”

But why would Russian President Putin want to be without the United States as an ally in the fight against terrorists in these two countries, which Moscow has long regarded as its geopolitical backyard? In Syria, where, as Putin has repeatedly warned, thousands of jihadists with Russian passports have appeared and vowed, if they take Damascus, to return to Russia and wage the same war there? And why even more in Afghanistan, where ever since the Soviet invasion in 1979, Moscow has worried that victorious Afghan terrorists and their foreign allies—by whatever name in whatever organized form—will flow through Central Asia into Russia, along with the indigenous Afghan war-funding crop, opium poppy? (Heroin addiction, fostered by cheap Afghan opium, is already reaching epidemic proportions in Russia.)

Unlike a large segment of the US policy-media elite, Putin can think geopolitically in his nation’s clear national interests. For 17 years, he has sought a full anti-terrorist alliance with the United States—first with President George W. Bush after 9/11, then with President Barack Obama, always in vain. As a candidate and then as president, Trump has seemed to want to seize the opportunity, but has been thwarted by Russiagate zealots, primarily Democrats, though not only.

Now we are told that Trump did something “treacherous” by meeting privately with Putin without adequate witnesses or note-keeping. His Russiagate accusers know history as poorly as they understand American national security. President Richard Nixon, for example, once met with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev with only Brezhnev’s translator present.

We should hope instead that in their necessarily secret meetings—there are enemies of cooperation in high places on both sides—Trump and Putin discussed expansive US-Russian cooperation against organized international terrorists, who are in pursuit of radioactive materials to make their explosions more lethal, whether the threat be abundantly visible in Syria and Afghanistan or silently incubating again in Europe and in Russia—or in our own country.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset its cautionary doomsday clock ever closer to midnight. The growing dangers of a new nuclear arms race also require the kind of US-American cooperation that has been badly shredded by the New Cold War and by unproven Russiagate allegations. But international terrorism has already repeatedly struck midnight. Is that not late enough to let Trump and Putin do what they can for the sake of everyone’s security, as American presidents and Kremlin leaders have previously done—and were expected to do?

This commentary is based on the most recent weekly discussion between Stephen F. Cohen—professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton—and the host of The John Batchelor Show. This installment also includes Russia as an energy superpower and the growing role of the church in Russia. (The podcast is here. Now in their fifth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com.) Cohen’s new book, War With Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate, is available in paperback and as an ebook.

For decades, Russia’s self-described “liberals” and “democrats” have touted the American political system as one their country should emulate. They have had abundant encouragement in this aspiration over the years from legions of American crusaders, who in the 1990s launched a large-scale, deeply intrusive, and ill-destined campaign to transform post-Communist Russia into a replica of American “democratic capitalism.” (See my book Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.) Some Russian liberals even favored NATO’s eastward expansion when it began in the late 1990s on the grounds that it would bring democratic values closer to Russia and protect their own political fortunes at home.

Their many opponents on Russia’s political spectrum, self-described “patriotic nationalists,” have insisted that the country must look instead to its own historical traditions for its future development and, still more, that American democracy was not a system to be so uncritically emulated. Not infrequently, they characterize Russia’s democrats as “fifth columnists” whose primary loyalties are to the West, not their own country. Understandably, it is a highly fraught political debate and both sides have supporters in high places, from the Kremlin and other government offices to military and security agencies, as well as devout media outlets.

In this regard, Russiagate allegations in the United States, which have grown from vague suspicions of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 presidential election to flat assertions that Putin’s Kremlin put Donald Trump in the White House, have seriously undermined Russian democrats and bolstered the arguments of their “patriotic” opponents. Americans, who may have been misled by their own media into thinking that Russia today is a heavily censored “autocracy” in which all information is controlled by the Kremlin, may be surprised to learn that many Russians, especially among the educated classes but not only, are well-informed about the Russiagate story and follow it with great interest. They get reasonably reliable information from Russian news broadcasts and TV talk shows; from direct cable and satellite access to Western broadcasts, including CNN; from translation sites that daily render scores of Western print news reports and commentaries into Russian (inosmi.ru being the most voluminous); and from the largely uncensored Internet.

How many Russians believe that the Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House is less clear. Widespread skepticism is often expressed sardonically: “If Putin can put his man in the White House, why can’t he put a mayor in my town who will have the garbage picked up?” Others, who believe the allegation, often take some pleasure, or schadenfreude, from it, having grown resentful of US “meddling” in Russian political life for so many years. (In recent history, the remembered example is the Clinton administration’s very substantial efforts on behalf of President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996.)

But what should interest us is how Russiagate allegations have tarnished America’s democratic reputation in Russia and thereby undermined the pro-American arguments of Russia’s liberal democrats, who were never a very potent political or electoral force and whose fortunes have already declined in recent years. Consider the following:

§ Russian democrats argue that their country’s elections are manipulated and unfair, including, but not only, those that put and kept Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. “Patriotic nationalists” now reply that Russiagate rests on the allegation, widely reported and believed in the United States, that an American presidential election was successfully manipulated on behalf of the desired candidate and that the entire US electoral system may be vulnerable to manipulation.

§ Russian democrats protest that oligarchic and other money has corrupted Russian politics. Their opponents argue that special counsel Robert Mueller’s convictions and other indictments—in the cases of Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, for example—prove that American political life is no less corrupt financially.

§ Going back to Soviet times and continuing today, a major complaint of Russian democrats has been the shadowy, malevolent role played by intelligence agencies, particularly the KGB and its successor organization. Patriotic nationalists point to disclosures that their US institutional counterparts, the CIA and FBI, played a secretive and major role in the origins of Russiagate allegations against Trump as a presidential candidate and since his inauguration.

§ Russian democratic dissidents have long protested, and been stifled by, varying degrees of official censorship. Their Russian opponents argue that campaigns now underway in the United States against “Russian disinformation” in the media are a form of American censorship.

§ Many Russians distrust their media, particularly “mainstream” state media. Their opponents retort that American mainstream media is no better, having undertaken a kind of “war” against President Trump and along the way having had to retract dozens of widely circulated stories. In this connection, we may wonder what Russian skeptics made of an astonishingly revealing statement by the media critic of The New York Times—an authoritative newspaper in Russia as well—on January 21 that the “ultimate prize” for leading American journalists is having “helped bring down a president.” By now, Americans may not be shocked by such a repudiation by the Times of its own professed mission and standards, but for Russian journalists, who have long looked to the paper as a model, the reaction was likely profound disillusionment.

§ Putin’s Russian democratic critics often protest his “imperial” foreign policies, so imagine how they interpreted this imperial statement by Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on January 15: “Nations, like children, crave predictability. They need to know the rules. The United States is like a parent. Other countries look to it for guidance and to enforce the rules. Trump has utterly failed in that regard.” Any Russian with a medium-range memory is unlikely to miss this echo of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward the “children” it ruled. And yet, a columnist for The Washington Post—also an authoritative newspaper in Russia—emphasizes Trump’s failure to “enforce the [imperial] rules” as a Russiagate indictment.

§ Perhaps most Russians who are informed about Russiagate believe that all the various allegations against Trump are actually motivated by US elite opposition to his campaign promise to “cooperate with Russia.” This means, as Russia’s “patriotic nationalists” have always argued, that Washington will never accept Russia as an equal great power in world affairs, no matter who rules Russia or how (whether Communist or anti-Communist, as is Putin). To this, Russia’s liberal democrats have yet to find a compelling answer.

One Russian, however, who personifies biographically both that system’s recent democratic experiences and its nationalist traditions, has had a mostly unambiguous reaction to Russiagate. Despite US mainstream-media claims that Russian President Putin is “happy” with the “destabilization and chaos” caused by Russiagate in the United States, such consequences are incompatible with what has been Putin’s historical mission since coming to power almost 20 years ago: to rebuild Russia socially and economically after its post-Soviet collapse in the 1990s, and to achieve this through modernizing partnerships with democratic nations—from Europe to the United States—in a stable international environment. For this reason, Putin himself is unlikely to have plotted Russiagate or to have taken any real satisfaction from its woeful consequences.

Which leaves us with an as-yet-unanswerable question. Eventually, Trump and Putin will leave office. But the consequences of Russiagate, both in America and in Russia, will not depart with them. What will be the subsequent, longer-term consequences for both countries and for relations between them? From today’s perspective, nothing good.

Stephen F. Cohen’s book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate has just been published. This commentary is based on his most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their fifth year, previous commentaries are at TheNation.com.

The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship—why mince words and call it “collusion”?—with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.

Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will not produce the hoped-for “bombshell” to end Trump’s presidency. Certainly, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, “The president must go,” his drop line exhorting, “What are we waiting for?” (In some countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.

And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times’ own recent “bombshells,” published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials “began investigating whether [President Trump] had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.” None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those “agents and officials” almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual, the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: “No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.”)

Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the “news” almost daily in the synergistic print and cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clinton’s top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution. According to Talbott, “We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker…. Trump has been colluding with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency.” In fact, we do not “know” any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated suspicions and allegations.

In this cult-like commentary, the “threat” of “a hostile Russia” must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth, Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.) For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless, the Times quotes Page at length: “In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability…to spread our democratic ideals.” Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though for the Times, in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.

Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened “threat” represented by “Putin’s Russia.” If true, we would expect the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because, according to The Washington Post, he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed the records of their private talks, sure signs of “treasonous” behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018.

It’s hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged “private time” for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev’s détente policies with Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump’s proclaimed goal of “cooperation with Russia.”)

That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the “secrecy of presidential private meetings…has been the rule, not the exception.” He continues, “There’s nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president’s private meetings with foreign leaders…. Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not.” Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US “bureaucracy,” sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev’s translator was present.

Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took notes—the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result, in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)

And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump’s meetings with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years—and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book War with Russia?—that anti-Trump Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.

The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.

Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate. This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is here. Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

President Trump was wrong in asserting that the United States destroyed the Islamic State’s territorial statehood in a large part of Syria—Russia and its allies accomplished that—but he is right in proposing to withdraw some 2,000 American forces from that tragically war-ravaged country. The small American contingent serves no positive combat or strategic purpose unless it is to thwart the Russian-led peace negotiations now underway or to serve as a beachhead for a US war against Iran. Still worse, its presence represents a constant risk that American military personnel could be killed by Russian forces also operating in that relatively small area, thereby turning the new Cold War into a very hot conflict, even if inadvertently. Whether or not Trump understood this danger, his decision, if actually implemented—it is being fiercely resisted in Washington—will make US-Russian relations, and thus the world, somewhat safer.

Nonetheless, Trump’s decision on Syria, coupled with his order to reduce US forces in Afghanistan by half, has been “condemned,” as The New York Times approvingly reported, “across the ideological spectrum,” by “the left and right.” Analyzing these condemnations, particularly in the opinion-shaping New York Times and Washington Post and on interminable (and substantially uninformed) MSNBC and CNN segments, again reveals the alarming thinking that is deeply embedded in the US bipartisan policy-media establishment.

First, no foreign-policy initiative undertaken by President Trump, however wise it may be in regard to US national interests, will be accepted by that establishment. Any prominent political figure who does so will promptly and falsely be branded, in the malign spirit of Russiagate, as “pro-Putin,” or, as was Senator Rand Paul, arguably the only foreign-policy statesman in the senate today, “an isolationist.” This is unprecedented in modern American history. Not even Richard Nixon was subject to such establishment constraints on his ability to conduct national-security policy during the Watergate scandals.

Second, not surprisingly, the condemnations of Trump’s decision are infused with escalating, but still unproven, Russiagate allegations of the president’s “collusion” with the Kremlin. Thus, equally predictably, the Times finds a Moscow source to say, of the withdrawals, “Trump is God’s gift that keeps on giving” to Putin. (In fact, it is not clear that the Kremlin is eager to see the United States withdraw from either Syria or Afghanistan, as this would leave Russia alone with what it regards as common terrorist enemies.) Closer to home, there is the newly reelected Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who, when asked about Trump’s policies and Russian President Putin, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “I think that the president’s relationship with thugs all over the world is appalling. Vladimir Putin, really? Really? I think it’s dangerous.” By this “leadership” reasoning, Trump should be the first US president since FDR to have no “relationship” whatsoever with a Kremlin leader. And to the extent that Pelosi speaks for the Democratic Party, it can no longer be considered a party of American national security.

But, third, something larger than even anti-Trumpism plays a major role in condemnations of the president’s withdrawal decisions: imperial thinking about America’s rightful role in the world. Euphemisms abound, but, if not an entreaty to American empire, what else could the New York Times’ David Sanger mean when he writes of a “world order that the United States has led for the 79 years since World War II,” and complains that Trump is reducing “the global footprint needed to keep that order together”? Or when President Obama’s national-security adviser Susan Rice bemoans Trump’s failures in “preserving American global leadership,” which a Times lead editorial insists is an “imperative”? Or when General James Mattis in his letter of resignation echoes President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeline Albright—and Obama himself—in asserting that “the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world”? We cannot be surprised. Such “global” imperial thinking has informed US foreign-policy decision-making for decades—it’s taught in our schools of international relations—and particularly the many disastrous, anti-“order” wars it has produced.

Fourth, and characteristic of empires and imperial thinking, there is the valorization of generals. Perhaps the most widespread and revealing criticism of Trump’s withdrawal decisions is that he did not heed the advice of his generals, the undistinguished, uninspired Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis in particular. The pseudo-martyrdom and heroizing of Mattis, especially by the Democratic Party and its media, remind us that the party had earlier, in its Russiagate allegations, valorized US intelligence agencies, and, having taken control of the House, evidently intends to continue to do so. Anti-Trumpism is creating political cults of US intelligence and military institutions. What does this tell us about today’s Democratic Party? More profoundly, what does this tell us about an American Republic purportedly based on civilian rule?

Finally, and potentially tragically, Trump’s announcement of the Syrian withdrawal was the moment for a discussion of the long imperative US alliance with Russia against international terrorism, a Russia whose intelligence capabilities are unmatched in this regard. (Recall, for example, Moscow’s disregarded warnings about one of the brothers who set off bombs during the Boston Marathon.) Such an alliance has been on offer by Putin since 9/11. President George W. Bush completely disregarded it. Obama flirted with the offer but backed (or was pushed) away. Trump opened the door for such a discussion, as indeed he has since his presidential candidacy, but now again, at this most opportune moment, there has not been a hint of it in our political-media establishment. Instead, a national security imperative has been treated as “treacherous.”

In this context, there is Trump’s remarkable, but little-noted or forgotten, tweet of December 3 calling on the presidents of Russia and China to join him in “talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race.” If Trump acts on this essential overture, as we must hope he will, will it too be traduced as “treacherous”—also for the first time in American history? If so, it will again confirm my often-expressed thesis that powerful forces in America would prefer trying to impeach the president to avoiding a military catastrophe. And that those forces, not President Trump or Putin, are now the gravest threat to American national security.

(This commentary is based on the most recent of Cohen’s weekly discussions with John Batchelor on the new US-Russian Cold War. The podcast is here. Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor mark the fifth anniversary of their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments are at TheNation.com.) Cohen reflects on major developments in 2018, in part drawing on themes in his new book War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.

The new Cold War is not a mere replica of its 40-year predecessor, which the world survived. In vital ways, it is more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, as illustrated by events in 2018, among them:

The militarization of the new Cold War intensified, with direct or proxy US-Russian military confrontations in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and Syria; the onset of another nuclear arms race with both sides in quest of more “usable” weapons; mounting, but entirely unsubstantiated, claims by influential Cold War lobbies, such as the Atlantic Council, that Moscow is contemplating an invasion of Europe; and the growing influence of Moscow’s own “hawks.” The previous Cold War was also highly militarized, but never directly on Russia’s own borders, as is this one, from the small nations of Eastern Europe to Ukraine, a process that continued to unfold in 2018.

Russiagate—allegations that President Trump is strongly influenced by or even under the sway of the Kremlin, for which there remains no actual evidence—continued to escalate as a dangerous and unprecedented factor in the new Cold War. What began as suggestions that the Kremlin had “meddled” in the 2016 US presidential election grew into mainstream insinuations, even assertions, that the Kremlin put Trump in the White House. The result has been to all but shackle Trump as a crisis-negotiator with Russian President Putin. Thus, for attending a July summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki—during which Trump defended the legitimacy of his own presidency—he was widely denounced by mainstream US media and politicians as having committed “treason.” And twice subsequently Trump was compelled to cancel scheduled meetings with Putin. Americans may reasonably ask whether the politicians, journalists, and organizations that assail Trump for the same kind of summit diplomacy practiced by every president since Eisenhower actually prefer trying to impeach Trump to avoiding war with Russia.

The same question can be asked of major mainstream media outlets that have virtually abandoned the reasonably balanced and fact-based reporting and commentary they practiced during the latter stages of the preceding Cold War. In 2018, for example, their nonfactual, surreal allegation that “Putin’s Russia attacked American democracy” in 2016 became an orthodox dogma and the pivot of their Russiagate and new Cold War narrative. Also unlike during the preceding Cold War, they continued to exclude dissenting, alternative reporting, perspectives, and opinions. Still more, these media outlets persist in relying heavily on former intelligence chiefs as sources and commentators, even though the role of these intel officials in the origins of the Russiagate narrative now seems clear. A striking example of media malpractice was coverage of the maritime conflict between Ukrainian and Russian gunboats on November 25, in the Kerch straits between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. All empirical evidence available, as well as Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s desperate need to bolster his chances for reelection in March 2019, strongly indicated that this was a deliberate provocation by Kiev. But the US mainstream media portrayed it instead as yet another instance of “Putin’s aggression.” Thus was a dangerous US-Russian proxy war fundamentally misrepresented to the American public.

In large part due to such media malpractice, and despite the escalating dangers in US-Russian relations, in 2018 there continued to be no significant anti–Cold War opposition anywhere in mainstream American political life—not in Congress, the major political parties, think tanks, or on college campuses, only a very few individual dissenters. Accordingly, the policy of détente with Russia, or what Trump has repeatedly called “cooperation with Russia,” still found no significant supporters in mainstream politics, even though it was the policy of other Republican presidents, notably Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan. Trump has tried, but he has been thwarted, repeatedly again in 2018.

Meanwhile, the charge that Russia “attacked American democracy” and continues to do so might best be applied to Russiagate promoters themselves. Their allegations have undermined the America presidency as an institution and cast doubt on US elections. By criminalizing both “contacts with Russia” and proposals for “better relations,” and by threatening to weed out a capacious and nebulous body of “disinformation” in US media, they have considerably diminished the vaunted American marketplace of free speech and ideas. Also under growing assault are traditional concepts of US political justice, which, at least based on what is known in regard to Russia, have been abused in the cases of Gen. Michael Flynn and, in Soviet-like fashion, of Maria Butina. At worst, this young Russian woman seems to have been an undeclared (but candidly open) advocate of “better relations” and an ardent proponent of her own country. For this, something long pursued by young Americans in Russia as well, she was held for months in solitary confinement until she confessed—that is, entered a plea. And this in a nation that has long officially “promoted” democracy abroad.

Finally, while US political and media elites remained obsessed with the fictions of Russiagate—which increasingly appears to be Russiagate without Russia and instead mostly tax-fraud-gate and sex-gate—post–Soviet Russia continued its remarkable rise as a diplomatic great power, primarily, though not only, in the East, as documented recently in three highly informed publications far from and scarcely noted by the US political-media establishment. Meanwhile, Washington’s primary base of allies in world affairs, the European Union, continued its slide into self-inflicted, ever-deepening crisis.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

A major theme of Cohen’s recently published book, War With Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate, is that the new Cold War is more dangerous in several ways than was its 40-year predecessor, which the world survived. Two of these new perils were demonstrated on November 25 when Russia forces fired on and seized small Ukrainian military vessels in disputed territorial waters near the recently built Kerch Bridge connecting mainland Russia with annexed Crimea.

The episode involved two unprecedented factors in Cold War history. Unlike the preceding Cold War, whose political epicenter was in faraway Germany, this one has unfolded directly on Russia’s borders, most existentially in Ukraine. Indeed, the Kiev government is in effect a US-NATO client regime. Thus, a “border incident,” as Russian President Putin called the Kerch episode, could trigger a general war between Russia and the West.

Second, during the 40-year Cold War, US presidents were expected and able to negotiate with their Kremlin counterparts in order to defuse such crises, as JFK famously did during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But because of Russiagate allegations that Donald Trump colluded with the Kremlin to attain the presidency in 2016, despite as yet the lack of any evidence, President Trump was unable or unwilling to do so. Instead, as a result of the Kerch episode, he canceled a scheduled meeting with Putin. That is, a crisis that made such a meeting imperative was instead, due to the state of American politics, the cause of its cancellation. The larger result was the further militarization of the new Cold War at the expense of diplomacy, a theme discussed at some length here.

Kerch is unlikely to be the last such potentially explosive conflict between Washington and Moscow along Russia’s borders, very possibly again in Ukraine, a result of NATO’s still ongoing expansion to the east. If President Trump is not fully empowered to conduct crisis negotiations with the Kremlin, as every president since Eisenhower has been, the next episode may not be so limited and quickly resolved, if in fact this one has been.

This explains another theme of War With Russia?: Russiagate allegations and their promoters have become a grave threat to American national security, both by impeding Trump and by further demonizing Putin, which was on full display in prosecutorial mainstream US media accounts of the Kerch episode. Not surprisingly, few of these accounts focused on the significance of Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s use of the Kerch episode to impose martial law on Ukrainian regions that are least likely to vote for him in the upcoming March 2019 presidential election—or whether bolstering his failing electoral chances was his motive in provoking the maritime conflict. (In the parliamentary struggle that limited martial law, Poroshenko’s would-be presidential rivals were far less reticent in this regard.)

Cohen ends with a personal memory of how the late President George H.W. Bush made policy toward Soviet Russia. In November 1989, faced with divided opinion as to whether to continue President Reagan’s pro-détente relationship with the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev or to resume Cold War policies, Bush convened a debate between opposing views at Camp David attended by virtually his entire national-security team. Cohen was invited to present the argument for a radical détente policy, with the late Harvard Professor Richard Pipes presenting the opposing view.

It was clear that President Bush wanted to hear the most divergent scholarly opinions at a crucial moment in relations with Moscow, to his great credit. There is no evidence that Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, or Obama felt any such need, which is a major reason Washington is now engaged in a new and more dangerous Cold War with Moscow. Herein lies a lesson for President Trump.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. — Hegel

ar With Russia?, like the biography of a living person, is a book without an end. The title is a warning—akin to what the late Gore Vidal termed “a journalistic alert-system”—not a prediction. Hence the question mark. I cannot foresee the future. The book’s overarching theme is informed by past and current facts, not by any political agenda, ideological commitment, or magical prescience.

To restate that theme: The new US-Russian Cold War is more dangerous than was its 40-year predecessor that the world survived. The chances are even greater that this one could result, inadvertently or intentionally, in actual war between the two nuclear superpowers. Herein lies another ominous indication. During the preceding Cold War, the possibility of nuclear catastrophe was in the forefront of American mainstream political and media discussion, and of policy-making. During the new one, it rarely seems to be even a concern.

In the latter months of 2018, the facts and the mounting crises they document grow worse, especially in the US political-media establishment, where, as I have argued, the new Cold War originated and has been repeatedly escalated. Consider a few examples, some of them not unlike political and media developments during the run-up to the US war in Iraq or, historians have told us, how the great powers “sleepwalked” into World War I:

§ Russiagate’s core allegations—US-Russian collusion, treason—all remain unproven. Yet they have become a central part of the new Cold War. If nothing else, they severely constrain President Donald Trump’s capacity to conduct crisis negotiations with Moscow while they further vilify Russian President Vladimir Putin for having, it is widely asserted, personally ordered “an attack on America” during the 2016 presidential campaign. Some Hollywood liberals had earlier omitted the question mark, declaring, “We are at war.” In October 2018, the would-be titular head of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, added her voice to this reckless allegation, flatly stating that the United States was “attacked by a foreign power” and equating it with “the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Clinton may have been prompted by another outburst of malpractice by The New York Times and The Washington Post. On September 20 and 23, respectively, those exceptionally influential papers devoted thousands of words, illustrated with sinister prosecutorial graphics, to special retellings of the Russiagate narrative they had assiduously promoted for nearly two years, along with the narrative’s serial fallacies, selective and questionable history, and factual errors.

Again, for example, the now-infamous Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman for several months in 2016, was said to have been “pro-Kremlin” during his time as a lobbyist for Ukraine under then-President Viktor Yanukovych, when in fact he was pro–European Union. Again, Trump’s disgraced national-security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was accused of “troubling” contacts when he did nothing wrong or unprecedented in having conversations with a Kremlin representative on behalf of President-elect Trump. Again, the two papers criminalized the idea, as the Times put it, that “the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest,” once the premise of détente. And again, the Times, while assuring readers that its “Special Report” is “what we now know with certainty,” buried a related acknowledgment deep in its some 10,000 words: “No public evidence has emerged showing that [Trump’s] campaign conspired with Russia.” (The white-collar criminal indictments and guilty pleas cited were so unrelated that they added up to Russiagate without Russia.)

Astonishingly, neither paper gave any credence to an emphatic statement by the Post’s own Bob Woodward—normally considered the most authoritative chronicler of Washington’s political secrets—that, after two years of research, he had found no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia.

Nor were the Times, the Post, and other print media alone in these practices, which continued to slur dissenting opinions. CNN’s leading purveyor of Russiagate allegations tweeted that an American third-party presidential candidate had been “repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on US foreign policy.” Another prominent CNN figure was, so to speak, more geopolitical, warning, “Only a fool takes Vladimir Putin at his word in Syria,” thereby ruling out US-Russian cooperation in that war-torn country. Much the same continued almost nightly on MSNBC.

For most mainstream-media outlets, Russiagate had become, it seemed, a kind of cult journalism that no counterevidence or analysis could dent and thus itself increasingly a major contributing factor to the new Cold War. Still more, what began two years earlier as complaints about Russian “meddling” in the US presidential election became by October 2018, for The New Yorker and other publications, an accusation that the Kremlin had actually put Donald Trump in the White House. For this seditious charge, there was also no convincing evidence—nor any precedent in American history.

§ At a higher level, by fall 2018, current and former US officials were making nearly unprecedented threats against Moscow. The ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, threatened to “take out” any Russian missiles she thought violated a 1987 treaty, a step that would certainly risk nuclear war. The secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, threatened a naval “blockade” of Russia. In yet another Russophobic outburst, the ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, declared that “lying, cheating and rogue behavior” are a “norm of Russian culture.”

These may have been outlandish statements by untutored political appointees, but they again inescapably raised the question: Who was making Russia policy in Washington—President Trump, with his avowed policy of “cooperation,” or someone else?

But how to explain, other than as unbridled extremism, the comments by Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, himself a longtime professor of Russian politics and favored mainstream commentator? According to McFaul, Russia had become a “rogue state,” its policies “criminal actions” and the “world’s greatest threat.” It had to be countered by “preemptive sanctions that would go into effect automatically”—“every day,” if deemed necessary. Considering the possibility of “crushing” sanctions proposed recently by a bipartisan group of US senators, this would be nothing less than a declaration of permanent war against Russia: economic war, but war nonetheless.

§ Meanwhile, other new Cold War fronts were becoming more fraught with hot war, none more so than Syria. On September 17, Syrian missiles accidentally shot down an allied Russian surveillance aircraft, killing all 15 crew members. The cause was combat subterfuge by Israeli warplanes in the area. The reaction in Moscow was indicative—and potentially ominous.

At first, Putin, who had developed good relations with Israel’s political leadership, said the incident was an accident caused by the fog of war. His own Defense Ministry, however, loudly protested that Israel was responsible. Putin quickly retreated to a more hard-line position, and in the end vowed to send to Syria Russia’s highly effective S-300 surface-to-air defense system, a prize long sought by both Syria and Iran.

Clearly, Putin was not the ever-“aggressive Kremlin autocrat” unrelentingly portrayed by US mainstream media. A moderate in the Russian context, he again made a major decision by balancing conflicting groups and interests. In this instance, he accommodated long-standing hard-liners in his own security establishment.

The result is yet another Cold War trip wire. With the S-300s installed in Syria, Putin could in effect impose a “no-fly zone” over large areas of the country, which has been ravaged by war due, in no small part, to the presence of several foreign powers. (Russia and Iran are there legally; the United States and Israel are not.) If so, this means a new “red line” that Washington and its ally Israel will have to decide whether or not to cross. Considering the mania in Washington and in the mainstream media, it is hard to be confident that restraint will prevail. In keeping with his Russia policy, President Trump may reasonably be inclined to join Moscow’s peace process, though it is unlikely the mostly Democrat-inspired Russiagate party would permit him to do so.

ow another Cold War front has also become more fraught, the US-Russian proxy war in Ukraine having acquired a new dimension. In addition to the civil war in Donbass, Moscow and Kiev have been challenging each other’s ships in the Sea of Azov, near the newly built bridge connecting Russia with Crimea. On November 25, this erupted into a small but potentially explosive military conflict at sea. Trump is being pressured to help Kiev escalate the maritime war—yet another potential trip wire. Here, too, the president should instead put his administration’s weight behind the long-stalled Minsk peace accords. But that approach also seems to be ruled out by Russiagate, which by October 6 included yet another Times columnist, Frank Bruni, branding all such initiatives by Trump as “pimping for Putin.”

After five years of extremism, as demonstrated by these recent examples of risking war with Russia, there remained, for the first time in decades of Cold War history, no countervailing forces in Washington—no pro-détente wing of the Democratic or Republican Party, no influential anti–Cold War opposition anywhere, no real public debate. There was only Trump, with all the loathing he inspired, and even he had not reminded the nation or his own party that the presidents who initiated major episodes of détente in the 20th century were also Republicans—Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan. This too seemed to be an inadmissible “alternative fact.”

And so the eternal question, not only for Russians: What is to be done? There is a ray of light, though scarcely more. In August 2018, Gallup asked Americans what kind of policy toward Russia they favored. Even amid the torrent of vilifying Russiagate allegations and Russophobia, 58 percent wanted “to improve relations with Russia,” as opposed to 36 percent who preferred “strong diplomatic and economic steps against Russia.”

This reminds us that the new Cold War, from 
NATO’s eastward expansion and the 2014 Ukrainian crisis to Russiagate, has been an elite project. Why US elites, after the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, ultimately chose Cold War rather than partnership with Russia is a question beyond my purpose here. As for the special role of US intelligence elites—what I have termed “Intelgate”—efforts are still underway to disclose it fully, and are still being thwarted.

A full explanation of the post-Soviet Cold War choice would include the US political-media establishment’s needs—ideological, foreign-policy, and budgetary, among others—for an “enemy.” Or, with the Cold War having prevailed for more than half of US-Russian relations during the century since 1917, maybe it was habitual. Substantial “meddling” in the 2016 US election by Ukraine and Israel, to illustrate the point, did not become a political scandal. In any event, once this approach to post-Soviet Russia began, promoting it was not hard. The legendary humorist Will Rogers quipped in the 1930s, “Russia is a country that no matter what you say about it, it’s true.” Back then, before the 40-year Cold War and nuclear weapons, the quip was funny, but no longer.

Whatever the full explanation, many of the consequences I have analyzed in War With Russia? continue to unfold, not a few unintended and unfavorable to America’s real national interests. Russia’s turn away from the West, its “pivot to China,” is now widely acknowledged and embraced by leading Moscow policy thinkers. Even European allies occasionally stand with Moscow against Washington. The US-backed Kiev government still covers up who was really behind the 2014 Maidan “snipers’ massacre” that brought it to power. Mindless US sanctions have helped Putin to repatriate oligarchic assets abroad, at least $90 billion already in 2018. The mainstream media persist in distorting Putin’s foreign policies into something “that even the Soviet Union never dared to try.” And when an anonymous White House insider exposed in the Times the “amorality” of President Trump, the only actual policy he or she singled out was on Russia.

I have focused enough on the demonizing of Putin—the Post even managed to characterize popular support for his substantial contribution to improving life in Moscow as “a deal with the devil”—but it is important to note that this derangement is far from worldwide. Even a Post correspondent conceded that “the Putin brand has captivated anti-establishment and anti-American politicians all over the world.” A British journalist confirmed that, as a result, “many countries in the world now look for a reinsurance policy with Russia.” And an American journalist living in Moscow reported that the “ceaseless demonization of Putin personally has in fact sanctified him, turned him into the Patron Saint of Russia.”

Again, in light of all this, what can be done? Sentimentally, and with some historical precedents, we of democratic beliefs traditionally look to “the people,” to voters, to bring about change. But foreign policy has long been the special prerogative of elites. In order to change Cold War policy fundamentally, leaders are needed. When the times beckon, they may emerge out of established, even deeply conservative, elites, as did unexpectedly the now-pro-détente Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. But given the looming danger of war with Russia, is there time? Is any leader visible on the American political landscape who will say to his or her elites and party, as Gorbachev did, “If not now, when? If not us, who?”

We also know that such leaders, though embedded in and insulated by their elites, hear and read other, nonconformist voices, other thinking. The once-venerated American journalist Walter Lippmann observed, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” This book is my modest attempt to inspire more thinking.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

On the fifth anniversary of the onset of the Ukrainian crisis, in November 2013, and of Washington “punishing” Russia by attempting to “isolate” it in world affairs—a policy first declared by President Barack Obama in 2014 and continued ever since, primarily through economic sanctions—Cohen discusses the following points:

1. During the preceding Cold War with the Soviet Union, no attempt was made to “isolate” Russia abroad; instead, the goal was to “contain” it within its “bloc” of Eastern European nations and compete with it in what was called the “Third World.”

2. The notion of “isolating” a country of Russia’s size, Eurasian location, resources, and long history as a great power is vainglorious folly. It reflects the paucity and poverty of foreign thinking in Washington in recent decades, not the least in the US Congress and mainstream media.

3. Consider the actual results. Russia is hardly isolated. Since 2014, Moscow has arguably been the most active diplomatic capital of all great powers today. It has forged expanding military, political, or economic partnerships with, for example, China, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, India, and several other East Asian nations, even, despite EU sanctions, with several European governments. Still more, Moscow is the architect and prime convener of three important peace negotiations under way today: those involving Syria, Serbia-Kosovo, and even Afghanistan. Put differently, can any other national leaders in the 21st century match the diplomatic records of Russian President Vladimir Putin or of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov? Certainly not former US presidents George W. Bush or Obama or soon-to-depart German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Nor any British or French leader.

4. Much is made of Putin’s purportedly malign “nationalism” in this regard. But this is an uninformed or hypocritical explanation. Consider French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently reproached Trump for his declared nationalism. The same Macron who has sought to suggest (rather implausibly) that he is a second coming of Charles de Gaulle, who himself was a great and professed nationalist leader of the 20th century, from his resistance to the Nazi occupation and founding of the Fifth Republic to his refusal to put the French military under NATO command. Nationalism, that is, by whatever name, has long been a major political force in most countries, whether in liberal enlightened or reactionary right-wing forms. Russia and the United States are not exceptions.

5. Putin’s success in restoring Russia’s role in world affairs is usually ascribed to his “aggressive” policies, but it is better understood as a realization of what is characterized in Moscow as the “philosophy of Russian foreign policy” since Putin became leader in 2000. It has three professed tenets. The first goal of foreign policy is to protect Russia’s “sovereignty,” which is said to have been lost in the disastrous post-Soviet 1990s. The second is a kind of Russia-first nationalism or patriotism: to enhance the well-being of the citizens of the Russian Federation. The third is ecumenical: to partner with any government that wants to partner with Russia. This “philosophy” is, of course, non- or un-Soviet, which was heavily ideological, at least in its professed ideology and goals.

6. Considering Washington’s inability to “isolate Russia,” considering Russia’s diplomatic successes in recent years, and considering the bitter fruits of US militarized and regime-change foreign policies (which long predate President Trump), perhaps it’s time for Washington to learn from Moscow rather than demand that Moscow conform to Washington’s thinking about—and behavior in—world affairs. If not, Washington is more likely to continue to isolate itself.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Summarizing one of the themes in his new book, War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine To Trump and Russiagate, Cohen argues that Russiagate allegations of Kremlin attempts to “undermine American democracy” may themselves erode confidence in those institutions.

Ever since Russiagate allegations began to appear more than two years ago, their core narrative has revolved around purported Kremlin attempts to “interfere” in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump. In recent months, a number of leading American media outlets have taken that argument even further, suggesting that Putin’s Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House and now is similarly trying to affect the November 6 midterm elections, particularly House contests, on behalf of Trump and the Republican Party. According to a page-one New York Times “report,” for example, Putin’s agents “are engaging in an elaborate campaign of ‘information warfare’ to interfere with the American midterm elections.”

Despite well-documented articles by Gareth Porter and Aaron Maté effectively dismantling these allegations about 2016 and 2018, the mainstream media continue to promote them. The occasionally acknowledged lack of “public evidence” is sometimes cited as itself evidence of a deep Russian conspiracy, of the Kremlin’s “arsenal of disruption capabilities…to sow havoc on election day.” (See the examples cited by Alan MacLeod at FAIR.org.)

Lost in these reckless allegations is the long-term damage they may themselves do to American democracy. Consider the following possibilities.

Even though still unproven, charges that the Kremlin put Trump in the White House have cast a large shadow of illegitimacy over his presidency and thus over the institution of the presidency itself. This is unlikely to end entirely with Trump. If the Kremlin had the power to affect the outcome of one presidential election, why not another one, whether won by a Republican or a Democrat? The 2016 presidential election was the first time such an allegation became widespread in American political history, but it may not be the last.

Now the same shadow looms over the November 6 elections and thus over the next Congress. If so, in barely two years, the legitimacy of two fundamental institutions of American representative democracy will have been challenged, also for the first time in history.

And if US elections are really so vulnerable to Russian “meddling,” what does this say about faith in American elections more generally? How many losing candidates on November 6 will resist blaming the Kremlin? Two years after the last presidential election, Hillary Clinton and her adamant supporters still have not been able to do so.

We know from critical reporting and from recent opinion surveys that the origins and continuing fixation on the Russiagate scandal since 2016 have been primarily a product of US political-intelligence-media elites. It did not spring from the American people—from voters themselves. Thus a Gallup poll recently showed that 57 percent of those surveyed wanted improved relations with Russia. And other surveys have shown that Russiagate is scarcely an issue at all for likely voters on November 6. Nonetheless, it remains a front-page issue for US elites.

Indeed, Russiagate has revealed the low esteem that many US political-media elites have for American voters—for their ability to make discerning, rational electoral decisions, which is the bedrock assumption of representative democracy. It is worth noting that this disdain for rank-and-file citizens echoes a longstanding attitude of the Russian political intelligentsia, as recently expressed in the argument by a prominent Moscow policy intellectual that Russian authoritarianism springs not from the nation’s elites but from the “genetic code” of its people.

US elites seem to have a similar skepticism about—or contempt for—American voters’ capacity to make discerning electoral choices. Presumably this is a factor behind the current proliferation of programs—official, corporate, and private—to introduce elements of censorship in the nation’s “media space” in order to filter out “Kremlin propaganda.” Here, it also seems, elites will decide what constitutes such “propaganda.”

The Washington Post recently gave such an example: “portraying Russian and Syrian government forces favorably as they battled ‘terrorists’ in what U.S. officials for years have portrayed as a legitimate uprising against the authoritarian government of President Bashar al-Assad.” That is, thinking that the forces of Putin and Assad were fighting terrorists, even if closer to the truth, is “Kremlin propaganda” because it is at variance with “what U.S. officials for years have” been saying. This was the guiding principle of Soviet censorship as well.

If the American electoral process, presidency, legislature, and voter cannot be fully trusted, what is left of American democracy? Admittedly, this is still only a trend, a foreboding, but one with no end in sight. If it portends the “undermining of American democracy,” our elites will blame the Kremlin. But they best recall the discovery of Walt Kelly’s legendary cartoon figure Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

After a brief discussion of Cohen’s new book, War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, to be published in November (and now available for order at Amazon and other outlets), Cohen elaborates on the following points regarding Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by the United States and (Soviet) Russia in 1987.

§ For whatever reasons, both leaders at the time, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, had developed a deep personal fear of nuclear weapons. After agreeing in principle, though informally, in February 1986 that all nuclear weapons should be eliminated, the following year they abolished an entire category of those instruments of mass destruction: nuclear-warhead–bearing missiles with a range of some 500–5,500 kilometers.

§ The INF Treaty was focused on Europe, which was targeted by Soviet missiles and which was where US counter-missiles were based. It was a major step in a diplomatic process of grand détente that both Reagan and Gorbachev thought would end the Cold War and nuclear arms races forever. The treaty’s larger significance is that it was the first, and still only, act of nuclear abolitionism—until now, a historic 31-year tangible symbol of what more could, and should, be possible.

§ If carried out, however, Trump’s decision relegates the historic INF Treaty to the status of just another failed or discarded international agreement.

§ Trump gave two reasons for nullifying the INF Treaty: Russia has been violating the agreement by developing a new intermediate-range “cruise” missile; and China, which was not a party to the treaty, has been developing its own arsenal of such weapons. There is some truth in both allegations, though none that would have ruled out negotiations to revise, expand, and preserve the treaty. But there was a larger truth that went unmentioned by Trump and by virtually all of the US commentary on his decision.

§ For 20 years, Washington has adopted policies that implicitly, perhaps inexorably, undermined the INF Treaty. In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton began the eastward expansion of the US-led NATO military alliance to Russia’s borders. In 2002, President George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibited the deployment of missile-defense installations. That prohibition had preserved the certainty of Mutual Assured Destruction in the event of one side launching a first strike, and it kept the nuclear peace since the onset of the nuclear age. Within a few years, Washington made missile-defense deployment a NATO project and thus its installations accompanied NATO expansion, on land and sea, to Russia’s borders. Still more, those installments are not only a “defensive” system. As MIT professor Theodore Postol and others have shown, US-NATO missile-defense installments near Russia now have the capacity to launch intermediate-range “cruise” missiles.

§ Moscow has been fully aware of this capacity for years and has repeatedly complained to Washington that it violates the INF Treaty. Washington ignored the complaints, and, not surprisingly, Moscow began developing its own new version of intermediate-range missiles. Herein lies the causal dynamic of the new US-Russian Cold War. Washington provokes, Moscow reacts, and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating. Reagan and Gorbachev thought they had broken this fateful, then 40-year cycle, in 1987, by undertaking mutual military build-downs and an act of nuclear abolitionism. Looking back from today’s perspective, they failed. And Gorbachev, now 87, watches as yet another of his historic legacies is undone by his successors, mostly American ones.

§ What now? The INF Treaty requires six months’ notice prior to withdrawal, so formally there is time for diplomacy to save some version of this historic agreement. (We do not know what role Russiagate allegations that Trump is a “Kremlin puppet” played in his decision, among other possible factors.) Trump and Putin are scheduled to meet in Paris, and possibly in Argentina, in November, and the subject will certainly be on their agenda, though a reversal of Trump’s decision seems unlikely.

§ As Cohen has pointed out before, a new nuclear-arms race has been under way for some time. Obviously, the abolition of the INF Treaty can only accelerate it on both sides.

§ Nuclear weapons, like war itself, are ultimately about politics. And Trump’s decision will have important political consequences in both capitals. Clearly, it is a budgetary “victory” for the military-industrial complexes on both sides. Each is ever eager to develop, test, and deploy new weapons systems.

§ It is also a political victory for “hawks” in Washington, for those like John Bolton, Trump’s national-security adviser, who oppose any constraints on American power, and for their counterparts in Moscow. Russia’s “hawks” now have an additional argument against the kind of “cooperation with our American partners” that Russian President Putin continues to preach. Washington has now exited or violated yet another international agreement, all of which involved Russia and some crucially. Clinton broke a promise made to Gorbachev by his predecessor that NATO would not expand eastward. Bush unilaterally nullified the ABM Treaty. Trump has quit the international climate treaty, the agreement with Iran regarding nuclear weapons, and now the INF Treaty. Moscow is unlikely to have any more illusions about Trump, but Russia’s “hawks” now have an argument that transcends any American president: The United States cannot be trusted to honor its agreements, certainly not in the long run.

§ Trump’s decision could also affect American politics. It might revive the once-important but long-dormant, or dead, anti-nuke movement in grassroots politics. It might redirect Democratic and other opposition to Trump from largely bogus Russiagate allegations to actual substantive issues like the danger of nuclear war. Nor should we forget that more than two years of Russisagate allegations, which have demonized both Trump and “Putin’s Russia,” have probably made it easier, if not tempting, for Trump to quit the INF Treaty.

§ But the biggest political fallout will almost certainly be in Europe, which was the focal point of the original conflict over intermediate-range nuclear missiles. If Trump tries to deploy a new generation of such land-based weapons, where—within easy range of Russia—will they be based? No Asian government will take them, but will any European ones, even NATO members, given the strategic risk and likelihood of mass political protests at home? If Trump proceeds, big political struggles lie ahead in Europe, struggles that could continue the drift of “US allies” away from Washington—possibly toward Moscow.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and politics at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com). Cohen comments on the following subjects currently in the news:

1. National intelligence agencies have long played major roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are doing so again today, as is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal assassination attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were “rogue” operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them.

There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial “rogue” operations by intelligence agents in history, but also “rogue” ones that were purposefully political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies—or groups of agents—tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that some intelligence players tried to stop Khrushchev’s formal recognition of West Germany, also in the early 1960s.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were “rogue” operations undertaken by political opponents of the leaders’ policies at home or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a—perhaps the—crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very moment when his government had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And why would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader?

We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying “we do not know” may be unmarketable in today’s mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful “analysis.”   

2. We do know, however, that there has been fierce opposition in the US political-media establishment to President Trump’s policy of “cooperating with Russia,” including in US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI—and at high levels of his own administration.

We might consider Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN ambassador in this light. Despite the laurels heaped on her by anti-Trump media, and by Trump himself at their happy-hour farewell in the White House, Haley was not widely admired by her UN colleagues. When appointed for political reasons by Trump, she had no foreign-policy credentials or any expert knowledge of other countries or of international relations generally. Judging by her performance as ambassador, nor did she acquire much on the job, almost always reading even short comments from prepared texts. 

More to the point, Haley’s statements regarding Russia at the UN were, more often than not, dissimilar from Trump’s—indeed, implicitly in opposition to Trump’s. (She did nothing, for example, to offset charges in Washington that Trump’s summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in July, had been “treasonous.”) Who wrote these statements for her, which were very similar to statements regarding Russia that have been issued by US intelligence agencies since early 2017? It is hard to imagine that Trump was unhappy to see her go, and easier to imagine him pushing her toward the exit. A president needs a loyalist as secretary of state and at the UN. Haley’s pandering remarks at the White House about Trump’s family suggests some deal had been made to ease her out, with non-recrimination promises made on both sides. We will see if opponents of Trump’s Russia policy can put another spokesperson at the UN.

As to which aspects of US foreign policy Trump actually controls, we might ask more urgently if he authorized, or was fully informed about, the joint US-NATO-Ukraine military air exercises that got under way over Ukraine, abutting Russia, on October 8. Moscow regards these exercises as a major “provocation,” and not unreasonably.

3. What do Trump’s opponents want instead of “cooperation with Russia”? A much harder line, including more “crushing” economic sanctions. Sanctions are more like temper tantrums and road rage than actual national-security policy, and thus are often counterproductive. We have some recent evidence. Russia’s trade surplus has grown to more than $100 billion. World prices for Russia’s primary exports, oil and gas, have grown to over $80 a unit while Moscow’s federal budget is predicated on $53 a barrel. Promoters of anti-Russian sanctions gloat that they have weakened the ruble. But while imposing some hardships on ordinary citizens, the combination of high oil prices and a weaker ruble is ideal for Russian state and corporate exporters. They sell abroad for inflated foreign currency and pay their operating expenses at home in cheaper rubles. To risk a pun, they are “crushing it.”

Congressional sanctions—for exactly what is not always clear—have helped Putin in another way. For years, he has unsuccessfully tried to get “oligarchs” to repatriate their wealth abroad. US sanctions on various “oligarchs” have persuaded them and others to begin to do so, perhaps bringing back home as much as $90 billion already in 2018.

If nothing else, these new budgetary cash flows help Putin deal with his declining popularity at home—he still has an approval rating well above 60 percent—due to the Kremlin’s decision to raise the pension age for men and women, from 60 to 65 and from 55 to 60 respectively. The Kremlin can use the additional revenue to increase the value of pensions, supplement them with other social benefits, or to enact the age change over a longer period of time.

It appears that Congress, particularly the Senate, has no Russia policy other than sanctions. It might think hard about finding alternatives. One way to start would be with real “hearings” in place of the ritualistic affirmation of orthodox policy by “experts” that has long been its practice. There are more than a few actual specialists out there who think different approaches to Moscow are long overdue. 

4. All of these dangerous developments, indeed the new US-Russian Cold War itself, are elite projects—political, media, intelligence, etc. Voters were never really consulted. Nor do they seem to approve. In August, Gallup asked its usual sample of Americans which policy toward Russia they preferred. Fifty-seven percent wanted improved relations vs. only 36 percent who wanted a tougher US policy with more sanctions. (Meanwhile, two-thirds of Russians surveyed by an independent agency now see the United States as their country’s number-one enemy, and about three-fourths view China favorably.)

Will any of the US political figures already jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 take these realities into account?

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Emphasizing growing Cold War extremism in Washington and war-like crises in US-Russian relations elsewhere, Cohen comments on the following examples:

§ Russiagate, even though none of its core allegations have been proven, is now a central part of the new Cold War, severely limiting President Trump’s ability to conduct crisis-negotiations with Moscow and further vilifying Russian President Putin for having ordered “an attack on America” during the 2016 presidential election. The New York Times and The Washington Post have been leading promoters of the Russiagate narrative, even though several of its foundational elements have been seriously challenged, even discredited.

Nonetheless, both papers recently devoted thousands of words to retelling the same narrative—on September 20 and 23, respectively—along with its obvious fallacies. For example, Paul Manafort, during the crucial time he was advising then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was not “pro-Russian” but pro–European Union. And contrary to insinuations, General Michael Flynn did nothing wrong or unprecedented in having conversations with a representative of the Kremlin on behalf of President-elect Trump. Many other presidents-elect had instructed top aides to do the same. The epic retellings of the Russiagate narrative by both papers, at extraordinary length, were riddled with similar mistakes and unproven allegations. (Nonetheless, a prominent historian, albeit one seemingly little informed both about Russiagate documents and about Kremlin leadership, characterized the widely discredited anti-Trump Steele dossier—the source of many such allegations—as “increasingly plausible.”)

Astonishingly, neither the Times nor the Post give any credence to the emphatic statement made at least one week before by Bob Woodward—normally considered the most authoritative chronicler of Washington’s political secrets—that after two years of research he had found “no evidence of collusion” between Trump and Russia.

For the Times and Post and other mainstream media outlets, Russiagate has become, it seems, a kind of cult journalism that no counter-evidence or analysis can dint, and thus itself is a major contributing factor to the new and more dangerous Cold War. Still worse, what began nearly two years ago as complaints about Russian “meddling” in the US presidential campaign has become for the The New Yorker and other publications an accusation that the Kremlin actually put Trump in the White House. For this reckless charge, with its inherent contempt for the good sense of American voters, there is no convincing evidence—nor any precedent in American history.

§ Meanwhile, current and former US officials are making nearly unprecedented threats against Moscow. NATO ambassador Kay Bailey Hutchinson threatened to “take out” any Russian missiles she thought violated a 1987 arms treaty, a step that would risk nuclear war. The secretary of the interior threatened a “naval blockade” of Russia. In a perhaps unprecedented, undiplomatic Russophobic outburst, UN ambassador Nikki Haley declared that “lying, cheating and rogue behavior” are a “norm of Russian culture.”

These may be outlandish statements by untutored appointed political figures, though they inescapably raise the question: Who is making Russia policy in Washington—President Trump with his avowed policy of “cooperating with Russia,” or someone else?

But how to explain, other than as unbridled extremism, statements by a former US ambassador to Moscow and longtime professor of Russian politics, who appears to be the mainstream media’s leading authority on Russia? According to him, Russia today is “a rogue state,” its policies “criminal actions,” and the “world’s worst threat.” It must be countered by “preemptive sanctions that would GO into effect automatically”—indeed, “every day,” if deemed necessary. Considering the “crippling” sanctions now being prepared by a bipartisan group of US senators—their actual reason and purpose apparently unknown even to them—this would be nothing less than a declaration of war against Russia; economic war, but war nonetheless.

§ Several other new Cold War fronts are also fraught with hot war, but today none more than Syria. Another reminder occurred on September 17, when Syrian missiles accidentally shot down an allied Russian surveillance plane, killing all 15 crew members. The cause, it was generally agreed, was subterfuge by Israeli warplanes in the area. The reaction in Moscow was highly indicative—potentially ominous.

At first, Putin, who had developed good relations with Israel’s political leadership, said the incident was an accident, an example of the fog of war. His own Ministry of Defense, however, loudly protested, blaming Israel. Putin quickly retreated, adopting a much more hard-line position, and in the end vowed to send to Syria Russia’s highly effective S-300 surface-to-air defense system, a prize both Syria and Iran have requested in vain for years.

Clearly, Putin is not the ever-“aggressive Kremlin autocrat” so often portrayed in US mainstream media. A moderate by nature (in the Russian context), he governs by balancing powerful conflicting groups and interests. In this case, he was countered by long-standing hard-liners (“hawks”) in the security establishment.

Second, if the S-300s are installed in Syria (they will be operated by Russians, not Syrians), Putin can in effect impose a “no-fly zone” over that country, which has been torn by war due, in no small part, to the presence of several major foreign powers. (Russia and Iran are there legally; the United States and Israel are not.) If so, it will be a new “red line” that Washington and Tel Aviv must decide whether or not to cross. Considering the mania in Washington, it’s hard to be confident that wisdom will prevail.

All of this unfolded on approximately the third anniversary of Russia’s military intervention in Syria, in September 2015. At that time, Washington pundits denounced Putin’s “adventure” and were sure it would “fail.” Three years later, “Putin’s Kremlin” has destroyed the vicious Islamic State’s grip on large parts of Syria, all but restored President Assad’s control over most of the country, and has become the ultimate arbiter of Syria’s future. President Trump would do best by joining Moscow’s peace process, though it is unlikely Washington’s mostly Democratic Russiagate party will permit him to do so. (For perspective, recall that, in 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton promised to impose a US no-fly zone over Syria to defy Russia.)

There is also this. As the US-led “liberal world order” disintegrates, not only in Syria, a new alliance is emerging between Russia, China, Iran, and possibly NATO member Turkey. It will be a real “threat” only if Washington makes it one, as it has Russia in recent years.

§ Finally, the US-Russian proxy war in Ukraine has recently acquired a new dimension. In addition to the civil war in Donbass, Moscow and Kiev have begun to challenge each other’s ships in the Sea of Azov, near the vital Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. Trump is being pressured to supply Kiev with naval and other weapons to wage this evolving war, yet another potential tripwire. Here too the president would do best by putting his administration’s weight behind the long-stalled Minsk peace accords. Here, too, this seemed to be his original intention, but it has proven to be yet another approach, it now seems, thwarted by Russiagate.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.) This post is different. The conversation was based on Cohen’s article below, completed the day of the broadcast.

“Putin is an evil man, and he is intent on evil deeds.”
—Senator John McCain

“[Putin] was a KGB agent. By definition, he doesn’t have a soul.”
“If this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 1930s.”
—2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton

he specter of an evil-doing Vladimir Putin has loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Henry Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia’s leader since 2000: “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one.”

But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by the demonizing of Putin—a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia’s latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints in the early 2000s to US-Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations. Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator John McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous Cold War: “Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik…. His world is a brutish, cynical place…. We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin’s world from befalling more of humanity.”

Mainstream media outlets have played a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from atypically, The Washington Post’s editorial-page editor wrote, “Putin likes to make the bodies bounce…. The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology—only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism.” Esteemed publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate “the flabbily muscled form” of the “small gray ghoul named Vladimir Putin.” There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying Russia’s leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.

As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin’s anointed successor, in 1999–2000, Putin was welcomed by leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times’ chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia’s new leader had an “emotional commitment to building a strong democracy.” Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and “the beginning of a very constructive relationship.”

But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly of having been “suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin.” By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment’s revised opinion, declared it “time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin’s Russia as an enemy of the United States.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may have to leave this large, complex question to future historians, when materials for full biographical study—memoirs, archive documents, and others—are available. Even so, it may surprise readers to know that Russia’s own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to the “pluses and minuses” of Putin’s leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)

In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported “minuses” reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.

By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary “minuses” that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand at least who he is not:

§ Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, “de-democratized” a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet “totalitarianism.” Democratization began and developed in Soviet Russia under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the years from 1987 to 1991.

Yeltsin repeatedly dealt that historic Russian experiment grievous, possibly fatal, blows. Among his other acts, by using tanks, in October 1993, to destroy Russia’s freely elected parliament and with it the entire constitutional order that had made Yeltsin president. By waging two bloody wars against the tiny breakaway province of Chechnya. By enabling a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia’s richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery, including the once- large and professionalized Soviet middle classes. By rigging his own reelection in 1996. And by enacting a “super-presidential” constitution, at the expense of the legislature and judiciary but to his successor’s benefit. Putin may have furthered this de-democratization of the Yeltsin 1990s, but he did not initiate it.

§ Nor did Putin then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like “autocrat,” which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy. The last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. Due to the increasing bureaucratic routinization of the political-administrative system, each successive Soviet leader had less personal power than his predecessor. Putin may have more, but if he really was a “cold-blooded, ruthless” autocrat—“the worst dictator on the planet”—tens of thousands of protesters would not have repeatedly appeared in Moscow streets, sometimes officially sanctioned. Or their protests (and selective arrests) been shown on state television.

Political scientists generally agree that Putin has been a “soft authoritarian” leader governing a system that has authoritarian and democratic components inherited from the past. They disagree as to how to specify, define, and balance these elements, but most would also generally agree with a brief Facebook post, on September 7, 2018, by the eminent diplomat-scholar Jack Matlock: “Putin…is not the absolute dictator some have pictured him. His power seems to be based on balancing various patronage networks, some of which are still criminal. (In the 1990s, most were, and nobody was controlling them.) Therefore he cannot admit publicly that [criminal acts] happened without his approval since this would indicate that he is not completely in charge.”

§ Putin is not a Kremlin leader who “reveres Stalin” and whose “Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin’s Soviet Union.” These assertions are so far-fetched and uninformed about Stalin’s terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. Stalin’s Russia was often as close to unfreedom as imaginable. In today’s Russia, apart from varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been. (When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an “appalling human rights situation in Putin’s Russia,” they should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)

Putin clearly understands that millions of Russians have and often express pro-Stalin sentiments. Nonetheless, his role in these still-ongoing controversies over the despot’s historical reputation has been, in one unprecedented way, that of an anti-Stalinist leader. Briefly illustrated, if Putin reveres the memory of Stalin, why did his personal support finally make possible two memorials (the excellent State Museum of the History of the Gulag and the highly evocative “Wall of Grief”) to the tyrant’s millions of victims, both in central Moscow? The latter memorial monument was first proposed by then–Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961. It was not built under any of his successors—until Putin, in 2017.

§ Nor did Putin create post–Soviet Russia’s “kleptocratic economic system,” with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin’s shock-therapy “privatization” schemes of the 1990s, when the “swindlers and thieves” still denounced by today’s opposition actually emerged.

Putin has adopted a number of “anti-corruption” policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin’s oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But branding Putin “a kleptocrat” also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing.

A recent scholarly book finds, for example, that while they may be “corrupt,” Putin “and the liberal technocratic economic team on which he relies have also skillfully managed Russia’s economic fortunes.” A former IMF director goes further, concluding that Putin’s current economic team does not “tolerate corruption” and that “Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the World Bank’s Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010.”

Viewed in human terms, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost even modest legacies of the Soviet era—their life savings; medical and other social benefits; real wages; pensions; occupations; and for men, life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the “kleptocrat” Putin had mobilized enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin “Vladimir the Savior.”

§ Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as “a KGB thug,” regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a “mafia-state boss.” This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss, because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it. And yet, it is ubiquitous. Times editorial writers and columnists—and far from them alone—characterize Putin as a “thug” and his policies as “thuggery” so often—sometimes doubling down on “autocratic thug”—that the practice may be specified in some internal manual. Little wonder so many politicians also routinely practice it, as did recently Senator Ben Sasse: “We should tell the American people and tell the world that we know that Vladimir Putin is a thug. He’s a former KGB agent who’s a murderer.”

Few, if any, modern-day world leaders have been so slurred, or so regularly. Nor does Sasse actually “know” any of this. He and the others imbibe it from reams of influential media accounts that fully indict Putin while burying a nullifying “but” regarding actual evidence. Thus another Times columnist: “I realize that this evidence is only circumstantial and well short of proof. But it’s one of many suspicious patterns.” This, too, is a journalistic “pattern” when Putin is involved.

Leaving aside other world leaders with minor or major previous careers in intelligence services, Putin’s years as a KGB intelligence officer in then–East Germany were clearly formative. Many years later, at age 65, he still speaks of them with pride. Whatever else that experience contributed, it made Putin a Europeanized Russian, a fluent German speaker, and a political leader with a remarkable, demonstrated capacity for retaining and coolly analyzing a very wide range of information. (Read or watch a few of his long interviews.) Not a bad leadership trait in very fraught times.

Moreover, no serious biographer would treat only one period in a subject’s long public career as definitive, as Putin demonizers do. Why not instead the period after he left the KGB in 1991, when he served as deputy to the mayor of St. Petersburg, then considered one of the two or three most democratic leaders in Russia? Or the years immediately following in Moscow, where he saw firsthand the full extent of Yeltsin-era corruption? Or his subsequent years, while still relatively young, as president?

As for being a “murderer” of journalists and other “enemies,” the list has grown to scores of Russians who died, at home or abroad, by foul or natural causes—all reflexively attributed to Putin. Our hallowed tradition is that the burden of proof is on the accusers. Putin’s accusers have produced none, only assumptions, innuendoes, and mistranslated statements by Putin about the fate of “traitors.” The two cases that firmly established this defamatory practice were those of the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006, and Alexander Litvinenko, a shadowy one-time KGB defector with ties to aggrieved Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who died of radiation poisoning in London, also in 2006.

Not a shred of actual proof points to Putin in either case. The editor of Politkovskaya’s paper, the devoutly independent Novaya Gazeta, still believes her assassination was ordered by Chechen officials, whose human-rights abuses she was investigating. Regarding Litvinenko, despite frenzied media claims and a kangaroo-like “hearing” suggesting that Putin was “probably” responsible, there is still no conclusive proof even as to whether Litvinenko’s poisoning was intentional or accidental. The same paucity of evidence applies to many subsequent cases, notably the shooting of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, “in [distant] view of the Kremlin,” in 2015.

About Russian journalists, there is, however, a significant, overlooked statistic. According to the American Committee to Protect Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered—41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82—41 under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still–partially corrupt post-Soviet economic system, not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters. The former wife of one journalist thought to have been poisoned concludes as much: “Many Western analysts place the responsibility for these crimes on Putin. But the cause is more likely the system of mutual responsibility and the culture of impunity that began to form before Putin, in the late 1990s.”

§ More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. Putin no doubt regards it as a blood slur, and even on the surface it is, to be exceedingly charitable, entirely uninformed. How else to explain Senator Ron Wyden’s solemn warnings, at a hearing on November 1, 2017, about “the current fascist leadership of Russia”? A young scholar recently dismantled a senior Yale professor’s nearly inexplicable propounding of this thesis. My own approach is compatible, though different.

Whatever Putin’s failings, the “fascist” allegation is absurd. Nothing in his statements over nearly 20 years in power are akin to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the asserted superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of a vast multiethnic state—embracing scores of diverse groups with a broad range of skin colors—such utterances or related acts by Putin would be inconceivable, if not political suicide. This is why he endlessly appeals for harmony in “our entire multi-ethnic nation” with its “multi-ethnic culture,” as he did once again in his re-inauguration speech in 2018.

Russia has, of course, fascist-white supremacist thinkers and activists, though many have been imprisoned. But a mass fascist movement is scarcely feasible in a country where so many millions died in the war against Nazi Germany, a war that directly affected Putin and clearly left a formative mark on him. Though he was born after the war, his mother and father barely survived near-fatal wounds and disease, his older brother died in the long German siege of Leningrad, and several of his uncles perished. Only people who never endured such an experience, or are unable to imagine it, can conjure up a fascist Putin.

There is another, easily understood, indicative fact. Not a trace of anti-Semitism is evident in Putin. Little noted here but widely reported both in Russia and in Israel, life for Russian Jews is better under Putin than it has ever been in that country’s long history.

§ Finally, at least for now, there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader, Putin has been exceedingly “aggressive” abroad. At best, this is an “in-the-eye-of-the-beholder” assertion, and half-blind. At worst, it justifies what even a German foreign minister characterized as the West’s “warmongering” against Russia.

In the three cases widely given as examples of Putin’s “aggression,” the evidence, long cited by myself and many others, points to US-led instigations, primarily in the process of expanding the NATO military alliance since the late 1990s from Germany to Russia’s borders today. The proxy US-Russian war in Georgia in 2008 was initiated by the US-backed president of that country, who had been encouraged to aspire to NATO membership. The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the long-standing effort to bring that country, despite large regions’ shared civilization with Russia, into NATO. And Putin’s 2015 military intervention in Syria was done on a valid premise: either it would be Syrian President Assad in Damascus or the terrorist Islamic State—and on President Barack Obama’s refusal to join Russia in an anti-ISIS alliance. As a result of this history, Putin is often seen in Russia as a belatedly reactive leader abroad, not as a sufficiently “aggressive” one.

Embedded in the “aggressive Putin” axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia’s neighbors. He is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, “The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was “a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as it was for most Russians.

Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation, naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians: “Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has no head.”

The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been “anti-Western,” specifically “anti-American,” has “always viewed the United States” with “smoldering suspicions.” A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in 2000 in the still-prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin—in hope of a “strategic friendship and partnership” with the United States. Hence his abundant assistance, following 9/11, to the American war in Afghanistan. Hence, until he believed Russia would not be treated as an equal and NATO had encroached too close, his full partnership in the US-European clubs of major leaders.

Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades—particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to have happened—it would be remarkable if his views of the West, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, “We all change.” A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had “illusions” about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: “Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it.”

If my refutation of the axioms of Putin demonization is valid, where does that leave us? Certainly, not with an apologia for Putin, but with the question, “Who is Putin?” Russians like to say, “Let history judge,” but given the perils of the new Cold War, we cannot wait. We can at least begin with a few historical truths. In 2000, a young and little-experienced man became the leader of a vast state that had precipitously disintegrated, or “collapsed,” twice in the 20th century—in 1917 and again in 1991—with disastrous consequences for its people. And in both instances, it had lost its “sovereignty” and thus its security in fundamental ways.

These have been recurring themes in Putin’s words and deeds. They are where to begin an understanding. No one can doubt that he is already the most consequential “statesman” of the 21st century, though the word is rarely, if ever, applied to him in the United States. And what does “consequential” mean? Even without the pseudo-minuses spelled out above, a balanced evaluation will include valid ones.

For example, at home, was it necessary to so strengthen and expand the Kremlin’s “vertical” throughout the rest of the country in order to pull Russia back together? Should not the historic experiment with democracy have been given equal priority? Abroad, were there not alternatives to annexing Crimea, even given the perceived threats? And did Putin’s leadership really do nothing to reawaken fears in small East European countries victimized for centuries by Russia? These are only a few questions that might yield minuses alongside Putin’s deserved pluses.

Whatever the approach, whoever undertakes a balanced evaluation should do so, to paraphrase Spinoza, not in order to demonize, not to mock, not to hate, but to understand.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.) Cohen’s contribution follows:

For nearly two years, mostly vacuous (though malignant) Russiagate allegations have drowned out truly significant news directly affecting America’s place in the world. In recent days, for example. French President Emmanuel Macron declared “Europe can no longer rely on the United States to provide its security,” calling for instead a broader kind of security “and particularly doing it in cooperation with Russia.” About the same time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Vladimir Putin met to expand and solidify an essential energy partnership by agreeing to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, despite US attempts to abort it. Earlier, on August 22, the Afghan Taliban announced it would attend its first ever major peace conference—in Moscow, without US participation.

Thus does the world turn, and not to the wishes of Washington. Such news would, one might think, elicit extensive reporting and analysis in the American mainstream media. But amid all this, on August 25, the ever-eager New York Times published yet another front-page Russiagate story—one that if true would be sensational, though hardly anyone seemed to notice. According to the Times’ regular Intel leakers, US intelligence agencies, presumably the CIA, has had multiple “informants close to…Putin and in the Kremlin who provided crucial details” about Russiagate for two years. Now, however, “the vital Kremlin informants have largely gone silent.” The Times laces the story with misdeeds questionably attributed to Putin and equally untrustworthy commentators, as well as a mistranslated Putin statement that incorrectly has him saying all “traitors” should be killed. Standard US media fare these days when fact-checkers seem not to be required for Russia coverage. But the sensation of the article is that the US had moles in Putin’s office.

Skeptical or credulous readers will react to the Times story as they might. Actually, an initial, lesser version of it first appeared in The Washington Post, an equally hospitable Intel platform, on December 15, 2017. I found it implausible for much the same reasons I had previously found Christopher Steele’s “dossier,” also purportedly based on “Kremlin sources,” implausible. But the Times’ new, expanded version of the mole story raises more and larger questions.

If US intelligence really had such a priceless asset in Putin’s office—the Post report implied only one, the Times writes of more than one—imagine what they could reveal about Enemy No. 1 Putin’s intentions abroad and at home, perhaps daily—why would any American Intel official disclose this information to any media at the risk of being charged with a treasonous capital offense? And now more than once? Or, since “the Kremlin” closely monitors US media, at the risk of having the no less treasonous Russian informants identified and severely punished? Presumably this why the Times’ leakers insist that the “silent” moles are still alive, though how they know we are not told. All of this is even more implausible. Certainly, the Times article asks no critical questions.

But why leak the mole story again, and now? Stripped of extraneous financial improprieties, failures to register as foreign lobbyists, tacky lifestyles, and sex having nothing to do with Russia, the gravamen of the Russiagate narrative remains what it has always been: Putin ordered Russian operatives to “meddle” in the US 2016 presidential election in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and Putin is now plotting to “attack” the November congressional elections in order to get a Congress he wants. The more Robert Mueller and his supporting media investigates, the less evidence actually turns up, and when it seemingly does, it has to be considerably massaged or misrepresented.

Nor are “meddling” and “interfering” in the other’s domestic policy new in Russian-American relations. Tsar Aleksandr II intervened militarily on the side of the Union in the American Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to fight the Reds in the Russian Civil War. The Communist International, founded in Moscow in 1919, and its successor organizations financed American activists, electoral candidates, ideological schools, and pro-Soviet bookstores for decades in the United States. With the support of the Clinton administration, American electoral advisers encamped in Moscow to help rig Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection in 1996. And that’s the bigger “meddling” apart from the decades-long “propaganda and disinformation” churned out by both sides, often via forbidden short-wave radio. Unless some conclusive evidence appears, Russian social media and other meddling in the 2016 presidential election was little more than old habits in modern-day forms. (Not incidentally, the Times story suggests that US Intel had been hacking the Kremlin, or trying to, for many years. This too should not shock us.)

The real novelty of Russiagate is the allegation that a Kremlin leader, Putin, personally gave orders to affect the outcome of an American presidential election. In this regard, Russiagaters have produced even less evidence, only suppositions without facts or much logic. With the Russiagate narrative being frayed by time and fruitless investigations, the “mole in the Kremlin” may have seemed a ploy needed to keep the conspiracy theory moving forward, presumably toward Trump’s removal from office by whatever means. And hence the temptation to play the mole card again, now, as yet more investigations generate smoke but no smoking gun.

The pretext of the Times story is that Putin is preparing an attack on the upcoming November elections, but the once-“vital,” now-silent moles are not providing the “crucial details.” Even if the story is entirely bogus, consider the damage it is doing. Russiagate allegations have already delegitimized a presidential election, and a presidency, in the minds of many Americans. The Times’ updated, expanded version may do the same to congressional elections and the next Congress. If so, there is an “attack on American democracy”—not by Putin or Trump but by whoever godfathered and repeatedly inflated Russiagate.

As I have argued previously, such evidence that exists points to John Brennan and James Clapper, President Obama’s head of the CIA and director of national intelligence respectively, even though attention has been focused on the FBI. Indeed, the Times story reminds us of how central “intelligence” actors have been in this saga. Arguably, Russiagate has brought us to the worst American political crisis since the Civil War and the most dangerous relations with Russia in history. Until Brennan, Clapper, and their closest collaborators are required to testify under oath about the real origins of Russiagate, these crises will grow.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Ever since Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, every American president has held one or more summit meetings with the Kremlin leader, first and foremost in order to prevent miscalculations that could result in war between the two nuclear superpowers. Generally, they received bipartisan support for doing so. In July, President Trump continued that tradition by meeting with Russian President Putin in Helsinki, for which, unlike previous presidents, he was scathingly criticized by much of the US political-media establishment. John Brennan, CIA director under President Obama, however, went much further, characterizing Trump’s press conference with Putin as “nothing short of treasonous.” Presumably in reaction, Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance, the continuing access to classified information usually accorded to former security officials. In the political-media furor that followed, Brennan was mostly heroized as an avatar of civil liberties and free speech, and Trump traduced as their enemy. 

Leaving aside the missed occasion to discuss the “revolving door” involving former US security officials using their permanent clearances to enhance their lucrative positions outside government, Cohen thinks the subsequent political-media furor obscures what is truly important and perhaps ominous:

Brennan’s allegation was unprecedented. No such high-level intelligence official had ever before accused a sitting president of treason, still more in collusion with the Kremlin. (Impeachment discussions of Presidents Nixon and Clinton, to take recent examples, did not include allegations involving Russia.) Brennan clarified his charge: “Treasonous, which is to betray one’s trust and to aid and abet the enemy.” Coming from Brennan, a man presumed to be in possession of related dark secrets, as he strongly hinted, the charge was fraught with alarming implications. Brennan made clear he hoped for Trump’s impeachment, but in another time, and in many other countries, his charge would suggest that Trump should be removed from the presidency urgently by any means, even a coup. No one, it seems, has even noted this extraordinary implication with its tacit threat to American democracy. (Perhaps because the disloyalty allegation against Trump has been customary ever since mid-2016, even before he became president, when an array of influential publications and writers—among them a former acting CIA director—began branding him Putin’s “puppet,” “agent,” “client,” and “Manchurian candidate.” The Los Angeles Times even saw fit to print an article suggesting that the military might have to remove Trump if he were to be elected, thereby having the very dubious distinction of predating Brennan.) 

Why did Brennan, a calculating man, risk leveling such a charge, which might reasonably be characterized as sedition? The most plausible explanation is that he sought to deflect growing attention to his role as the “Godfather” of the entire Russiagate narrative, as Cohen argued back in February. If so, we need to know Brennan’s unvarnished views on Russia.

They are set out with astonishing (perhaps unknowing) candor in a New York Times op-ed of August 17. They are those of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover in their prime. Western “politicians, political parties, media outlets, think tanks and influencers are readily manipulated, wittingly and unwittingly, or even bought outright, by Russian operatives…not only to collect sensitive information but also to distribute propaganda and disinformation.… I was well aware of Russia’s ability to work surreptitiously  within the United States, cultivating relationships with individuals who wield actual or potential power.… These Russian agents are well trained in the art of deception. They troll political, business and cultural waters in search of gullible or unprincipled individuals who become pliant in the hands of their Russian puppet masters. Too often, those puppets are found.” All this, Brennan assures readers, is based on his “deep insight.” All the rest of us, it seems, are constantly susceptible to “Russian puppet masters” under our beds, at work, on our computers. Clearly, there must be no “cooperation” with the Kremlin’s grand “Puppet Master,” as Trump said he wanted early on. (People who wonder what and when Obama knew about the unfolding Russiagate saga need to ask why he would keep such a person so close for so long.)

And yet, scores of former intelligence and military officials rallied around this unvarnished John Brennan, even though, they said, they did not entirely share his opinions. This too is revealing. They did so, it seems clear enough, out of their professional corporate identity, which Brennan represented and Trump was degrading by challenging the intelligences agencies’ (implicitly including his own) Russiagate allegations against him. It’s a misnomer to term these people representatives of a hidden “deep state.” In recent years, they have been amply visible on television and newspaper op-ed pages. Instead, they see and present themselves as members of a fully empowered and essential fourth branch of government. This too has gone largely undiscussed while nightingales of the fourth branch—such as David Ignatius and Joe Scarborough in the pages of the The Washington Post—have been in full voice.

The result is, of course—and no less ominous—to criminalize any advocacy of “cooperating with Russia,” or détente, as Trump sought to do in Helsinki with Putin. Still more, a full-fledged Russophobic hysteria is sweeping through the American political-media establishment, from Brennan and—pending actual evidence against her—those who engineered the arrest of Maria Butina (imagine how this endangers young Americans networking in Russia) to the senators now preparing new “crippling sanctions” against Moscow and the editors and producers at the Times, Post, CNN, and MSNBC. (However powerful, how representative are these elites when surveys indicate that a majority of the American people still prefer good relations with Moscow?) As the dangers grow of actual war with Russia—again, from Ukraine and the Baltic region to Syria—the capacity of US policy-makers, above all the president, are increasingly diminished. To be fair, Brennan may only be a symptom of this profound American crisis, some say the worst since the Civil War.

Finally, there was a time when many Democrats, certainly liberal Democrats, could be counted on to resist this kind of hysteria and, yes, spreading neo-McCarthyism. (Brennan’s defenders accuse Trump of McCarthyism, but Brennan’s charge of treason without presenting any actual evidence was quintessential McCarthy.) After all, civil liberties, including freedom of speech, are directly involved—and not only Brennan’s and Trump’s. But Democratic members of Congress and pro-Democratic media outlets are in the forefront of the new anti-Russian hysteria, with only a few exceptions. Thus a generally liberal historian tells CNN viewers that “Brennan is an American hero. His tenure at the CIA was impeccable. We owe him so much.” Elsewhere the same historian assures readers, “There has always been a bipartisan spirit of support since the CIA was created in the Cold War.” In the same vein, two Post reporters write of the FBI’s “once venerated reputation.”

Is this liberal historical amnesia? Is it professional incompetence? A quick Google search would reveal Brennan’s less-than-“impeccable” record, FBI misdeeds under and after Hoover, as well as the Senate’s 1975 Church Committee’s investigation of the CIA and other intelligence agencies’ very serious abuses of their power. Or have liberals’ hatred of Trump nullified their own principles? The critical-minded Russian adage would say, “All three explanations are worst.”

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.

Cohen begins by putting the current bipartisan Senate campaign to impose new, “crushing” sanctions on Russia in historical context. Broadly understood, sanctions have been part of US policy toward Russia for much of the past 100 years. During the Russian civil war of 1918–20, President Woodrow Wilson sent American troops to fight against the emerging Soviet government. Though the “reds” were clearly the established government of Soviet Russia by 1921, Washington continued to deny the USSR diplomatic recognition until President Franklin D. Roosevelt established formal relations in 1933. During much of the 40-year Cold War, the United States imposed various sanctions on its superpower rival, mainly related to technological and military exports, along with periodic expulsions of diplomats and “spies” on both sides.

Congress’s major political contribution was the 1975 Jackson–Vanik Amendment, which denied Moscow privileged trading status with the United States, primarily because of Kremlin restrictions on Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. Indicative of how mindlessly habitual US sanctions had become, Jackson–Vanik was nullified only in late 2012, long after the end of the Soviet Union and after any restrictions on Jews leaving (or returning to) Russia. Even more indicative, it was immediately replaced, in December 2012, by the Magnitsky Act, which purported to sanction individual Russian officials and “oligarchs” for “human-rights abuses.” The Magnitsky Act remains law, supplemented by additional sanctions leveled against Russia as a result of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and particularly Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

Looking back over this long history, there is no evidence that any US sanctions ever significantly altered Moscow’s “behavior” in ways that were intended. Or that they adversely affected Russia’s ruling political or financial elites. Any pain inflicted fell on ordinary citizens, who nonetheless rallied “patriotically” around the Kremlin leadership, most recently around Russian President Vladimir Putin. Historically, such sanctions were not problem-solving measures advancing American national security but more akin to temper tantrums or road rage, making things even worse, than to real policy-making.

Why, then, Washington’s new bout of sanction mania against Moscow, especially considering the harsh official Russian reaction expressed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who called the Senate’s proposed measures “a declaration of economic war” and promised that the Kremlin would retaliate?

One explanation is an underlying, astonishing assumption recently stated by Michael McFaul, the media-ubiquitous former US ambassador to Moscow and a longtime Russia scholar: “To advance almost all of our core national security and economic interests, the US does not need Russia.” Such a statement by a former or current policy-maker and intellectual is perhaps unprecedented in modern times—and manifestly wrong. US “core” interests “need” Russia’s cooperation in many vital ways. They include avoiding nuclear war; preventing a new and more dangerous arms race; guarding against the proliferation of weapons and materials of mass destruction; coping with international terrorists (who are in pursuit of such materials); achieving lasting peace in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East; fostering prosperity and stability in Europe, of which Russia is a part; promoting better relations with the Islamic world, of which Russia is also a part; and avoiding a generation-long confrontation with a formidable new alliance that already includes Russia, China, Iran, and other non-NATO countries. If McFaul’s assumption is widespread in Washington, as it seems to be, we are living in truly unwise and perilous times.

A second assumption is no less myopic and dangerous: that the Kremlin is weak and lacks countermeasures to adopt against the new sanctions being advocated in Washington. Consider, however, the following real possibilities. Moscow could sell off its billions of dollars of US Treasury securities and begin trading with friendly nations in non-dollar currencies, both of which it has already begun to do. It could restrict, otherwise undermine, or even shut down many large US corporations long doing profitable business in Russia, among them Citibank, Cisco Systems, Apple, Microsoft, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motor Co., and even Boeing. It could end titanium exports to the United States, which are vital to American civilian and military aircraft manufacturers, including Boeing. And terminate the sale of rocket engines essential for NASA and US satellite operations. The world’s largest territorial country, Russia could charge US airlines higher tariffs for their regular use of its air space or ban them altogether, making them uncompetitive against other national carriers. Politically, the Kremlin could end its own sanctions on Iran and North Korea, alleviating Washington’s pressure on those governments. And it could end the Russian supply transit to US troops fighting in Afghanistan used since the early 1990s.

None of this seems to have been considered by Washington’s sanction zealots. Nor have four other circumstances. Sanctions against Russia’s “oligarchs” actually help Putin, whom the US political-media establishment so despises and constantly indicts. For years, he has been trying to persuade many of the richest oligarchs to repatriate their offshore wealth to Russia. Few did so. Now, fearful of having their assets abroad frozen or seized by US measures, more and more are complying. Second, new sanctions limiting Moscow’s ability to borrow and finance investment at home will retard the country’s still meager growth rate. But the Kremlin coped after the 2014 sanctions and will do so again by turning away even more from the West and toward China and other non-Western partners, and by developing its own capacity to produce sanctioned imports. (Russian agricultural production, for example, has surged in recent years, now becoming a major export industry.) Third, already unhappy with existing economic sanctions against Russia, European multinational corporations—and thus Europe itself—may tilt even farther away from their capricious “transatlantic partner” in Washington, who is diminishing their vast market in the East. And fourth, waging “economic war” is one impulsive step from breaking off all diplomatic relations with Russia, this too actually being discussed by Washington zealots. Such a rupture would turn the clock back many decades, but in an era when there is no “globalization,” or international security, without Russia.

Finally, what reason do Washington extreme Cold Warriors themselves give for imposing new sanctions on Russia? Most of them are in the US Senate, historically a body with at least several independent-minded distinguished statesmen, but no longer, with the apparently solitary exception of Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has demonstrated considerable wisdom in regard to US-Russian relations. Their professed reasons are various and nonsensical. Some say Russia must be sanctioned for Ukraine, but those events happened four years ago and have already been “punished.” Others say for “Russia’s aggression in Syria,” but it was Putin’s military intervention that destroyed the Islamic State’s terrorist occupation of much of the country and ended its threat to take Damascus, to the benefit of America and its allies, including Europe and Israel. Still others insist the Kremlin must be sanctioned for its “nerve agent” attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK several months ago. But the British government’s case against the Kremlin has virtually fallen apart, as any attentive reader of articles in David Johnson’s Russia List will understand.

Ultimately, though, the new bout of sanction mania is in response to Russia’s alleged “attack on American democracy” during the 2016 presidential election. In reality, there was no “attack”—no Pearl Harbor, no 9/11, no Russian parachuters descending on Washington—only the kind of “meddling” and “interference” in the other’s domestic politics that both countries have practiced, almost ritualistically, for nearly a hundred years. Indeed, whatever “meddling” Russian actors did in 2016 may well have been jaywalking compared to the Clinton administration’s massive, highly intrusive political and financial intervention on behalf of the failing Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 1996.

We are left, then, with the real reason behind the new anti-Russian sanctions effort: to thwart and even punish President Donald Trump for his policy of “cooperation with Russia.” And Putin too for having met and cooperated with Trump at their Helsinki summit in July. This bizarre, also unprecedented, reality is more than a whisper. According to a New York Times “news analysis,” as well as other published reports, a “bipartisan group of senators, dismayed that Mr. Trump had not publicly confronted Mr. Putin over Russia’s election meddling, released draft legislation” of new sanctions against Moscow. “Passage of such a bill would impose some of the most damaging sanctions yet.”

Leave aside for now that it is not Russian “meddling” that is delegitimizing our elections but instead these fact-free allegations themselves that are doing so. (How many losing candidates in 2018 will claim their victory was snatched away by Putin?) Consider instead that for doing what every American president since Eisenhower has done—meet with the sitting Kremlin leader in order to avoid stumbling into a war between the nuclear superpowers—in effect both Trump and Putin are being condemned by the Washington establishment, including by members of Trump’s own intelligence agencies.

If so, who will avert the prospect of war with Russia, a new Cuban missile–like crisis, conceivably in the Baltic region, Ukraine, or Syria? Certainly not any leading representative of the Democratic Party. Certainly not the current Russophobic “bipartisan” Senate. Certainly not the most influential media outlets, which amplify the warmongering folly almost daily. In this most existential regard, there is for now only, like it or not, President Donald Trump.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

As has every American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, President Trump held a summit meeting with the Kremlin’s leader—Russian President Putin, in Helsinki on July 16. As with every president since Eisenhower, the underlying and overriding purpose was to reduce the chances of war between the two nuclear superpowers. With the new US-Russian Cold War fraught with possibilities of hot war on several fronts, from Ukraine and the Baltic and Black Sea regions to Syria, Trump had a vital national-security duty to meet in the most august way with Putin. As with previous summits, details will come later, but the two leaders reached several important agreements: to revive the necessary US-Russian diplomatic process tattered by recent events; to restore decades-long negotiations intended to reduce and regulate nuclear weapons and thus avert a new nuclear arms race; to jointly try to prevent Iran, Russia’s Middle East partner, from threatening “Israeli security,” as Putin formulated it, on that nation’s borders; to jointly relieve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria, whose suffering was caused substantially by the aid rendered by Washington and its allies to anti-Assad “freedom fighters” and then, as collateral damage, by Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian war, in September 2015, in order to destroy the murderous Islamic State, which was threatening to take Damascus; and to promote American-Russian “business ties,” a nebulous aspiration, considering US and European economic sanctions on Russia. (This was possibly a signal by Trump that he would not object, as President Obama had, if the European Union diminished or terminated its sanctions, as several of its members wish to do and as would be wise.)

Historically, in what were once “normal” Cold War times, these summit achievements would have been widely supported, even applauded, across the American political spectrum, as they were, for example, even under President Nixon. But not Trump’s, which elicited an unprecedented torrent of denunciation by the US mainstream bipartisan (primarily Democratic but far from only) political-media establishment. Idioms varied, from The Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, but the once-stately New York Times, as is now its nearly daily practice, set the tone. Its front-page headline on July 17 blared: “Trump, At Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election.” Another headline below explained, “Disdain for U.S. Institutions, and Praise for an Adversary.” The “reporting” itself was fulsomely prosecutorial, scarcely mentioning what Trump and Putin had agreed to. Times columnists competed to indict the American president. An early entry, on July 16, before anything was actually known about the summit results, came from Charles M. Blow, whose headline thundered: “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.” The title of the entry by Michelle Goldberg, on July 17, was less alliterative: “Trump Shows the World He’s Putin’s Lackey.” Much as I predicted in the weeks prior to the summit, the same toxic message bellowed through the realm of mainstream print and cable “news”: Trump had betrayed and shamed America before the entire world. As has been the case for years regarding “the Russia threat”—created mainly by US policy itself—no dissenting voices were included in the “discussions,” apart perhaps from unqualified Trump spokespeople.

The media coverage, not Trump himself at the summit, was shameful. But media were reporting “news,” of the kind they wanted, amplifying leading political figures, also across the spectrum. As usual on this subject, Senator John McCain led the vigilante posse: “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” He added for personal emphasis: “One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Most unusual, given the traditional non-political public role of intel chiefs, however, was former CIA director John Brennan, who quickly appeared as Trump’s prosecutor and judge, declaring that his behavior in Helsinki “exceeds the threshold” for impeachment and indeed “was nothing short of treasonous.” Only one major political figure stood apart from and above this political-media kangaroo court, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Defending the president’s meeting with Putin on behalf of US national security, Senator Paul emerged as the only visible statesman in Congress, a once-venerable role in the Senate but long abdicated.

It is, of course, still-unproven Russiagate allegations that caused this “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as it has been termed. (Commentators wanted, it seemed, for Trump to publicly waterboard the Russian president into a confession.) Hence the charges that at Helsinki Trump allied with Putin “against US intelligence agencies.” Leave aside the murky role of those agencies in the origins of Russiagate, about which Brennan should be questioned under oath, and recall their part in persuading presidents to undertake the disasters that were the Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion, Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya, among other now-regretted national mishaps. Recall too the 1975 Senate Church Committee that investigated and exposed unauthorized, even criminal, deeds by the “agencies,” particularly the CIA. Political scientists tell us that bureaucratic chiefs may change, but institutions not so much. And yet the pursuers of Trump, particularly liberal Democrats and their media, wish to judge him by the rectitude of “agencies” of which they were once the sharpest critics. “Derangement,” indeed.

So much so that an astonishing but exceedingly wise comment by Trump, before and after the summit, was barely noticed, or else was derided. It relates directly to the most fateful question in US-Russian relations: Why has the relationship since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 evolved into the new and more dangerous Cold War that it is today? For the past 15 years, the virtually unanimous American bipartisan establishment answer has been: Putin, or “Putin’s Russia,” is solely to blame. Washington’s decision to expand NATO to Russia’s border, bomb Russia’s traditional ally Serbia, withdraw unilaterally from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, carry out military regime change in Iraq and Libya, provoke the Ukrainian crisis and back the coup against its legitimate president in 2014, and considerably more—none of these, only “Putin’s aggression,” led to the new Cold War. This explanation has long become a rigid bipartisan orthodoxy tolerating no dissent, no alternative explanations, excluding, even slurring, their well-informed proponents. (See, for example, my Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Soviet Russia, Chapter 7 and Epilogue, as well as my Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.) The result has been for years no debate, no rethinking, and thus no revising of the triumphalist, winner-take-all “post–Cold War” approach first adopted by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and continued in spirit and most practices ever since, from President George W. Bush to President Obama. It has been an unassailable orthodoxy that has led now not only to a new Cold War but to the real danger of actual war with Russia, from Ukraine and the Baltic states to Syria.

And then suddenly, whether bowing to common sense or to wise advice, President Trump broke with this years-long, untrue, and dangerous orthodoxy. In a tweet on July 15, he wrote, “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity.” Asked about the new Cold War in Helsinki, he formulated it more diplomatically: “I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago.” Everything said here by President Trump is factually and analytically, even, profound. But it is also outright heresy and perhaps the real reason his meeting with Putin is being so traduced by political and media elites who have made their careers on orthodox dogmas at the expense of American and international security.

Heretics are scorned or worse, but sometimes in history they prevail. However strongly people may disapprove of the president’s other words and deeds, anyone, anywhere across our political spectrum, who wishes to avoid war with Russia—again, conceivably nuclear war—must support and encourage this Trump heresy until it is no longer heresy, until the full debate over reckless US policy since the 1990s finally ensues, and until that approach changes, as should have happened, as Trump said, “a long time ago.” It is not too late, but it may be the last chance.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

As Cohen pointed out in previous discussions, US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits are a long tradition going back to FDR’s wartime meeting with Stalin in Tehran in 1943. Every American president since FDR met with a Kremlin leader in a summit-style format at least once, several doing so multiple times. The purpose was always to resolve conflicts and enhance cooperation in relations between the two countries. Some summits succeeded, some did not, but all were thought to be an essential aspect of White House-Kremlin relations.

As a rule, American presidents have departed for summits with bipartisan support and well-wishes. Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Putin, in Helsinki on July 16, is profoundly different in two respects. US-Russian relations have rarely, if ever, been more dangerous. And never before has a president’s departure—in Trump’s case, first for a NATO summit and then the one with Putin—been accompanied by allegations that he is disloyal to the United States and thus cannot be trusted, defamations once issued only by extremist fringe elements in American politics. Now, however, we are told this daily by mainstream publications, broadcasts, and “think tanks.” According to a representative of the Clintons’ Center for American Progress, “Trump is going to sell out America and its allies.” The New York Times and The Washington Post also feature “experts”—they are chosen accordingly—who “worry” and “fear” that Trump and Putin “will get along.” The Times of London, a bastion of Russophobic Cold War advocacy, captures the mainstream perspective in a single headline: “Fears Grow Over Prospect of Trump ‘Peace Deal’ with Putin.”

An anti-“peace” Washington establishment is, of course, what still-unproven Russiagate allegations have wrought, as summed up by a New York magazine writer who advises us that the Trump-Putin summit may well be “less a negotiation between two heads of state than a meeting between a Russian-intelligence asset and his handler.” The charge is hardly original, having been made for months at MSNBC by the questionably credentialed “intelligence expert” Malcolm Nance and the, it seems, selectively informed Rachel Maddow, among many other “experts.” Considering today’s perilous geopolitical situation, it is hard not to conclude that much of the American political establishment, particularly the Democratic Party, would prefer trying to impeach Trump to averting war with Russia, the other nuclear superpower. For this too, there is no precedent in American history.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s dreaded visit to the NATO summit has only inflated the uncritical cult of that organization, which has been in search of a purpose and ever more funding since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. The New York Times declares that NATO is “the core of an American-led liberal world order,” an assertion that might startle many of the non-military institutions involved and even some liberals. No less puzzling is the ritualistic characterization of NATO as “the greatest military alliance in history.” It has never—thankfully—gone to war as an alliance, only a few “willing” member (and would-be member) states under US leadership. Even then, what counts as “great victories”? The police action in the Balkans in the 1990s? The disasters in the aftermath of Iraq and Libya? The longest, still-ongoing American war in history, in Afghanistan? NATO’s only real mission since the 1990s has been expanding to Russia’s borders, and that has resulted in less, not more, security for all concerned, as is evident today. The only “Russian threat” since the end of the Soviet Union is one provoked by the US-led NATO itself, from Georgia and Ukraine to the Baltic states. And only NATO’s vast corporate bureaucracy, its some 4,000 employees housed in its new $1.2 billion headquarters in Brussels, and US and other weapons manufacturers who gain from each new member state, have profited. But none of this can be discussed in the mainstream, because Trump uttered a few words questioning NATO’s role and funding, even though the subject has been on the agenda of several think tanks since the 1990s.

Also not surprisingly, and unlike in the past, mainstream media have found little place for serious discussion of today’s dangerous conflicts between Washington and Moscow: regarding nuclear-weapons-imitation treaties, cyber-warfare, Syria, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region, even Afghanistan. It’s easy to imagine how Trump and Putin could agree on conflict-reduction and cooperation in all of these realms. But considering the traducing by the Post, Times, and Maddow of a group of senators who visited Moscow around July 4, it’s much harder to see how the defamed Trump could implement such “peace deals.” (There is a long history of sabotaging or attempting to sabotage summits and other détente-like initiatives. Indeed, a few such attempts have been evident in recent months and more may lie ahead.)

Nor is the unreasonably demonized Putin without constraints at home, though none like those that may cripple Trump. The Kremlin’s long-postponed decision to raise the pension age for Russian men and women has caused his popular ratings, though still high, to drop some 8 to 10 percent in recent weeks. More significantly, segments of the Russian military-security establishment do not trust Putin’s admitted “illusions” about negotiating with Washington in the past. And like their American counterparts, they do not trust Trump, whom they too view as unreliable, if not capricious. These Russian “hard-liners” have made their concerns known publicly, and Putin must take them into account. As has been a function of summits over the decades, he is seeking in Trump a reliable national-security partner. Given the constraints on Trump and his proclivities, Putin too is taking a risk, and he knows it.

Even if nothing more specific is achieved, everyone who cares about American and international security should hope that the Trump-Putin summit results at least in a restoration of the diplomatic process, the longstanding “contacts,” between Washington and Moscow that have been greatly diminished, if not destroyed, by the new Cold War and by Russiagate allegations. Cold War without diplomacy is a recipe for actual war.

We should also hope that the Democratic Party’s reaction to the summit, in its pursuit of Trump, does not make it the party of unrelenting Cold War, as it may be already becoming.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Discussing the apparent decision to hold a prepared Trump-Putin meeting in July, Cohen points out there have been dozens of such US-Soviet/Russian top leadership events since the precedent was set by FDR and Stalin in 1943, during World War II. That was a meeting of allies, and included Winston Churchill. After the war, all the rest have been between the two Cold War “superpower” rivals or purportedly post–Cold War leaders. Every American president after FDR participated in at least one summit with his Soviet or Russian counterpart, and some presidents in multiple ones, including Eisenhower with Khrushchev, Reagan and George H.W. Bush with Gorbachev, and Clinton with Yeltsin.

If “summits” with large agendas and all of their political and media rituals are distinguished from occasional meetings on the “sidelines” of other events, the former have usually had several purposes: to solidify a mutual national-security partnership between the two leaders, typically on behalf of improving relations, or what became known as détente; to enhance both leaders’ political standing at home and in the world; to send a message to their respective elites and bureaucracies that obstructing, let alone sabotaging, the leader’s détente policy will no longer be tolerated; and by way of announced agreements and positive media coverage to broaden domestic elite and popular support for détente. Summit agendas have varied over the decades, some shaped by ongoing regional or other issues, but one item has been constant from Eisenhower and Khrushchev in the 1950s to Obama and then–Russian President Medvedev in 2009: managing and reducing existential dangers inherent in the “nuclear superpower arms race.”

Full summits have had various results. Some had few consequences for better or worse. The third Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting in Paris in 1960 was aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US U-2 spy plane (sent, some think, by “deep state” foes of Eisenhower’s détente policy). Several summits were historic achievements, at least eventually. The Eisenhower-Khrushchev “spirit of Camp David” in the 1950s diminished the mutually isolating Cold War that prevailed until Stalin’s death in 1953, opening up new possibilities for “peaceful coexistence.” Nixon and Brezhnev established the modern tradition of détente, in the 1970s, including the expanded role of summits in that process. The multiple Reagan-Bush-Gorbachev summits claimed to have ended the Cold War. Several summits did more longer-term harm than good, particularly the highly touted Clinton-Yeltsin meetings, which were mostly decorative covering for Clinton’s winner-take-all approach to a weakened post-Soviet Russia; and Obama’s with Medvedev—the “reset” summit—which was badly conceived and conducted by the White House. During his 18 years as Russia’s leader, Putin has had two full summits with American presidents, though both are mostly forgotten or ill-remembered: with Clinton in Moscow in 2000 and with George W. Bush in Washington and at the latter’s Texas ranch in 2001. Clinton and Bush spoke positively about Putin at the time, but, of course, do so no longer. (Therein lies a serious debate yet to be had as to who and what changed, and why.)

If the summit with Putin happens in July, it will be Trump’s first with him, though the two had a long “sit-down” at the G-20 meeting in Germany a year ago. A Trump-Putin summit will resemble its many predecessors in various ways, but also be unique in two unprecedented respects. Rarely if ever before, as Cohen has previously argued, have US-Russian relations been so perilous. And never before would an American president have gone to a Soviet or post-Soviet summit with so much defamatory opposition and so little political support at home, indeed so defiled in his capacity as commander in chief. Two years of still-unproven Russiagate allegations that Trump is a “Putin puppet,” a “quisling,” or an otherwise “treasonous” president, are without precedent in the 75 years of such crucial meetings. As already adumbrated in commentary on a possible summit, any Trump-Putin agreements that enhance American and international security, of the kind for which previous US presidents were applauded, are likely to be denounced by most representatives of the bipartisan political-media establishment at best as “a grand illusion” and at worst as the treacherous acts of Russia’s “useful idiot,” as a “reward” to Putin for his misdeeds, as “Putin…essentially being given a free hand,” as “upsetting our closest allies in Europe.” If Trump’s laudable summit breakthrough with North Korean leader Kim was widely traduced as incompetent, security cooperation with Putin will be construed as sinister.

Cohen ends with two larger points:

§ As he has argued previously, Russiagate, by crippling Trump’s presidential duty to cope with the gravest international threats, has itself become the number-one threat to American national security, a reality for which the Democratic Party, though not solely, bears a very large responsibility. In other circumstances, we might reasonably hope that a Trump-Putin summit would begin to reduce the dangers inherent in the new nuclear arms, the trip-wire proximity of US and Russian forces and their proxies in Syria, the smoldering civil and proxy wars in Ukraine, the growing NATO buildup and provocative military exercises on Russia’s borders, and the near-vaporizing of Washington-Moscow diplomacy by the large-scale expulsions of diplomats on both sides. (Regarding politically charged sanctions, Trump does best leaving this to the European Union, which must vote, also in July, on whether to continue the ones it imposed on Moscow.) Summits have traditionally diminished such crises, but the ever-looming Russiagate crisis makes this “leadership meeting at the top” unprecedented in this regard as well.

§ Nor is Putin himself immune. Even apart from the lack of any facts or logic supporting the charge that he “attacked American democracy” during the 2016 presidential election, a failed or discredited summit would diminish his own political position at home. Hard-liners in Russia’s military-security (and intellectual) establishment continue to believe that Putin has never really shed his admitted early “illusions” about negotiating with an always-treacherous Washington and, still more, that the Russiagate-plagued Trump would be unable to carry out any commitments made at the summit. Meanwhile, Putin’s popular ratings at home, while still very high, are being eroded by a long-overdue decision to gradually raise the pension age for Russian citizens—from 55 for women and 60 for men, an entitlement taken for granted for many decades. However rational and necessary the decision may be, popular protests are already underway and spreading.

Given the unprecedentedly perilous nature of US-Russian relations today, a Trump-Putin summit is imperative. Nevertheless, efforts will continue to be made, publicly and in the shadows, to prevent it from happening. If Russiagate or another “scandal” does so, or subsequently undermines any of its achievements, Trump might not try again. Nor might Putin. What then?

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Cohen reminds listeners that the Russiagate scandal, which first leaked into the media in mid-2016, has already done immense political damage during these two years. It has cast doubt on the legitimacy of this presidency and possibly future ones. It has questioned the authenticity of a popular election and probably future ones, and thus of American democracy itself. And with high-level former US officials, influential columnists, and an array of mainstream-media outlets regularly declaring that President Trump is “a quisling” and “a Russian agent,” the scandal has greatly diminished his capacity to avoid war with Russia, conceivably nuclear war. Meanwhile, as happened during the McCarthy era, a myriad of official and media “investigations” have cast an ever-widening net in search of evidence of other “colluders,” from peripheral Trump “advisers” and shadowy “informants” to a Russian prostitute and her pimp in Thailand. After all this time and frenzy, substantiated charges and indictments amount to little more than customary financial corruption on the part of the bipartisan top 2 percent and “lying to the FBI,” the latter apparently open to interpretation as to what was actually said and perhaps involving entrapment. Meanwhile, reputations are slurred, lives ruined, once-respectable media degraded, and public discourse—especially about international affairs, but not only—chilled by self-censorship and growing institutional forms of “preventing disinformation.”

Amid this daily frenzy, it’s often forgotten that Russiagate’s “core narrative,” as one of its most devout and prominent promoters terms it, was inspired by, and continues to be based on, two documents, both published in January 2017: an “Intelligence Community Assessment” and the anti-Trump “dossier” compiled by a retired UK intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. The “core narrative” of both was, of course, that Putin’s Kremlin had intervened in the 2016 presidential election—essentially an “attack on America”—in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and abet Trump’s. At the time, a few critics questioned the authenticity of the ICA and the dossier, but for political and media Russiagaters, they instantly became, and have remained, canons, despite their deficit of facts and logic. Reread today, in light of what is now known, they are examples of the adage “rubbish in, rubbish out.”

Intentionally or not—one former intelligence officer called it a “deliberate misrepresentation”—the ICA, by using the term “Community,” gave the impression that its findings were the consensus of all “17 US intelligence agencies,” even though it was signed by only three (the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA) and by the overseeing director of national intelligence, James Clapper. This canard was widely deployed by pro-Clinton media and by her campaign until The New York Times belatedly corrected it in June 2017. But even then, anti-Trump forces continue to deploy a deceptive formulation, insisting that the ICA narrative was “a consensus of the intelligence community.” That was false on two counts. Clapper subsequently admitted he had personally selected for the ICA analysts from the three agencies, but we still do not know who. No doubt these were analysts who would conform to the “core narrative” of Kremlin-Trump collusion, possibly even one or more of the FBI officials now exposed for their “bias.” Second, on one crucial finding, the NSA had only “moderate confidence,” not the “high confidence” of the CIA and FBI. This has yet to be explained.

Still more, the ICA provided almost no facts for its “assessment.” Remarkably, even the Times, which has long been a leading promoter of the Russiagate narrative, noticed this immediately: “What is missing,” one of its lead analysts wrote, is “hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims.” Even more remarkable but little noticed, the ICA authors buried at the end this nullifying disclaimer about their “assessment”: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.” What did that mean? Apparently, that after all the damning and ramifying allegations made in the report, the authors had no “proof” that any of them were a “fact.”

Of course, throughout the ICA document its authors assured readers that it possessed information too sensitive, too classified, to reveal. Despite some criticism of the barren document, nothing more has since been revealed, with one telling exception, also little noted. Buried in a story based on Intel leaks in The Washington Post on December 15, 2017, and repeated in an editorial on December 17, the reporters claimed there was “an extraordinary CIA stream of intelligence that had captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation.” The Post editorial was more explicit, referring to “intelligence from inside the Kremlin.” We might interpret this apparently sensational revelation in one of two ways. If true, it meant the CIA had a human or technical mole in Putin’s Kremlin office. If so, leaking the existence of such a priceless intelligence “asset” would have been a grave national-security crime demanding an intense search for the culprit and severe criminal punishment. So far as is known, there was neither. Or the Post or its Intel leaker just made it up. Given the vacuous nature of the ICA and its authors’ disclaimer of having proof or facts, the latter may be more likely.

Which brings Cohen to Steele’s dossier. Since Steel also professed to be getting his information from “inside the Kremlin,” it is possible that the Post or its Intel leaker was referring to his confection, which, though still unpublished, was already known in high intelligence and political circles and which media had made unattributed use of since mid-2016. Since his identity as author of the dossier became known, Steele’s personal reputation has been seriously tarnished. Not surprisingly, prominent supporters of the Russiagate narrative have made a major effort to rehabilitate him as a “hero.” But the fact that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign for his anti-Trump “intelligence” reports—lavishly, it is said—is not the real issue but instead his actual sources and the information in his dossier. Both have been seriously questioned. As Cohen documented previously, Steele’s claim that his sources were current or former Russian intelligence or other officials at the Kremlin level is implausible. In addition, others were compiling “Russian dirt” on Trump, including the wife of a top FBI official and people personally close to Mrs. Clinton. It’s hard to believe that their “dirt” did not find its way into Steele’s compilation. Indeed, in the dossier, Steele repeatedly cites as a source a Russian émigré associate of Trump—that is, apparently an American.

As for the anti-Trump “information” in Steele’s 35-page dossier, it would take at least 70 pages to document the systemically unconvincing nature of the document. Fortunately, a knowledgeable and meticulous investigator has done at least half the job. What he reveals is an abundance of factual errors, inconsistencies, outright contradictions, and, equally important, information purportedly from secret Kremlin sources but that had already been published in open Russian or other media. (History shows that the trick to making a falsified document at least semi-plausible is to include a few facts previously verified in open sources.) And, one might add, some illogic in the dossier: Would Trump, a longtime hotelier, really commit “acts of sexual perversion” in a VIP suite he did not control, especially in Russia, where audio and video bugging had long been rumored? In the end, Steele’s dossier may be a quintessential example of “rubbish in, rubbish out,” an expression I first heard from another former British intelligence officer who also specialized in Russian affairs more than 40 years ago.

But there remains the equally important matter of logic, especially as related to the allegation that Putin personally “ordered” and “directed” the Russiagate operation on behalf of Trump, a charge that structures the common narrative of the ICA and the dossier. Pervasive demonizing of Putin aside, why would he have done this? What was his motive? The two “core” documents give varying explanations, as do media accounts and the several books that rely heavily on them. It was “payback” for Clinton’s having encouraged protests against Putin in Moscow in 2011­–12. No, it was a clear long-standing preference for Trump, going back as far as perhaps eight years, though this is contradicted in several ways in the Steele dossier, where some Kremlin officials are reported to doubt they should favor him. Then, certain that Clinton would win, Putin sought to cripple her presidency. It’s even said that the operation was payback not for Clinton’s offenses but for what Putin saw as the US-led doping scandal that so battered the Russian Olympic team after the 2014 Sochi games. Today, however, the general Russiagate explanation has grown into Putin’s alleged desire to sow “chaos and disorder” in the West generally, both in the United States and Europe—or as the ICA puts it, “the US-led liberal democratic order”—and therefore, it is often said, he has “won.”

Anyone who has studied Putin as a leader closely and objectively over nearly 20 years understands there is little if any logic in these explanations for the motives attributed to him. He may have intensely disliked Mrs. Clinton, and thought she acted highly improperly in 2011 by meddling in Russia’s elections, but nothing in his long-observed political character suggests he would have acted petulantly to get “payback” with such a risk involved. (Putin also understood full well that Clinton was not responsible for the mass protests.) Undertaking such a Russiagate operation in the United States on behalf of Trump would surely become known and thereby greatly favor Clinton electorally. A man said to be an exceedingly cunning “former KGB officer” would certainly have understood that—and even if he so favored Trump, would never have authorized it. (Even Steele reports that some top-level Kremlin officials feared the purported operation would “backfire” and be “counterproductive.”)

But the larger fallacy derives from failing to understand Putin’s mission ever since he came to power in 1999–2000, and which he has never ceased stating: to rebuild Russia, whose state had collapsed twice in the 20th century, as a stable, prosperous great power, foremost at home but also abroad. Despite the new Cold War and all that has disrupted Russia’s relations with the West, Putin persists in this goal, to the great consternation of his hard-line critics. In May, for example, he said: “To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States.” And in June, amid heightened tensions over Russiagate and other scandals, he amplified: “It is not our aim to divide anything or anybody in Europe…. On the contrary, we want to see a united and prosperous European Union because the European Union is our biggest trade and economic partner. The more problems there are within the European Union, the greater the risk and uncertainties for us.” Is this really a Russian leader who would risk his entire mission and legacy on tawdry “kompromat” on behalf of an American candidate and then president whose caprice had unnerved the Kremlin only slightly less than it did Washington? A leader who would consider that he had “won” as a result of Russiagate?

In short, in these most dangerous of times in US-Russian relations, American politics is consumed by a Russiagate “core narrative” that is essentially a conspiracy theory about an alleged conspiracy. The first victim is rational discourse, the second rational policy-making, the third our own national security. At this moment, we need above all a full critical discussion of that orthodox “core narrative” in the American mainstream media, from which truly informed dissenting opinions are effectively banned. Serious, nonpartisan alternative explanations of various crucial aspects of the “core narrative” have been published and broadcast, but almost never by influential mainstream-media outlets. In these times, it may be the case that anything could be true, including conspiracies. But it is both reckless and undemocratic to prevent public discussion of all of the possibilities, not just those that uncritically support Russiagate’s “core narrative.”

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Recent reports suggest that a formal meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is being seriously discussed in Washington and Moscow. Such ritualized but often substantive “summits,” as they were termed, were frequently used during the 40-year US-Soviet Cold War to, among other things, reduce conflicts and increase cooperation between the two superpowers. They were most important when tensions were highest. Some were very successful, some less so, others were deemed failures. Given today’s extraordinarily toxic political circumstances, even leaving aside powerful opposition in Washington (including inside the Trump administration) to any cooperation with the Kremlin, we may wonder if anything positive would come from a Trump-Putin summit. But it is necessary, even imperative, that Washington and Moscow try.

The reason should be clear. As Cohen first began to argue in 2014, the new Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor, and steadily becoming even more so. It’s time to update, however briefly, the reasons, of which there are already at least ten:

1. The political epicenter of the new Cold War is not in far-away Berlin, as it was from the late 1940s on, but directly on Russia’s borders, from the Baltic states and Ukraine to the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Each of these new Cold War fronts is, or has recently been, fraught with the possibly of hot war. US-Russian military relations are especially tense today in the Baltic region, where a large-scale NATO buildup is under way, and in Ukraine, where a US-Russian proxy war is intensifying. The “Soviet Bloc” that once served as a buffer between NATO and Russia no longer exists. And many imaginable incidents on the West’s new Eastern Front, intentional or unintentional, could easily trigger actual war between the United States and Russia. What brought about this unprecedented situation on Russia’s borders—at least since the Nazi German invasion in 1941—was, of course, the exceedingly unwise decision, in the late 1990s, to expand NATO eastward. Done in the name of “security,” it has made all the states involved only more insecure.

2. Proxy wars were a feature of the old Cold War, but usually small ones in what was called the “Third World”—in Africa, for example—and they rarely involved many, if any, Soviet or American personnel, mostly only money and weapons. Today’s US-Russian proxy wars are different, located in the center of geopolitics and accompanied by too many American and Russian trainers, minders, and possibly fighters. Two have already erupted: in Georgia in 2008, where Russian forces fought a Georgian army financed, trained, and minded by American funds and personnel; and in Syria, where in February scores of Russians were killed by US-backed anti-Assad forces. Moscow did not retaliate, but it has pledged to do so if there is “a next time,” as there very well may be. If so, this would in effect be war directly between Russia and America. Meanwhile, the risk of such a direct conflict continues to grow in Ukraine, where the country’s US-backed but politically failing President Petro Poroshenko seems increasingly tempted to launch another all-out military assault on rebel-controlled Donbass, backed by Moscow. If he does so, and the assault does not quickly fail as previous ones have, Russia will certainly intervene in eastern Ukraine with a truly tangible “invasion.” Washington will then have to make a fateful war-or-peace decision. Having already reneged on its commitments to the Minsk Accords, which are the best hope for ending the four-year Ukrainian crisis peacefully, Kiev seems to have an unrelenting impulse to be a tail wagging the dog of war. Certainly, its capacity for provocations and disinformation are second to none, as evidenced again last week by the faked “assassination and resurrection” of the journalist Arkady Babchenko.

3. The Western, but especially American, years-long demonization of the Kremlin leader, Putin, is also unprecedented. Too obvious to reiterate here, no Soviet leader, at least since Stalin, was ever subjected to such prolonged, baseless, crudely derogatory personal vilification. Whereas Soviet leaders were generally regarded as acceptable negotiating partners for American presidents, including at major summits, Putin has been made to seem to be an illegitimate national leader—at best “a KGB thug,” at worst a murderous “mafia boss.”

4. Still more, demonizing Putin has generated a widespread Russophobic vilification of Russia itself, or what The New York Times and other mainstream-media outlets have taken to calling “Vladimir Putin’s Russia.” Yesterday’s enemy was Soviet Communism. Today it is increasingly Russia, thereby also delegitimizing Russia as a great power with legitimate national interests. “The Parity Principle,” as Cohen termed it during the preceding Cold War—the principle that both sides had legitimate interests at home and abroad, which was the basis for diplomacy and negotiations, and symbolized by leadership summits—no longer exists, at least on the American side. Nor does the acknowledgment that both sides were to blame, at least to some extent, for that Cold War. Among influential American observers who at least recognize the reality of the new Cold War, “Putin’s Russia” alone is to blame. When there is no recognized parity and shared responsibility, there is little space for diplomacy—only for increasingly militarized relations, as we are witnessing today.

5. Meanwhile, most of the Cold War safeguards—cooperative mechanisms and mutually observed rules of conduct that evolved over decades in order to prevent superpower hot war—have been vaporized or badly frayed since the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, as the UN General Secretary António Guterres, almost alone, has recognized: “The Cold War is back—with a vengeance but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.” Trump’s recent missile strike on Syria carefully avoided killing any Russians there, but here too Moscow has vowed to retaliate against US launchers or other forces involved if there is a “next time,” as, again, there may be. Even the decades-long process of arms control may, we are told by an expert, be coming to an “end.” If so, it will mean an unfettered new nuclear-arms race but also the termination of an ongoing diplomatic process that buffered US-Soviet relations during very bad political times. In short, if there are any new Cold War rules of conduct, they are yet to be formulated and mutually accepted. Nor does this semi-anarchy take into account the new warfare technology of cyber-attacks. What are its implications for the secure functioning of existential Russian and American nuclear command-and-control and early-warning systems that guard against an accidental launching of missiles still on high alert?

6. Russiagate allegations that the American president has been compromised by—or is even an agent of—the Kremlin are also without precedent. These allegations have had profoundly dangerous consequences, among them the nonsensical but mantra-like warfare declaration that “Russia attacked America” during the 2016 presidential election; crippling assaults on President Trump every time he speaks with Putin in person or by phone; and making both Trump and Putin so toxic that even most politicians, journalists, and professors who understand the present-day dangers are reluctant to speak out against US contributions to the new Cold War.

7. Mainstream-media outlets have, of course, played a woeful role in all of this. Unlike in the past, when pro-détente advocates had roughly equal access to mainstream media, today’s new Cold War media enforce their orthodox narrative that Russia is solely to blame. They practice not diversity of opinion and reporting but “confirmation bias.” Alternative voices (with, yes, alternative or opposing facts) rarely appear any longer in the most influential mainstream newspapers or on television or radio broadcasts. One alarming result is that “disinformation” generated by or pleasing to Washington and its allies has consequences before it can be corrected. The fake Babchenko assassination (allegedly ordered by Putin, of course) was quickly exposed, but not the alleged Skripal assassination attempt in the UK, which led to the largest US expulsion of Russian diplomats in history before London’s official version of the story began to fall apart. This too is unprecedented: Cold War without debate, which in turn precludes the frequent rethinking and revising of US policy that characterized the preceding 40-year Cold War—in effect, an enforced dogmatization of US policy that is both exceedingly dangerous and undemocratic.

8. Equally unsurprising, and also very much unlike during the 40-year Cold War, there is virtually no significant opposition in the American mainstream to the US role in the new Cold War—not in the media, not in Congress, not in the two major political parties, not in the universities, not at grassroots levels. This too is unprecedented, dangerous, and contrary to real democracy. Consider only the thunderous silence of scores of large US corporations that have been doing profitable business in post-Soviet Russia for years, from fast-food chains and automobile manufacturers to pharmaceutical and energy giants. And contrast their behavior to that of CEOs of PepsiCo, Control Data, IBM, and other major American corporations seeking entry to the Soviet market in the 1970s and 1980s, when they publicly supported and even funded pro-détente organizations and politicians. How to explain the silence of their counterparts today, who are usually so profit-motivated? Are they too fearful of being labeled “pro-Putin” or possibly “pro-Trump”? If so, will this Cold War continue to unfold with only very rare profiles of courage in any high places?

9. And then there is the widespread escalatory myth that today’s Russia, unlike the Soviet Union, is too weak—its economy too small and fragile, its leader too “isolated in international affairs”—to wage a sustained Cold War, and that eventually Putin, who is “punching above his weight,” as the cliché has it, will capitulate. This too is a dangerous delusion. As Cohen has shown previously, “Putin’s Russia” is hardly isolated in world affairs, and is becoming even less so, even in Europe, where at least five governments are tilting away from Washington and Brussels and perhaps from their economic sanctions on Russia. Indeed, despite the sanctions, Russia’s energy industry and agricultural exports are flourishing. Geopolitically, Moscow has many military and related advantages in regions where the new Cold War has unfolded. And no state with Russia’s modern nuclear and other weapons is “punching above its weight.” Above all, the great majority of Russian people have rallied behind Putin because they believe their country is under attack by the US-led West. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Russia’s history understands it is highly unlikely to capitulate under any circumstances.

10. Finally (at least as of now), there is the growing war-like “hysteria” often commented on in both Washington and Moscow. It is driven by various factors, but television talk/“news” broadcasts, which are as common in Russia as in the United States, play a major role. Perhaps only an extensive quantitative study could discern which plays a more lamentable role in promoting this frenzy—MSNBC and CNN or their Russian counterparts. For Cohen, the Russian dark witticism seems apt: “Both are worst” (Oba khuzhe). Again, some of this American broadcast extremism existed during the preceding Cold War, but almost always balanced, even offset, by truly informed, wiser opinions, which are now largely excluded.

Is this analysis of the dangers inherent in the new Cold War itself extremist or alarmist? Even SOME usually reticent specialists would seem to agree with Cohen’s general assessment. Experts gathered by a centrist Washington think tank thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, there is a 5 to 7 chance of actual war with Russia. A former head of British M16 is reported as saying that “for the first time in living memory, there’s a realistic chance of a superpower conflict.” And a respected retired Russian general tells the same think tank that any military confrontation “will end up with the use of nuclear weapons between the United States and Russia.”

In today’s dire circumstances, one Trump-Putin summit cannot eliminate the new Cold War dangers. But US-Soviet summits traditionally served three corollary purposes. They created a kind of security partnership—not a conspiracy—that involved each leader’s limited political capital at home, which the other should recognize and not heedlessly jeopardize. They sent a clear message to the two leaders’ respective national-security bureaucracies, which often did not favor détente-like cooperation, that the “boss” was determined and that they must end their foot-dragging, even sabotage. And summits, with their exalted rituals and intense coverage, usually improved the media-political environment needed to enhance cooperation amid Cold War conflicts. If a Trump-Putin summit achieves even some of those purposes, it might result in a turning away from the precipice that now looms.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments of these conversations, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Baseless and reckless tropes about Russia, Cohen points out, have proliferated in the US political-media establishment during the new Cold War, and even more since Russiagate allegations began to circulate widely two years ago, in mid-2016. The worst of these tropes—in effect an incitement to war—is that “Russia attacked America during the 2016 presidential election.” But there are others equally unfounded and almost as detrimental to Washington policy-making. Among them, as The Economist and The New York Times recently asserted, are that on today’s “world stage” Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “pariah” and his country “isolated from the international community.” Indeed, the Times insisted, quoting a British intelligence chief, that Russia is “becoming a ‘more isolated pariah.’”

These assertions are so detached from geopolitical realities that they may be expressions of some Putin-Russia Derangement Syndrome, as others have suggested. Consider only last week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, an annual event conceived by the Kremlin as a kind of Russian Davos. By most media accounts, including non-Russian ones, it was the best attended and most successful since 2014, when the West began imposing escalating economic sanctions on the country. Leaders of France, Japan, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and scores of less consequential states were there, along with innumerable international corporate executives, the director of the International Monetary Fund, and the president of Boeing, who declared that Russia “is a place for long-term partnership.” Judging by press reports, television footage, and transcripts of meetings, virtually all of them were eager for close encounters with the “pariah” Putin. Indeed, just prior to the event, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Sochi to meet separately with Putin. Again, all this against the backdrop of new financial and diplomatic sanctions rained on Russia by London and Washington and very perfunctory, if at all, implemented by their European “allies.”

In reality, it is impossible to isolate Russia, the planet’s largest territorial and most natural-resource rich nation. There is no “global politics,” no “world order,” without Russia. Its natural gas and oil resources, carried west and east through its far-flung networks of pipelines—both existing ones and those under construction—make such an effort an epic geopolitical folly. So too does Moscow’s political-diplomatic influence in vital regions, from Europe, China, and Afghanistan to the Middle East. (Consider its crucial role, for example, in any crisis-resolution involving Iran or North Korea.) Much of this is due not primarily to Moscow’s modernized conventional and nuclear weapons but to its foreign-policy philosophy under Putin. Simply put but often elaborated: In accord with national sovereignty, we are ready for good relations with any government that seeks good relations with us. Contrast this with Washington’s longstanding ideological, highly militarized, and often hegemony-aspiring foreign-policy tenets.

As a result, unlike the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia has few, if any, unwilling allies, semi-allies, or partners in international affairs. China and Iran are big and important allies. Semi-allies and occasional partners include India and, of course, the other BRICs nations; Saudi Arabia, with whom Russia has cooperated in order to raise international oil prices; and Israel, whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was an honored guest in Moscow for Russia’s most sacred memorial holiday, Victory Day, on May 9. America’s European NATO allies may seem united in “isolating” Russia, but not the leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, or the president of France. Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, again accompanied by his wife, did a mini-version of his effervescent socializing with President Trump in Washington with Putin in St. Petersburg, while also signing a major energy deal with Russia and hoping that France will become “Russia’s largest investor.” Another test of Europe’s fidelity to the United States (and its devout UK partner) will come in July, when EU sanctions on Russia must be continued or terminated. A single “no” vote will end them. Until now, Europe has been swayed—or coerced—by Washington. But can the new government now being formed in Italy be made to conform, or other governments now rebelling against Trump’s renewed sanctions on Iran, with which not a few European companies have highly profitable business relations? But can the new government now being formed in Italy be made to conform? And what of the other governments now rebelling against Trump’s renewed sanctions on Iran, a nation with which not a few European companies have highly profitable business relations? Is, as an official Russian news agency hopes, an “anti-sanctions coalition” forming against the United States? If so, who would be isolated?

Where did the foolish notion of “isolating Russia” originate? This, at least, cannot be attributed to President Trump, but to President Obama. In April 2014, he made known, as reported by the Times, that henceforth his policy would focus on “isolating…Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world…effectively making it a pariah state.” This was extremist folly, not, as the Times correspondent thought, “an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.” Containment was intended not to isolate the Soviet Union but to keep it from spreading its military and political influence beyond its own existing “bloc” of allies.

Washington and its allies have certainly tried to isolate “Putin’s Russia.” Hence the multiyear cascade of tantrum-like, pointless, mostly ineffective, even counterproductive sanctions. In addition, whether by chance or intent, political campaigns have erupted on the eve of Putin and Russia’s emerging on “the world state” in ways that demonstrate their central role in international affairs. Thus the media campaign to frighten away visitors to the 2014 Sochi Olympics with reports that terrorist and homophobic attacks were certain to happen along with life-threatening mishaps due to “corrupt” construction. (None did.) Now, on the eve of the World Cup championship in Russia, there is perhaps a predictable new series of US media reports suggesting that Russia should be treated as a pariah nation: accounts of an attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in the UK, an official story that has almost completely fallen apart, but not before having major diplomatic consequences; a revived report that Moscow was behind the shoot-down of a Malaysian passenger jetliner over Ukraine in 2014, but without any new actual evidence; a revival of the malicious allegation that Putin and Russia itself are “fascist,” without a word, of course, about an epidemic of anti-Semitic episodes and armed neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine; and a prominent Times opinion article warning that “L.G.T.B. people” may be in danger during the World Cup games.

An argument about the extent to which Russia is or is not isolated in the world today may seem marginal given the looming dangers inherent in the new Cold War. But even leaving aside the obscurant conceit that Washington and London are “the international community,” it is indicative of the general degradation of American thinking and discourse about geopolitics and US foreign policy generally in mainstream media and politics. (There are, of course, many exceptions outside the mainstream, especially in scholarly publications.) Henry Kissinger once said, “The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one.” The “isolated pariah” trope is part of that demonizing. But Kissinger was partially wrong: Washington has had Russia policies in the Putin era—exceedingly ill-informed, unwise, and failed ones.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments of these conversations, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Cohen has several reactions to the recent revelation that a longtime CIA-FBI “informant,” professor emeritus Stefan Halper, had been dispatched to “interact” with several members of Donald Trump’s campaign organization in 2016. He discusses each of them:

1. In February, Cohen asked if “Russiagate” was largely “Intelgate,” pointing to the roles then known to have been played by CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The revelation about Halper, essentially an Intel undercover operative, is further evidence that US intelligence agencies were deeply involved in the origins and promotion of Russiagate allegations of “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin. (We do not know if others were deployed covertly to “investigate” the Trump campaign, what the two agencies did with Halper’s information, or whether he was connected in any way to UK intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his “dossier.”)

2. But the issue is not President Trump, support him or not. It is instead twofold: our own civil liberties; and, in regard to the Russiagate allegations made against him as a candidate and now as president, or against others under investigation, the organizations and media that no longer profess nor defend these liberties as basic principles of American democracy. (This may be another by-product of what someone has called a “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”)

— The ACLU, for example, seems not to have loudly protested Intel or related transgressions in this regard, if at all.

— Still worse, in two articles and an editorial, The New York Times unconditionally defended Halper’s clandestine mission. It did so by stating the underlying Russiagate narrative as “facts” that “aren’t disputed”: “There was a sophisticated, multiyear conspiracy by Russian government officials and agents, working under direct orders from President Vladimir Putin, to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in support of Donald Trump.” In fact, aspects of this narrative have been strongly questioned by a number of qualified critics, including Cohen, though their questioning of it is never printed in the Times. Even if there was such a “multiyear conspiracy,” for example, how does the Times know it was carried out under Putin’s “direct orders”? In reality, that entire assumption is based solely on two seriously challenged sources: an “Intelligence Community Assessment” of January 2017 and Steele’s dossier. But they are enough for the Times to assert that Halper’s targets had “suspicious contacts linked to Russia”—that these Trump associates had “met with Russians or people linked to Russia.” Indeed, Times columnist Paul Krugman, once a distinguished Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner, tweeted as Joseph McCarthy might have, calling it “treason.” (These allegations are so vague and capacious they could apply to encounters with many New York City taxi drivers. Certainly, they apply to Cohen himself, who has had scores of “meetings” and “contacts” with Russians over the years, including with “Kremlin-linked” ones.) Indicative of its malpractice in covering Russia and Russiagate, the Times then proceeds to commit factual misrepresentations about three of Halper’s targets. Gen. Michael Flynn did nothing wrong or unusual in talking with the Russian ambassador to Washington in December 2016. Other presidents-elected have established such “back channels” to Moscow, including Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. Carter Page was not “recruited by Russian spies.” Russian agents tried to do so, but he helped the FBI expose and arrest them. And Paul Manafort had not, during the time in question, “lobbied for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine.” Instead, he urged that country’s president to accept an EU trading agreement that Putin strongly opposed. The Times ends by asserting that no information collected by Halper (or Steele) had been made public prior to the November 2016 election. In fact, an article alluding to such material was published as early as July 2016 by Franklin Foer and subsequently by Michael Isikoff and David Corn. The Times itself ran a number of insinuating “Trump-Putin” stories; accusatory opinion pieces by former Intel chiefs, like the CIA’s Michael Morell and the NSA’s Michael Hayden; and its own editorials prior to the election. Indeed, the allegations were so well-known that in their August debate, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of being Putin’s “puppet.”

 — Nor was the Times alone among media outlets that had once deplored civil-liberties violations but justified the Halper operation. The Washington Post also unconditionally did so, as in a column by Eugene Robinson, who denounced critics of those Russiagate practices for “smearing veteran professionals” of the agencies. Had they not dispatched Halper, Robinson added, it “would have been an appalling dereliction of duty.” Proponents of civil liberties might consider his statement “appalling.”

— As usual, MSNBC and CNN were in accord with the Times and the Post. For instance, CNN’s Don Lemon summoned James Clapper himself to vouch for Halper’s undercover mission: “That’s a good thing because the Russians pose a threat to the very basis our political system.” Lemon did not question Clapper’s rationalizing or perspective, nor did he book anyone who might have done so. The new cult of Intel is a mainstream orthodoxy.

3. Not a word about constitutional civil liberties in any of this media coverage, though surely the “informant” and “contacts” themes—the Clinton-sponsored Center for American Progress has recently posted 70-plus purportedly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s people and Russia—should have reminded some editors, writers, or producers about those practices during the McCarthy era. (For a powerful reminder, read former Nation editor and publisher Victor Navasky’s widely acclaimed Naming Names.)

4. But Cohen recalls instead the times he lived in Soviet Russia periodically from 1976 to 1982 when the authorities banned him from the country (until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985) among open dissidents and semi-closeted Communist Party nonconformists, under Brezhnev’s “vegetarian” surveillance state. Cohen’s Soviet Russian friends called it “vegetarian” because the era of Stalin’s mass arbitrary arrests, torture, and executions had long passed. Suppression by the KGB now featured “softer” tactics, among them clandestine informers and accusations of “contacts with American imperialism and the CIA.” Cohen was quickly instructed by his Moscow friends how to detect informers or, in any case, to be ever mindful they might be present even at intimate gatherings, even “friends.” And, as an American living among targeted individuals, he took every precaution to avoid being that damning “contact.” Nonetheless, in the end, Cohen was cited by the KGB in cases against at least two prominent dissidents, one jailed and the other hounded. (Both later became very prominent human-rights figures under Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin: one as head of the human-rights organization Memorial, the other as the founder of Moscow’s Museum of the History of the Gulag.) 

5. Surveillance was, of course, very different and far more consequential in the generally repressive pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union than in America today. But a number of episodes on both sides involved professors who were intelligence operatives. In the Russigate saga, there is already Halper and the still-shadowy Professor Joseph Mifsud, who befriended the very minor, very inexperienced, and hapless Trump “aide” George Papadopoulos. (Originally said to be a Russian intelligence “asset,” some evidence has appeared that Mifsud actually worked for British intelligence. In any event, he has vanished.) This should not surprise us. Not all American or Russian intelligence officers are assassins, recruiters, or even spies. Some are highly qualified scholars who hold positions in colleges and universities, as has been the case both in Russia and in the United States. As a result, Cohen himself has had over the years personal—yes—“contacts” with several Soviet and post-Soviet “intelligence officers.” Two held the rank of general, both were affiliated with higher-educational institutions (one as a professor), which is where Cohen first met them. Another general headed the former KGB (now FSB) archives. The others, more junior, were working on their doctoral dissertations (a prerequisite for advancement) in the same Stalin-era archive where Cohen was doing research for a book. Cohen took many lunch and smoking breaks with them. Most of the discussions focused on knowledge about the Stalin Terror of the 1930s, though sometimes they did wander to current concerns—including whether Cohen’s native Kentucky bourbon was superior to Russian vodka. No “suspicious” subjects ever came up.

6. The Halper affair should compel each of us to decide whether or not top levels of US intelligence agencies—what Cohen has been referring to as Intelgate—have played an improper, or worse, role in what now may be the worst political crisis in modern American history: Russiagate. Whatever we decide, no one, especially proponents of the anti-Trump “Resistance,” should forget a 20th-century political lesson: The end rarely, if ever, justifies the means.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments of these conversations, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

On May 9, at a public event jointly sponsored by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Russian Studies, Cohen and McFaul—a Stanford University professor and previously President Obama’s top Russia adviser in the White House and then his ambassador to Moscow—debated a crucial historical but also urgent contemporary subject: “The New US-Russian Cold War—Who Is to Blame?” Cohen argues that unwise American policies since the 1990s have been largely responsible. McFaul, drawing on themes in his new book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, argues that Russia’s leader since 2000, Vladimir Putin, is to blame. (A video of the full debate can be seen here.)

Batchelor plays several statements by Cohen and McFaul at the event, which he and Cohen discuss. Among the main points made by Cohen are the following:

— The new Cold War has unfolded for more than twenty years without any substantive mainstream debate—not in elections, Congress, the media, think tanks, or universities. In a democracy, such debates are the only way to challenge and change official policy. As a result, Washington’s unwise policies toward Moscow have been guided by the same underlying assumptions and principles since the 1990s. This situation is dramatically unlike the preceding 40-year Cold War, when US policy was regularly debated both at high and grassroots levels from the 1960s through the 1980s. And this lack of public debate is one reason why the new Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. Therefore, Cohen emphasizes, if this event sets a precedent, inspires more such debates between representatives of fundamentally opposing American views, as he and McFaul are, there will be no loser only winners in the making of subsequent US policy toward Russia.

— Cohen locates the origins of the new Cold War at the time when the preceding one was said to have ended. The three leaders who declared that the ColdWar had ended in 1989­­­–1990—Presidents Gorbachev, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush—publicly agreed it had been terminated through negotiations and “without any losers.” But in 1992, Bush changed both the timing and terms of that epochal event, dating it from the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, two years later, and declaring: “America won the Cold War.” Thus arose the US triumphalism and sense of entitlement that has informed Washington’s policies toward post-Soviet Russia ever since.

— At the same time, in 1990, another major agreement was successfully negotiated and then violated by Washington. In return for Gorbachev’s agreement that a reunited Germany (the political epicenter of that Cold War) would be a NATO member, the Western powers, led by President Bush, pledged that NATO would not expand “two inches to the East.” Violating that pledge a few years later led to two primary causes of the new Cold War: today, NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, is encamped on Russia’s borders; and the Russian policy elite’s abiding belief, expressed not only by Putin, that Washington has repeatedly broken its promises to, even “deceived,” Moscow.

— In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration’s professed “strategic partnership and friendship” with Russia was in fact driven by rampant triumphalism. With Russia gravely weakened and in profound crisis following the end of the Soviet Union, Clinton pursued what Cohen terms “a winner-take-all” approach to Moscow and, behind the scenes, toward Russian President Boris Yeltsin himself. While the physically ailing and psychologically needy Yeltsin was being cajoled by Clinton on matters of Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, legions of American “advisers” encamped across the country to similarly “meddle” in that nation’s politics—drafting laws and textbooks, abetting politicians and parties favored by Washington, and directly participating in the rigging of Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection. Many Americans applauded as progress the oligarchic plundering of Russia’s richest assets, and some even enabled the transfer and laundering of that ill-gained wealth in the West. Then followed the onset of NATO expansion eastward and, in 1999, the US-led bombing of Russia’s traditional ally, Serbia, and NATO’s annexation of its Kosovo province, which the Putin leadership would later cite as precedent for its action in Crimea. All along, as Russia was afflicted by the worst ever peacetime economic depression, with some 75 percent of its people sinking into poverty and attendant social misery, Washington cheered the process as a “transition to democracy and capitalism.” It ended in 1999, with Russia in financial collapse and with Yeltsin’s resignation. The resulting backlash could have been, Cohen points out, very much worse for the United States than Vladimir Putin has been.

— Despite the disastrous US policies of the 1990s, the winner-take-all approach continued under President George W. Bush. Thus, following the 9/11 attack on America in 2001, the new and not yet unchallengeable Russian President Putin gave more support to the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan than did any other country, including NATO members. Putin sought the real strategic partnership with Washington that Yeltsin had failed to achieve. Instead, he got in return from Bush further NATO expansion, now headed to Russia’s Baltic borders; expanded “democracy promotion”—“meddling,” to use “Russiagate” jargon—in Russia’s internal affairs; and, most detrimental to Russian (and international) security, unilateral US withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which now has resulted in missile defense installments on land and sea very close to Russia and, predictably, a new nuclear arms race.

— In 2008, following an official NATO statement that one day the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine would certainly become members of the alliance, a brief war between Russia and Georgia erupted. An official European investigation concluded that Georgia’s president had initiated the war. What is not known is whether he was advised to do so by his American patrons in the Bush Administration. Whatever the case, Georgia was the first US-Russian proxy war of the new Cold War. Others, in effect, soon followed—in Ukraine, then in Syria. More, or even worse, may be in the making.

— McFaul argues that Cohen’s thesis of an unending triumphalist, “winner-take-all” approach to post-Soviet Russia is wrong, as evidenced by President Obama’s “re-set” with Moscow under then President Dmitry Medvedev. It was, according to McFaul (himself a major participant), a “win-win” policy. Cohen disagrees, pointing out in detail that Moscow was offered, and received, very little, while the Obama Administration got what it most wanted: Russian sanctions on Iran and an expanded Russian supply route to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Moreover, it ended with another American broken promise. In return for its “partner” Medvedev not vetoing at the UN Security Council the US-led attack on Libya in 2011, Obama and his representatives, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, promised not to seek the removal of Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. In the event, he was tracked down and killed. Putin, then prime minister, remarked on “yet another American deception.” And any chance Medvedev had for a second term as president, as the Obama administration hoped and even lobbied for, was crushed by his own “re-set” partner in Washington.

— That is, McFaul and many others continue to insist that the new Cold War and its causes began with Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012. But as Cohen’s historical presentation shows, this is not a viable empirical or analytical understanding of past or current developments.

— Has the outcome really been a new Cold War? When Cohen first warned of this danger in the early 2000s, adumbrating his concern even during the Clinton-Yelstein 1990s, it was widely said that a recapitulation of Cold War was impossible for several reasons, primarily because there was no longer any fundamental ideological conflict between the United States and Russia, as there had been between democratic capitalism and Soviet Communism. If nothing else, Cohen and McFaul agree there is now indeed an ideological clash between, it is said, the US-led West’s liberal democratic values and Putin’s conservative, even reactionary, ones. Cohen questions this simplistic characterization of Putin’s values, or ideology, but the issue was not directly joined and remains to be debated.

— A range of other disputed issues are discussed before the debate, and the Cohen-Batchelor discussion, ends with the issue of “Russiagate” allegations regarding “collusion” between President Trump and Putin. McFaul apparently regards the allegations as proven or nearly so. Cohen does not, and he worries that if Trump is faced with an existential nuclear confrontation with Russia, as President John F. Kennedy was during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, these allegations will prevent Trump from avoiding nuclear war through negotiations with the Kremlin, as Kennedy did. McFaul did not comment on this, perhaps because the debate format did not provide him an opportunity to do so. What he thinks about it is unclear. But all of us, Cohen ends, should certainly, and urgently, think very carefully about this not improbable possibility.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

Cohen begins: The orthodox American political-media narrative blames “Putin’s Russia” alone for the new US-Russian Cold War. Maintaining this (at most) partial truth involves various mainstream media malpractices, among them lack of historical context; reporting based on unverified “facts” and selective sources; editorial bias; and the excluding, even slurring, of proponents of alternative explanatory narratives as “Kremlin apologists” and carriers of “Russian propaganda.” An extraordinary example appeared on May 1, when Jim Sciutto, CNN’s leading purveyor of Russiagate allegations, tweeted that “Jill Stein is…repeating Russian talking points on its interference in the 2016 election and on U.S. foreign policy.” To the extent that Sciutto represents CNN, as he does almost nightly on air, it is useful to know what this influential network actually thinks about a legitimate third party in American electoral democracy and its presidential candidate. And also about many well-informed Americans who have not supported Stein or her party but who strongly disagree with CNN’s orthodox positions on Russiagate and US foreign policy. No less important, however, is the highly selective nature of the mainstream narrative of the new Cold War, what it chooses to feature and what it virtually omits. Among the omissions, few realities are more important than the role played by neofascist forces in US-backed, Kiev-governed Ukraine since 2014. Not even many Americans who follow international news know the following, for example:

§ That the snipers who killed scores of protestors and policemen on Kiev’s Maidan Square in February 2014, thereby triggering a “democratic revolution” that overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, and brought to power a virulent anti-Russian, pro-American regime—it was neither democratic nor a revolution, but a violent coup unfolding in the streets with high-level support—were sent not by Yanukovych, as is still widely reported, but instead almost certainly by the neofascist organization Right Sector and its co-conspirators.

§ That the pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa shortly later in 2014 reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during World War II has been all but deleted from the American mainstream narrative even though it remains a painful and revelatory experience for many Ukrainians.

§ That the Azov Battalion of some 3,000 well-armed fighters, which has played a major combat role in the Ukrainian civil war and now is an official component of Kiev’s armed forces, is avowedly “partially” pro-Nazi, as evidenced by its regalia, slogans, and programmatic statements, and well-documented as such by several international monitoring organizations. Congressional legislation recently banned Azov from receiving any US military aid, but it is likely to obtain some of the new weapons recently sent to Kiev by the Trump Administration due to the country’s rampant network of corruption and black markets.

§ That stormtroop-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other “impure” citizens are widespread throughout Kiev-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. And that the police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neofascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kiev has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorializing Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms and their leaders during World War II, renaming streets in their honor, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.

§ Or that Israel’s official annual report on anti-Semitism around the world in 2017 concluded that such incidents had doubled in Ukraine and the number “surpassed the tally for all the incidents reported throughout the entire region combined.” By the region, the report meant the total in all of Eastern Europe and all former territories of the Soviet Union.

Americans cannot be faulted for not knowing these facts. They are very rarely reported and still less debated in the mainstream media, whether in newspapers or on television. To learn about them, Americans would have to turn to alternative media and to their independent writers, which rarely affect mainstream accounts of the new Cold War. One such important American writer is Lev Golinkin. He is best known for his book ‘A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,’ a deeply moving and highly instructive memoir of his life as a young boy brought to America by his immigrant parents from Eastern Ukraine, now the scene of tragic civil and proxy war. But Golinkin has also been an unrelenting and meticulous reporter of neofascism in “our” Ukraine and a defender of others who try to chronicle and oppose its growing crimes. (Many of us seeking reliable information often turn to him.)

The significance of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and the at least tacit official U.S support or tolerance for it should be clearly understood:

§ This did not begin under President Trump but under President George W. Bush, when then Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s “Orange Revolution” began rehabilitating Ukraine’s wartime killers of Jews, and it grew under President Obama, who, along with Vice President Joseph Biden, were deeply complicit in the Maidan coup and what followed. Then too the American mainstream media scarcely noticed. Still worse, when a founder of a neo-Nazi party and now repackaged speaker of the Ukrainian parliament visited Washington in 2017, he was widely feted by leading American politicians, including Senator John McCain and Representative Paul Ryan. Imagine the message this sent back to Ukraine—and elsewhere.

§ Fascist or neo-Nazi revivalism is underway today in many countries, from Europe to the United States, but the Ukrainian version is of special importance and a particular danger. A large, growing, well-armed fascist movement has reappeared in a large European country that is the political epicenter of the new Cold War between the United States and Russia—indeed a movement that not so much denies the Holocaust as glorifies it. Could such forces come to power in Kiev? Its American minimizers say never because it has too little public support (though perhaps more than has Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko today). But the same was said of Lenin’s party and Hitler’s until Russia and Germany descended into chaos and lawlessness. And a recent Amnesty International article reports that Kiev is losing control over radical groups and the state’s monopoly on the use of force.

§ For four years, the US political-media establishment, including many prominent American Jews and their organizations, has at best ignored or tolerated Ukrainian neo-Nazism and at worst abetted it by unqualified support for Kiev. Typically, The New York Times may report at length on corruption in Ukraine, but not on the very frequent manifestations of neofascism. And when George Will laments the resurgence of anti-Semitism today, he cites the British Labor Party but not Ukraine. When Ukrainian fascism is occasionally acknowledged, a well-placed band of pro-Kiev zealots quickly asserts—maybe, but the real fascist is America’s number one enemy, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Whatever Putin’s failings, this allegation is either cynical or totally uninformed. Nothing in Putin’s statements over 18 years in power are akin to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the alleged superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of a vast multiethnic state, such statements by Putin would be inconceivable and political suicide. There are, of course, neofascist activists in Russia, but many of them have been imprisoned. Nor is a mass fascist movement feasible in Russia where so many millions died in the war against Nazi Germany, a war that directly affected Putin and clearly left a formative mark on him. Though born after the war, his mother and father barely survived near-fatal wounds and disease, his older brother died in the long German siege of Leningrad, and several uncles perished. Still more, there is no anti-Semitism evident in Putin. Indeed, it is widely said, both in Russia and in Israel, that life for Russian Jews is better under Putin than it has ever been in that country’s long history.

§ We are left, then, not with Putin’s responsibility for the resurgence of fascism in a major European country, but with America’s shame and possible indelible stain on its historical reputation for tolerating it even if only through silence.

At least until recently. On April 23, a courageous first-term congressman from California, Ro Khanna, organized a public letter to the State Department, co-signed by 56 other members of the House, calling on the US government to speak out and take steps against the resurgence of official anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism in both Ukraine and Poland. In the history of the new and more perilous Cold War, “Ro,” as he seems to be known to many in Washington, is a rare profile in courage, as are his co-signers. We will see what comes of their wise and moral act. In a righteous representative democracy, every member of Congress would sign the appeal and every leading newspaper lend editorial support. But not surprisingly, the mainstream media has yet even to report on Representative Khanna’s certainly newsworthy initiative, though, also not surprisingly, he has been slurred —and promptly defended by the inestimable Lev Golinkin.

The previous 40-year experience taught that Cold War can corrupt even American democracy—politically, economically, morally. There are many examples of how the new edition has already degraded America’s media, politicians, even scholars. But the acid test today may be our elites’ reaction to neofascism in US-supported Ukraine. Protesting it is not a Jewish issue, but an American one. Nonetheless, it is fitting to paraphrase again the Jewish philosopher Hillel: If not now, when? If not us, who?

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussion of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments of these discussions, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)

Cohen points out that for more than a decade Russia—certainly its state and leadership—has been increasingly demonized and thus delegitimized by the American political-media establishment. This began with the personal vilification of Russian President Vladimir Putin but has grown into a general Russophobic indictment of Russia itself and any of its citizens with whom Americans may have had encounters. Nearly two years of “Russiagate” allegations, which still remain unproven, have more than implied that “contacts” or “ties” with anyone “linked to” Russian officialdom, directly or indirectly, are inherently suspicious, if not treasonous. (See, for example, statements by John Brennan and James Clapper.) According to former vice president (and would-be president) Joseph Biden, today’s Russia, which “is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy” everywhere, is apparently no less a nefarious menace than was communist Soviet Russia.

More recently, “crimes” attributed to the Kremlin in the UK and Syria (also yet to be proven) have expanded the condemnation beyond charges customarily leveled against Soviet Russia. Thus, the UK foreign minister, echoing Washington, indicts today’s Russia for its “malign behavior in all of its manifestations…whether it is cyberwarfare, whether it’s disinformation, assassination attempts, whatever it happens to be.” On April 20, the DNC went further, seeking a formal indictment of “whatever it happens to be” by suing the Russian government for conspiring with the Trump campaign to deprive Hillary Clinton of her rightful victory in the 2016 presidential election. Central figures in this “act of unprecedented treachery”—few deeds could be more criminal—are stated to have been “people believed to be affiliated with Russia.”

It follows, of course, that such a criminal Russia—frequently termed a “mafia state,” also incorrectly—can have no legitimate national interest anywhere, not even on its own borders nor perhaps even at home. And with such a state, it also follows, there should be no civil relations, including diplomacy, only warfare ones. Lost, forgotten, or negated in this widespread reasoning is why Russia was generally understood to matter so greatly to US national security during the 40-year Cold War that the result was myriad forms of cooperation, even official episodes of détente, that kept that perilous conflict from becoming something much worse. The reasons also apply to Russia today. Briefly summarized:

— Even middle-school children presumably know the most existential reason. Like the United States, Russia possesses enormous arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones. A conventional US-Russian war—as both sides are now flirting with in Syria and may soon do so in Ukraine or the Baltic region—could easily slide into nuclear war. In this connection, at a recent meeting of Washington’s highly respected Center for the National Interest, several well-informed experts thought that on a scale of 1 to 10, the chances of war with Russia today are 5 to 7. The only safeguard is, of course, the highest form of cooperation: diplomacy. Still more, this Cold War includes a new existential danger in the form of international terrorists in pursuit of radioactive materials to make their attacks immeasurably more devastating and their consequences more enduring. (Imagine, for example, the planes of 9/11 with radioactive material aboard, or the bombings in so many cities around the world.) Full-scale anti-terrorism cooperation with Russia, which has experienced many such attacks and thus developed the kind of intelligence needed, is an essential safeguard against such a calamity.

— Almost equally important is the reason usually called “geopolitical.” Even after the Soviet Union, Russia remains the largest territorial country in the world and possesses a disproportionate share of the planet’s natural resources, from energy, iron ore, nickel, timber, diamonds, and gold to fresh water. It is also one of the world’s leading exporters of weapons. Still more, Russia is located squarely between East and West, whose civilizations are in considerable conflict, and indeed part of both. Many months ago, Cohen raised the possibility that Russia might “leave the West,” driven out by the new Cold War or by choice. That possibility is now said by a top Kremlin aide and ideologist to be inescapable. Herein lies another fallacy constantly repeated by the American media: that sanctioned Russia is “isolated from the international community.” This is merely an Anglo-American-European conceit. Multidimensional relations between “Putin’s Russia” and non-Western countries such as China, Iran, India, and other BRIC nations are thriving. And it is there that most of the world’s territory, people, resources, and growing markets are located. In short, were Russia to leave the West, talk of America’s “global leadership” would become even more hollow. Put differently, what would “globalization” be without Russia and its partners?

— Given all the warfare talk in the US political-media establishment, consider also Russia’s renewed military capabilities or, as strategists like to say, “capacity to project power.” There is no reason to doubt Putin’s March 1 inventorying of Moscow’s new weapons systems. The US unilateral abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 triggered a new nuclear-arms race, and Moscow may have won it. Even if not, Russia demonstrated its more than equal military capabilities by destroying ISIS’s entrenched grip on Syria following its intervention in September 2015, even though many American pundits and others falsely claim this was an American achievement. When there is military parity between Washington and Moscow, as there was during the preceding Cold War and as there is again now, it is time to cooperate. Otherwise, as President Ronald Reagan liked to say when he decided to meet the Kremlin halfway, there will be no winners.

— On the positive side, however, there is Moscow’s capabilities for conflict resolution, including, but not only, its vote on the UN Security Council, where the ultimate diplomatic cooperation should take place. Various examples could be cited, but remember only Russia’s essential role in the nuclear-weapons agreement with Iran; its behind-the-scenes part today in attempts to resolve the conflict with North Korea; its potential as an essential partner in bringing peace to Syria; and the role it is likely to play when the United States finally decides to leave Afghanistan. Given a chance, Russia can be a vital peacemaker, and there is ample reason to think that the Kremlin is ready to do so if again met halfway by Washington.

During the preceding Cold War, when Cohen first developed his own “contacts” and “ties” with Russian society and, yes, even with Kremlin officials, he often said, “The road to American national security runs through Moscow.” The same is no less true today. For reasons he has often discussed, the new Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. Meanwhile, US-Russian cooperation seems barely a remote possibility, especially while Russia is so unrelentingly criminalized by American political-media elites. On the other hand, President Trump’s ambassador to Russia, Jon Huntsman, stated publicly on April 24: “My president has said repeatedly that he wants a better relationship with Russia…with Putin…. You can call it a desire for détente.” If so, it is imperative to support the president’s initiative, even if only this one.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com.)

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Cohen points out, is widely regarded as a landmark event in the preceding Cold War. It was the closest the United States and (then-Soviet) Russia ever came to intentional war, very possibly nuclear war. And its lessons have been taught ever since: No such confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers should ever be permitted to happen again; and if it does, only diplomacy of the kind practiced by President John F. Kennedy during the crisis, including secret negotiations, can save both countries, and the world, from catastrophe. Indeed, in the decades following that sobering event, Washington and Moscow enacted forms of cooperation to limit their conflicts and prevent a recapitulation of the Cuban episode—mutual codes of Cold War conduct; a myriad of public and secret communications; nuclear-arms agreements; periodic summit meetings; and other regularized processes that kept the nuclear peace.

But the new US-Russian Cold War has vaporized most of those restraining conventions, especially since the conflict over Ukraine in 2014, and even more since the “Russiagate” allegations against candidate and then President Donald Trump began in 2016. (The now ritualistic charge that Russian “meddling” in the 2016 American presidential election—“meddling” being something that both sides have done in one form or another for decades—constituted “an attack on America” is not only preposterous but dangerous warmongering.) During the first two weeks of August, thus arose in Syria the real possibility of a new Cuban-like crisis and of war with Russia. (Other possibilities simmer in Ukraine and in the Baltic region.)

The danger unfolded less in the context of Syrian developments than that of “Russiagate.” For more than a year, President Trump had been hectored almost daily—mainly by Democrats and much of the media—to “get tougher” with Russia and its President Vladimir Putin in order to demonstrate that his election had not been abetted by “collusion with the Kremlin.” To his credit, Trump remained publicly committed to his campaign promise to “cooperate with Russia” for the sake of US national security, while also “getting tougher” by sending weapons to Ukraine, imposing mounting economic sanctions on Moscow, and expelling large numbers of Russian diplomats, even shutting a Russian consulate in the United States, as President Obama had unwisely done. But “Russiagate” advocates continuously moved the goal posts of “tougher” until the end zone, war, loomed on the horizon.

As it did during the days from reports on April 7 that Syrian President Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people in Douma to the launching of US missiles against Syria on the night of April 13-14. This might well have resulted in war with Russia because of two little-noticed red lines Putin’s Kremlin had laid down in Syria. In a speech on March 1, Putin stated that Russia’s new elusive missiles were available to protect Moscow’s “allies,” which clearly included Damascus. And shortly later, when perhaps scores of Russian troops were killed in Syria by US-backed anti-Assad fighters, Russia’s military and civilian leadership vowed “retaliation” if this happened again, specifically against American forces in Syria and any US launchers of the weapons used. (Russian troops are embedded with many Syrian units and thus potential collateral damage.)

And yet, an evidently reluctant Trump launched more than a hundred missiles at Syria on August 13-14. Just how reluctant he was to risk a Cuban-like crisis in Syria, still more any chance of war with Russia, is clear from what actually happened. Rejecting more expansive and devastating options, Trump chose one that gave Russia (and thus Syria) advance warning; that killed no Russians (or perhaps anyone else); and struck no essential political or military targets in Damascus, only purported chemical-weapons facilities. The Kremlin’s red lines were carefully and widely skirted.

Nonetheless, those events of April are ominous and may well forebode worse to come, for several reasons:

§ The very limited, carefully crafted attack on Syria was clearly not undertaken primarily for objective military reasons but for political ones related to “Russiagate” allegations against Trump. (Just how political is suggested by the circumstances: No evidence had yet been produced that Assad was responsible for the alleged chemical attack, and the missiles were launched as OPCW investigators were in route to Douma. And, it might be added, as a similar official allegation against the Kremlin in the UK, involving the Skripal affair, appeared to be falling apart.) We might well fault Trump for being insufficiently strong—politically or psychologically—to resist warfare demands to prove his “innocence,” but the primary responsibility lies with “Russiagate” promoters who seek only to impeach the president, politicians and journalists for whom Stormy Daniels seems to be a higher priority than averting nuclear war with Russia. They are are mostly Democrats and pro-Democratic media, but also Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham, who declared, “If…we back off because Putin threatens to retaliate, that is a disaster for us throughout the world.” No, senator, that is a Cuban missile crisis that was not resolved peacefully and a disaster for the entire world.

§ More generally, for the first time since the onset of the nuclear age, there is not in the White House an American president fully empowered—“legitimate” enough, Russiagaters allege—to negotiate with a Kremlin leader in such dire circumstances, as Trump has discovered every time he has tried. Or, in an existential crisis, to avert nuclear war the way President Kennedy did in 1962. Given the escalating dynamic evidenced in recent months, this generalization may be tested sooner rather than later. (It doesn’t help, of course, that Trump has surrounded himself with appointees and aides who apparently do not share his opinion that it is imperative “to cooperate with Russia,” but instead people who seem to personify the worst aspects of Cold War zealotry and Russophobia while lacking elementary knowledge of US-Russian relations over the years.)

§ Meanwhile, there is the Moscow policy elite who believe that “America has been at war against Russia”—political, economic, and military—for more than a decade, and whose views are often mirror images of those of Lindsey Graham and other establishment zealots. (History has witnessed this perilous axis of American-Russian “hard-liners” before.) In this essential context, Putin appears to be, in words and deeds, the moderate, still calling Western leaders “our partners and colleagues,” still asking for understanding and negotiations, still being far less “aggressive” than he could be. Our legions of Putin demonizers will say this is a false analysis, but it too should not be tested.