By Aaron MATÉ

In an interview recorded one year before his death, Stephen F. Cohen discusses local elections and protests in Russia; opposition leader Alexei Navalny; as well as the state of Russia’s post-Soviet democratization and how US meddling undermines it.

Guest: Stephen F. Cohen. Professor emeritus of Russian studies at New York University and Princeton University, contributing editor at The Nation, and author of books including “War with Russia: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.” This interview was recorded in September 2019, one year before his death.

TRANSCRIPT

AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I’m Aaron Maté. Today we are airing something special. It’s an unpublished interview that I did with the late Stephen F. Cohen in September 2019, just a year before his death. Stephen passed away in September of this year at the age of 81.

And as anyone who watches The Grayzone knows, Steve was a legend. He shaped the field of Russian studies. He wrote a number of really important books about Russian and Soviet history. And in the last few years, as this new Cold War emerged, and anti-Russia chauvinism and militarism became just predominant across both political parties, starting especially with the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. And that coinciding with the US and Russia being on opposite sides of the Syrian proxy war. And then, of course, in 2016, when Russiagate began.

During all this time, Stephen F. Cohen was almost a lonely figure inside the academy, from his esteemed perch. He was professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, world-renowned, appeared often on CNN and other major outlets. And he was virtually alone in pushing back on all this, and calling out the hypocrisy, and calling out the fallacies of the narratives that were used to justify what he called a New Cold War on Russia.

And he was infallible. He faced a whole bunch of smear campaigns and childish attacks, but it didn’t faze him. He handled it. He handled everything with so much grace and courage, and a mastery of the facts. And that’s why we all loved him and looked up to him. And that’s why his loss has just been so incalculable, because there’s no one like him.

And that’s why now with a story like Alexei Navalny’s poisoning in the news, the first person I want to hear from on this is Stephen Cohen, and he’s not here anymore. But what we can do today, though, is play this interview that I did with him a year ago, that we have never released before. I don’t remember why we exactly didn’t release it. Sometimes we just record a lot of segments, and then something gets lost, and you don’t come back to it. But in this case, I’m glad that we haven’t published it yet because it gives us a way to honor Steve, as we close the year, the year in which we lost him.

But it’s also actually relevant to this Navalny story that is a top story right now in the world. Because we discuss Alexei Navalny in this interview. It was recorded a year ago, right after the United Russia Party, which backs Vladimir Putin had suffered some losses in some local elections across Russia, including in Moscow. But in this interview, Steve talks about that. He also talks about Nalalny. And he talks about how Western meddling in Russia — including by propping up figures like Navalny as opposition leaders, when really the picture is more nuanced inside Russia — that Navalny is actually more of an anti-corruption activist. And there are opposition figures with more popularity than he has.

But because for whatever reason he is deemed to serve Western interests, he is propped up inside the West as this major opposition figure. And the analogy that people sometimes make is that it would be like if Russia propped up Gary Johnson, as a major opposition figure in the US. That’s the analogy that some people make.

So Professor Cohen talks about that, in this interview, what Navalny really does in Russia and how he’s really seen. And he also talks about how years of Western intervention in Russia, and things like propping up people like Navalny actually serve to undermine the goal of democratizing Russia. And that Russia has to be seen in its own history, not in the context of anybody else’s. And that’s the lesson that Steve often preached for judging any country: to judge it within its own history. Not anybody else’s, including our own.

And that is the background to this interview we are now going to play with Stephen F. Cohen, which again, was conducted a year ago in September 2019. And the occasion was some elections in Russia, where the United Russia party, which backs Vladimir Putin, had suffered some losses. And so Professor Cohen talks about that. He talks about Navalny. And he talks about how Western meddling in Russia — in the name of so-called “democracy promotion,” actually, in his view, impedes the cause of democratization inside Russia. Here is Stephen Cohen from September 2019.

AARON MATÉ: My guest is Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Princeton and NYU, author of many books, including his latest “War with Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.”

Welcome, Professor Cohen. Let’s talk about what’s happening inside of Russia. We recently had elections in Moscow, where the party of Putin suffered some setbacks. This was a culmination of weeks of protests, by the opposition that saw some of Russia’s biggest opposition protests in years. Many arrests, anger over the exclusion of some candidates from the ballot. Your take on what has transpired recently, when it comes to these protests and the election results?

STEPHEN F. COHEN: Well, I come from it in a kind of autobiographical way, which gives me a perspective. Maybe it’s not the correct perspective, but it’s more historical. I start living for long periods of time in Soviet Russia in 1976. And it was about that time that the dissident movement was making decisions about what they would do publicly, and what they would not risk doing publicly. And by chance, purely by chance, I ended up living among many of these dissidents.

So I’ve heard these conversations. When I see what’s unfolding in Russia, today: street protests, the way the authorities react or do not react, the way — the importance that elections, particularly regional and local elections –that’s for the mayors of big cities, and the governors of large provinces — the way these elections take place. I see a lot of good in this because I look at it historically.

If we say that the history of the attempt to democratize Russia began roughly in 1988-89, with Gorbachev and the first free elections to a national parliament, I would date it from then. 1989.

So Aaron, is 30 years, if we date, again, the beginning of democratization from the late 1980s, under Gorbachev to the present, just about exactly 30 years is that in the history of, of the democratization, particularly of a very large country, one with weak democratic practices and experiences and traditions, but acquiring them is 30 years, a long time or a short time?

So you answer the question comparatively: how long did it take England, Great Britain — which is considered to be the kind of home of our modern democracy — to acquire democracy? How many decades passed before people who didn’t own property were allowed to vote? Before women were allowed to vote? And you can ask the same question about the United States. How long it took for women to get the vote. And I, having grown up in the Jim Crow South, as myself, as I remember back, how long did it take Black folk, to get the right to vote down where I grew up? Decades.

So we got to see this in perspective, what’s going on in Russia. Thirty years is not a long time. But Russia has come a long way. Elections are now accepted. Unfair practices are protested. They’re covered and reported on television. More and more officeholders — the most important being governors and mayors — are elected. Some are appointed. But more and more they’re contested by opposition forces. The opposition is just learning how to be an electoral opposition in Russia. This is semi-new for Russia.

Most opposition wasn’t electoral in Russia — before it was of a different kind. So I think what we’re seeing unfolding in Russia, I mean, there are pluses and minuses, but it’s kind of encouraging. It’s encouraging that the elections went ahead, that the opposition to the party of the Kremlin did well in several regions and several towns, that people protested, that the degree of repression was relatively low, certainly for Russia, and that the process of democratization continues in Russia.

AARON MATÉ: And the takes that we’re getting in the US from US pundits that this signifies a major threat to Vladimir Putin — the setbacks he faced in Moscow, for example, I believe his party lost about a third of its seats. That this could mean that Putin himself is next out the door. Do you think that that is a fair assessment? Is Putin facing a serious challenge here?

STEPHEN F. COHEN: No, because first of all, there’s the reality that very few of the oppositionists ran against Putin. They may run against the party that people associate with Putin. But Putin himself doesn’t associate with that party. He’s not a member of the party. He’s not head of the party. He takes its support at electoral moments, but Putin is apart. So the degree to which oppositionists ran against Putin, and won, was low.

There were a lot of local issues. If you look at where oppositionists won and lost, a lot of the issues are what we would expect them to be. The garbage isn’t being picked up. Hot water is not reliable. The air is being polluted. Construction projects are being built near parks. The schools are failing. Health care system is overloaded. There’s a lot of local issues. I mean, it’s not true that all politics are local — all politics is local. But a lot of politics is local. And the kind of local politics you find in Russia, are the kinds we would identify with.

So I don’t think this was in any significant way, a referendum on Putin’s governance in any way. It might have been a referendum on the party that wants to be Putin’s party. And yet a lot of people who are members of the party, accepted party support, ran as independents, because they thought the party was not a benefit. But look, I mean, the important thing is these elections continue with their flaws, with their achievements. And this is a process. And I return to it: 30 years is not a long time in the history of a country’s democratization.

AARON MATÉ: How should we understand Alexei Navalny, do you think. We often hear about Navalny being the most popular opposition politician in Russia. He’s made corruption a central issue. Corruption is by all accounts extremely rampant in Russia. On the other hand, the criticism of him is that he has been xenophobic, and that the faction he represents is simply just a different faction of the corrupt elite. Just he happens to be just outside of the current one.

STEPHEN F. COHEN: Well, that’s probably unfair to Navalny, and I mean, he’s played a positive role to some degree in Russia. What matters, I think, is not what I think about Navalny, or you think about Navalny, or the New York Times thinks about Novotny, but what other Russian oppositionists is think about Navalny. And there are very mixed views in Russia. Some people don’t trust his nationalism, his willingness to appeal to — I wouldn’t call them quasi-fascist, but ultra-nationalist Forces — because he had that background. And some people worry about a leader-centered dissident opposition movement, because the kind of democratic argument in Russia is, “We’ve had too much leader-centric politics in our country, and not enough that’s institutionalized.”

So they’re not real happy with the way the Navalny kind of usurps opposition politics. But you know, other leaders will emerge. One of the things about Russia that makes it difficult, is the country is so big — again, the biggest in the world — that you and I can’t see what local electoral politics are going on in other cities where Navalny is not important at all, but other leaders have emerged. A number of them women, by the way.

So suddenly, there’s a story I think recently, for example, about a woman, maybe in [inaudible], I don’t remember but very far from Moscow, who turns out to be a very popular oppositionist figure, I’d never heard of her. And she only came to the attention of the Western media, because she was mistreated. But there are probably scores of people like this around Russia.

And this is a good thing. I mean, again, I keep coming back as a historian to bearing in mind that when Gorbachev began, and Gorbachev is still alive. And he watches this. And when I see him as I do when I go to Russia, he’s torn. Because he understands that he’s the father of whatever democracy is going to emerge in Russia. And as a father, he’s worried about his offspring and its health and its behavior. But it’s a very messy, protracted process. But how could it be otherwise?

One of the things that American politicians I think — Senators, who speak about things of which they know nothing, and the New York Times and the Washington Post, who are always choosing sides, and editorializing — is we do Russian democrats, no good with this kind of interventionism. Or with the kind of stunt that then-Vice President Biden pulled by going to Russia and telling Putin, he shouldn’t return to the presidency. We undermine authentic democratization in Russia with this kind of interventionism. And we should feel a little shame-faced, considering the fact that we’re very busy accusing Russia of intervention, meddling in our election.

AARON MATÉ: So finally, Professor Cohen, a lot being made, particularly about the results in Moscow, where in the Moscow vote for the Moscow assembly, Putin’s United Russia party lost about a third of his votes. This is, of course, where all these protests are being held. What do you make of that result in Moscow and its importance to Russia overall?

STEPHEN F. COHEN: Well you can’t exaggerate the importance of Moscow. I’m not sure the figure is right, but I read recently that roughly 75% of all of Russia’s invested capital is controlled through Moscow, banks, or invested in Moscow itself. Politically, it’s more than the capital. It’s the Kremlin city, if you know what I mean. So they, the mayor of Moscow, [Sergei] Sobyanin, has a kind of interesting reputation in Moscow. Among non-conformists, let’s not call them dissidents. But people who think for themselves.

A lot of people think he’s been a very, very good mayor, that if you go to Moscow today, and you walk around the city, particularly the inner city, compared to the way it was 10 years ago, the city has become beautiful, clean, wonderful, restored, he gets a lot of credit for that. He’s also thought to be — and I know this from a couple of friends who have operated quasi-dissident institutions, like museums or exhibits — he’s been a fairly liberal mayor, in that his people have issued permits that are needed. Like they’re needed in any place.

But this then brings us to another question that people in my generation will remember. If you want to protest something that you think is really bad — in my case, it would have been the Vietnam War. And I thought about this when I thought about people in Moscow, seeking permits to march, and then marching in places where they didn’t have permits, because they wanted confrontation with the police.

During the protest against the war in Vietnam — though, I was in living in New York and come here from Kentucky and Indiana, was a student at Columbia — I recall vividly these discussions before these large protests; the organizers hoping to gather 100-200-300,000 people — maybe less — but in Central Park or various places. And the question about, whether to do it with or without a permit? And so there was a negotiation with the city.

And sometimes the city gave you a permit. Sometimes it didn’t. Then the organizers had to make a fundamental decision: do we do we go ahead without a permit, in which case we’re going to be confronted by police. And what do we do then when we’re confronted by police? Are we passive? Or do we provoke the police? Some of the organizers — I talk now about the opposition against the war in Vietnam — wanted arrest, because they wanted to be shown on television, thinking it would show a repressive state and win adherents. Almost exactly the same conversation has gone on in Moscow, ever since protests began under Gorbachev.

By the way, when we talk about protest in Moscow: I may have the year slightly off in the number. But I believe — and we’re talking about protest now, of maybe 20-30-40,000 people today. In 1990, I believe it was, 1990. Yeah. In 1990, there was a protest march of 600,000 people in Moscow — 600,000. And what were they protesting? There was a clause in the then-Soviet constitution, that named the Communist Party as the only party permitted in the country. They wanted that clause removed from the constitution. That was 1990. But imagine: 600,000 people.

So if we look at the history of democratization of Russia, going back to the Gorbachev years, and we take the view that protests are part of democratization — as they were in England, as they were in the United States — then we see the history of Russia during the last 30 years. And it doesn’t look all that bad. But there were 600,000 people in 1990.

Recently, far less, because partly, it’s become routinized. It was sensation in 1990 to go into the streets and protest. Today, you know, if it’s a weekend, Saturday and Sunday, Mom says to Dad, it’s a nice sunny day, let’s go down to the protests. Dad says I’m going bowling. I mean, some people go to the dacha. I mean, so many people go to the dacha, they’re away. Do they come back in time for the protest? It’s become a kind of routine experience. And this is a good thing, I think.

AARON MATÉ: All right, Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton and NYU, author of many books, including his latest “War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.” Thanks very much.

STEPHEN F. COHEN: Thank you Aaron.

AARON MATÉ: That was Stephen F. Cohen, speaking to me in September 2019. I can’t think of a better way to end this year than with his words. His wisdom was always so important to me, and I know it was to many people who watch the Grayzone.

thegrayzone.com

An accomplished academic, Cohen was the leading English language mass media TV talking head on Russia. Over the past several months, I suspected that something ominous was up with him. He wasn’t appearing anywhere, as news items like the situation in Belarus and Alexei Navalny’s health cropped up. Belarusian presidential election

I first became aware of Cohen in the 1980s, via his Nation articles and appearances on New York Pacifica Foundation affiliate WBAI.  In the pre-internet era, I had the pleasure of corresponding with him. He was the first person who cautioned me on how Russia was restructuring during the Yeltsin era. In more recent times, Cohen and yours truly communicated via email on some Russia related media and historical areas of interest.

The U.S. establishment’s treatment of Cohen’s death has been mixed. Johnson’s Russia List and The New York Times have provided a detailed and respectful accounting. Mind you, that these are two venues which I’ve been reasonably critical of. I’m willing to give credit where it’s due. The same can’t be said of some others, which concerns why the coverage of Russia (and for that matter other issues) has been lacking from what it otherwise could be.

It’s not surprising to see that the anti-Russian leaning and largely U.S. government funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) ignored Cohen’s death, unlike its coverage of Richard Pipes’ passing, which I commented on as well. A colleague of Cohen’s, Gilbert Doctorow, noted that Cohen wasn’t well liked among anti-Russian elements with a central and east European origin. Without a doubt, that grouping has had the upper hand at RFE/RL.

Former New York Times editor, Carla Robbins, who is now involved with the Council on Foreign Relations and the City University of New York, matched the RFE/RL route in ignoring Cohen’s passing. At her Twitter account, Robbins regretfully noted the passing of Brent Scowcroft and wished Julia Ioffe a get well from a Covid-19 bout. Concerning this comparative matter, it’s somewhat surprising to see The National Interest (as of this writing) take the same stance as RFE/RL and Robbins. Like RFE/RL, The National Interest ran a piece relating to Pipes’ death.

Via Aaron Mate’s Twitter account, I became aware of tributes to Cohen from media hosts John Batchelor and Chris Hayes. The respectful honoring of Cohen from Batchelor and Hayes should be followed up on. As an MSNBC host, one senses that Hayes has restrictions on who he can comfortably (from the vantage point of his position) have on. Keep that thought in mind when the subject of Russia comes up on his show. Batchelor seems like he has more leeway on who he can have on his show.

A recent Mate exchange with Fred Weir expressed a view that I’ve previously noted. On matters pertaining to Russia’s relations with the West, post-Soviet Russia (Putin era included) sees greater media diversity than U.S. mass media, which has slid into a very restricted coverage of Russia.

This observation very well relates to the “New Cold War” term, utilized by Cohen and some others. Concisely put, the neocon-neolib, to flat out anti-Russian view is quite flawed. There’s no reason for the mainstream Russian position to feel intellectually threatened by it.

The issues at hand aren’t always so east to accurately categorize. I generally tended to agree more with Cohen than Pipes. In some instances, I found myself more in agreement with Pipes than Cohen. The eclectic mindset is different from the five minute and under TV and radio segments, given to some guests who’ve stated questionable to out rightly false statements, with little and at times no challenge.

The goal for a mutually beneficial improved U.S.-Russian relationship lives on. This desire continues to face an uphill battle. Pro-American sentiment in Russia has declined. To a considerable extent, this occurrence has been the result of faulty biases against Russia which continue to get an upper hand in Anglo-American mass media and body politic, as well as those venues influenced by them. Frustrating as it has been, the only viable option is to continue communicating as effectively as possible. Throwing in the towel is a win for the neocons, neolibs and flat out Russia haters.

Stephen F Cohen, the renowned American scholar on Russia and leading authority on US-Russian relations, has died of lung cancer at the age of 81.

As one of the precious few western voices of sanity on the subject of Russia while everyone else has been frantically flushing their brains down the toilet, this is a real loss. I myself have cited Cohen’s expert analysis many times in my own work, and his perspective has played a formative role in my understanding of what’s really going on with the monolithic cross-partisan manufacturing of consent for increased western aggressions against Moscow.

In a world that is increasingly confusing and awash with propaganda, Cohen’s death is a blow to humanity’s desperate quest for clarity and understanding.

Very sad. A huge loss. America’s leading expert on Russia, Stephen Cohen, has died, aged 81. Stephen was subjected to a horrible smear campaign when he questioned US-policy towards Moscow after the 2014 estrangement. Condolences to @KatrinaNationhttps://t.co/3PNLdl758f

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) September 19, 2020

I don’t know how long Cohen had cancer. I don’t know how long he was aware that he might not have much time left on this earth. What I do know is he spent much of his energy in his final years urgently trying to warn the world about the rapidly escalating danger of nuclear war, which in our strange new reality he saw as in many ways completely unprecedented.

The last of the many books Cohen authored was 2019’s War with Russia?, detailing his ideas on how the complex multi-front nature of the post-2016 cold war escalations against Moscow combines with Russiagate and other factors to make it in some ways more dangerous even than the most dangerous point of the previous cold war.

“You know it’s easy to joke about this, except that we’re at maybe the most dangerous moment in US-Russian relations in my lifetime, and maybe ever,” Cohen told The Young Turks in 2017. “And the reason is that we’re in a new cold war, by whatever name. We have three cold war fronts that are fraught with the possibility of hot war, in the Baltic region where NATO is carrying out an unprecedented military buildup on Russia’s border, in Ukraine where there is a civil and proxy war between Russia and the west, and of course in Syria, where Russian aircraft and American warplanes are flying in the same territory. Anything could happen.”

Cohen repeatedly points to the most likely cause of a future nuclear war: not one that is planned but one which erupts in tense, complex situations where “anything could happen” in the chaos and confusion as a result of misfire, miscommunication or technical malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war.

“I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen told Democracy Now in 2017. “And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.”

“Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,” Cohen added. “Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear 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,” Cohen wrote last year. “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.”

“Finally, there continues to be no effective, organized American opposition to the new Cold War,” Cohen added. “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’,” Cohen continued. “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.”

“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,” Cohen wrote in another essay last year. “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.”

And now Stephen Cohen is dead, and that clock is inching ever closer to midnight. The Russiagate psyop that he predicted would pressure Trump to advance dangerous cold war escalations with no opposition from the supposed opposition party has indeed done exactly that with nary a peep of criticism from either partisan faction of the political/media class. Cohen has for years been correctly predicting this chilling scenario which now threatens the life of every organism on earth, even while his own life was nearing its end.

And now the complex cold war escalations he kept urgently warning us about have become even more complex with the addition of nuclear-armed China to the multiple fronts the US-centralized empire has been plate-spinning its brinkmanship upon, and it is clear from the ramping up of anti-China propaganda since last year that we are being prepped for those aggressions to continue to increase.

We should heed the dire warnings that Cohen spent his last breaths issuing. We should demand a walk-back of these insane imperialist aggressions which benefit nobody and call for détente with Russia and China. We should begin creating an opposition to this world-threatening flirtation with armageddon before it is too late. Every life on this planet may well depend on our doing so.

Stephen Cohen is dead, and we are marching toward the death of everything. God help us all.

medium.com

Despite the Robert Mueller report’s conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, a move that has made billions in profits for U.S. arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class and the party’s subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas—including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new Cold War predates the Trump presidential campaign. It was manufactured over a decade ago by a war industry and intelligence community that understood that, by fueling a conflict with Russia, they could consolidate their power and increase their profits. (Seventy percent of intelligence is carried out by private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which has been called the world’s most profitable spy operation.)

“This began long before Trump and ‘Russiagate,’ ” Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him for my television show, “On Contact.” Cohen is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, where he was the director of the Russian studies program, and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University. “You have to ask yourself, why is it that Washington had no problem doing productive diplomacy with Soviet communist leaders. Remember Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev? It was a love fest. They went hunting together [in the Soviet Union]. Yet along comes a post-Soviet leader, Vladimir Putin, who is not only not a communist but a professed anti-communist. Washington has been hating on him ever since 2003, 2004. It requires some explanation. Why do we like communist leaders in Russia better than we like Russia’s anti-communist leader? It’s a riddle.”

“If you’re trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful and demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin,” said Cohen, whose new book is “War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.” The first post-Soviet leader is Boris Yeltsin. Clinton is president. And they have this fake, pseudo-partnership and friendship, whereas essentially the Clinton administration took advantage of the fact that Russia was in collapse. It almost lost its sovereignty. I lived there in the ’90s. Middle-class people lost their professions. Elderly people lost their pensions. I think it’s correct to say that industrial production fell more in the Russian 1990s than it did during our own Great Depression. It was the worst economic and social depression ever in peacetime. It was a catastrophe for Russia.”

In September 1993 Russians took to the streets to protest the collapse of the economy—the gross domestic product had fallen by 50% and the country was convulsed by hyperinflation—along with the rampant corruption that saw state enterprises sold for paltry fees to Russian oligarchs and foreign corporations in exchange for lavish kickbacks and bribes; food and fuel shortages; the nonpayment of wages and pensions; the lack of basic services, including medical services; falling life expectancy; the explosion of violent crime; and Yeltsin’s increasing authoritarianism and his unpopular war with Chechnya.

“Putin went to Texas,” Cohen said. “He had a barbecue with Bush, second Bush. Bush said he ‘looked into his eyes and saw a good soul.’ There was this honeymoon. Why did they turn against Putin? He turned out not to be Yeltsin. We have a very interesting comment about this from Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, who wrote, I think in 2003, that his own disillusion with Putin was that he had turned out not to be ‘a sober Yeltsin.’ What Washington was hoping for was a submissive, supplicant, post-Soviet Russian leader, but one who was younger, healthier and not a drinker. They thought they had that in Putin. Yeltsin had put Putin in power, or at least the people around Yeltsin did.”

“When Putin began talking about Russia’s sovereignty, Russia’s independent course in world affairs, they’re aghast,” Cohen said of the Washington elites. “This is not what they expected. Since then, my own thinking is we were pretty lucky after the 1990s to get Putin because there were worst contenders in the wings. I knew some of them. I don’t want to name names. But some of these guys were really harsh people. Putin was kind of the right person for the right time, both for Russia and for Russian world affairs.”

“We have had three years of this,” Cohen said of Russiagate. “We lost sight of the essence of what this allegation is. The people who created Russiagate are literally saying, and have been for almost three years, that the president of the United States is a Russian agent, or he has been compromised by the Kremlin. We grin because it’s so fantastic. But the Washington establishment, mainly the Democrats but not only, have taken this seriously.”

“I don’t know if there has ever been anything like this in American history,” Cohen said. “That accusation does such damage to our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system, to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it’s done to American-Russian relations, the damage it has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today. This whole Russiagate has not only been fraudulent, it’s been a catastrophe.”

“There were three major episodes of détente in the 20th century,” Cohen said. “The first was after Stalin died, when the Cold War was very dangerous. That was carried out by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president. The second was by Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger—it was called ‘the Nixon détente with Brezhnev.’ The third, and we thought most successful, was Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev. It was such a successful détente Reagan and Gorbachev, and Reagan’s successor, the first Bush, said the Cold War was over forever.”

“The wall had come down,” Cohen said of the 1989 collapse of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Germany was reunifying. The question became ‘where would a united Germany be?’ The West wanted Germany in NATO. For Gorbachev, this was an impossible sell. Twenty-seven point five million Soviet citizens had died in the war against Germany in the Second World War on the eastern front. Contrary to the bunk we’re told, the United States didn’t land on Normandy and defeat Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazi Germany was done primarily by the Soviet army. How could Gorbachev go home and say, ‘Germany is reunited. Great. And it’s going to be in NATO.’ It was impossible. They told Gorbachev, ‘We promise if you agree to a reunited Germany in NATO, NATO will not move—this was Secretary of State James Baker—one inch to the east. In other words, NATO would not move from Germany toward Russia. And it did.”

“As we speak today, NATO is on Russia’s borders,” Cohen said. “From the Baltics to Ukraine to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. So, what happened? Later, they said Gorbachev lied or he misunderstood. [That] the promise was never made. But the National Security Archive in Washington has produced all the documents of the discussion in 1990. It was not only [President George H.W.] Bush, it was the French leader François Mitterrand, it was Margaret Thatcher of England. Every Western leader promised Gorbachev NATO would not move eastward.”

“What do you end up with today?” he asked. “Betrayal. Any kind of discussion about Russian-American relations today, an informed Russian is going to say, ‘We worry you will betray us again.’… Putin said he had illusions about the West when he came to power.”

“Trump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, ‘I think we should cooperate with Russia,’ ” Cohen said. “This is a statement of détente. It’s what drew my attention to him. It’s then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin begins. One has to wonder—I can’t prove it—but you have to think logically. Was this [allegation] begun somewhere high up in America by people who didn’t want a pro-détente president? And [they] thought that Trump, however small it seemed at the time that he could win—they really didn’t like this talk of cooperation with Russia. It set in motion these things we call Russiagate.”

“The forefathers of détente were Republicans,” Cohen said. “How the Democrats behaved during this period of détente was mixed. There was what used to be called the Henry Jackson wing. This was a very hard-line, ideological wing of the Democratic Party that didn’t believe in détente. Some Democrats did. I lived many years in Moscow, both Soviet and post-Soviet times. If you talk to Russian, Soviet policymakers, they generally prefer Republican candidates for the presidency.”

Democrats are perceived by Russian rulers as more ideological, Cohen said.

“Republicans tend to be businessmen who want to do business in Russia,” he said. “The most important pro-détente lobby group, created in the 1970s, was called the American Committee for East-West Accord. It was created by American CEOs who wanted to do business in Soviet Russia.”

“The single most important relationship the United States has is with Russia,” Cohen went on, “not only because of the nuclear weapons. It remains the largest territorial country in the world. It abuts every region we are concerned about. Détente with Russia—not friendship, not partnership, not alliance—but reducing conflict is essential. Yet something happened in 2016.”

The accusations made repeatedly by James Clapper, the former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concerning the Kremlin’s supposed control of Trump and Russia’s alleged theft of our elections are deeply disturbing, Cohen said. Clapper and Brennan have described Trump as a Kremlin “asset.” Brennan called Trump’s performance at a news conference with the Russian president in Finland “nothing short of treasonous.”

Clapper in his memoir, “Facts and Fears: Hard Truths From a Life in Intelligence,” claims Putin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Trump was “staggering.”

“Of course, the Russian efforts affected the outcome,” writes Clapper. “Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.”

Brennan and Clapper have on numerous occasions been caught lying to the public. Brennan, for example, denied, falsely, that the CIA was monitoring the computers that Senate staff members were using to prepare a report on torture. The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, took to the Senate floor to accuse Brennan and the CIA of potentially violating the U.S. Constitution and of criminal activity in its attempts to spy on and thwart her committee’s investigations into the agency’s use of torture. She described the situation as a “defining moment” for political oversight. Brennan also claimed there was not a “single collateral death” in the drone assassination program, that Osama bin Laden used his wife as a human shield before being gunned down in a U.S. raid in Pakistan, and insisted that torture, or what is euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” has produced valuable intelligence. None of these statements are true.

Clapper, who at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for interpreting spy-satellite photos and intelligence such as air particles and soil samples, concocted a story about Saddam Hussein spiriting his nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the documents that verified his program to Syria on the eve of the invasion. He blatantly committed perjury before the Senate when being questioned about domestic surveillance programs of the American public. He was asked, “Does the NSA [National Security Agency] collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” It was, as Clapper knew very well, a lie.

Our inability to oversee or control senior intelligence officials and their agencies, which fabricate information to push through agendas embraced by the shadow state, signals the death of democracy. Intelligence officials seemingly empowered to lie—Brennan and Clapper have been among them—ominously have in their hands instruments of surveillance, intimidation and coercion that effectively silence their critics, blunt investigations into their activities, even within the government, and make them and their agencies unaccountable.

“We have the Steele dossier that was spookily floating around American media,” Cohen said of the report compiled by Christopher Steele.

The report was commissioned by Fusion GPS and paid for by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Bob Woodward reported that Brennan pushed to include the Steele dossier in the intelligence community assessment of Russian election interference.

“He [Steele] got it from newspapers,” Cohen said. “I don’t think he had a single source in Russia. Steele comes forward with this dossier and says, ‘I’ve got information from high-level sources.’ The Clinton campaign is funding this operation. But Steele is very important. He’s a former U.K. intelligence officer, if he’s really former, who had served in Russia and ran Russian cases. He says he has this information in the dossier about Trump frolicking with prostitutes. About Trump having been corrupted decades ago. He got it from ‘high-level’ Kremlin sources. This is preposterous. It’s illogical.”

“The theory is Putin desperately wanted to make Trump president,” Cohen said. “Yet, guys in the Kremlin, around Putin, were feeding Trump dirt to a guy called Steele. Even though the boss wants—does it make any sense to you?”

“Why is this important?” Cohen asked. “Right-wing American media outlets today, in particularly Fox News, are blaming Russia for this whole Russiagate thing. They’re saying that Russia provided this false information to Steele, who pumped it into our system, which led to Russiagate. This is untrue.”

“Who is behind all this? Including the Steele operation?” Cohen asked. “I prefer a good question to an orthodox answer. I’m not dogmatic. I don’t have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA. Long before it hit America—maybe as early as late 2015. One of the problems we have today is everybody is hitting on the FBI. Lovers who sent emails. But the FBI is a squishy organization, nobody is afraid of the FBI. It’s not what it used to be under J. Edgar Hoover. Look at James Comey, for God’s sake. He’s a patsy. Brennan and Clapper played Comey. They dumped this stuff on him. Comey couldn’t even handle Mrs. Clinton’s emails. He made a mess of everything. Who were the cunning guys? They were Brennan and Clapper. [Brennan,] the head of the CIA. Clapper, the head of the Office of [the Director of] National Intelligence, who is supposed to oversee these agencies.”

“Is there any reality to these Russiagate allegations against Trump and Putin?” he asked. “Was this dreamed up by our intelligence services? Today investigations are being promised, including by the attorney general of the United States. They all want to investigate the FBI. But they need to investigate what Brennan and the CIA did. This is the worst scandal in American history. It’s the worst, at least since the Civil War. We need to know how this began. If our intelligence services are way off the reservation, to the point that they can try to first destroy a presidential candidate and then a president, and I don’t care that it’s Trump, it may be Harry Smith next time, or a woman; if they can do this, we need to know it.”

“The second Bush left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002,” Cohen said. “It was a very important treaty. It prevented the deployment of missile defense. If anybody got missile defense that worked, they might think they had a first strike [option]. Russia or the United States could strike the other without retaliation. Once Bush left the treaty, we began to deploy missile defense around Russia. It was very dangerous.”

“The Russians began a new missile program which we learned about last year,” he said. Hypersonic missiles. Russia now has nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system. We are in a new and more perilous point in a 50-year nuclear arms race. Putin says, ‘We’ve developed these because of what you did. We can destroy each other.’ Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate. Russiagate is one of the greatest threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren’t on there. Russiagate is number one.”

truthdig.com

Ann GARRISON

“Russiagate, like Count Dracula, will never end because new political blood will be fed to this vampire… The Russiagate fable — fraud — has become a kind of theocratic cult, and it has millions and millions and millions of self-interested and unwitting followers.”

That was Stephen F. Cohen’s comment after Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence to convict President Donald Trump or any of his campaign staff of colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election.  He was speaking to nationally syndicated radio host John Batchelor in one of their broadcasts on Radio WABC-AM, New York City, which have been archived on the website of The Nation for the past five years.

Now, a month later, Democratic elites are still roaming the streets of Washington and the Halls of Congress in search of fresh blood. On May 16, The Washington Post reported that House Democrats had begun a marathon public reading of the “Mueller Report” for citizens who don’t have time to read the whole thing but might listen to the audio. There’s no there there, but they won’t let go. Are they serious? Or just mortified, like most vampires, by the light of day? Whichever, they’re likely to lose again in 2020, because poll after poll says that Americans don’t care; Russia-gate is nowhere near the top of their list of concerns.

Cohen is Russian studies professor emeritus at Princeton and NYU. His latest book, “War with Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate,” is a series of essays published in The Nationand text elaborations of the radio broadcasts.

Cohen says that Russia-gate has deeply damaged at least four U.S. institutions: the electoral system; the presidency; the “intelligence community;” and the media, meaning most of all the influential “legacy” media; The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major television and cable news networks. Whichever side of the partisan divide they’re on, Americans know they’ve been lied to by one or more of them. Will they find reason to widely trust any of these institutions again? Will any Washington officials and their staffers, and their allied power brokers and intelligence agents, trust any others from here on?

The Democrats, he says, have created a permanent excuse for failure: “the Russians did it.” And what’s to keep the Republicans from using the same excuse for their own electoral failures? Or to keep dangerous tension between the U.S. and Russia, the world’s two greatest nuclear powers, from ratcheting up all the while?

“War with Russia?” analyzes where we are, how we got here, and where we can go if U.S.-driven military escalation between the U.S. and Russia doesn’t lead to nuclear apocalypse. Cohen still believes that there are options as long as there is human agency, as he wrote in “Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938.”

Lost Prominence 

That book, published in 1973, made him a prominent voice in both U.S. and Soviet politics until his dissidence about the New Cold War, then Russia-gate, made him persona non grata at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the network news outlets where he had previously been a welcome commentator.

Since Russia-gate was “ginned up,” as Cohen puts it, he has even been attacked by fellowNation writers. Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director of The Nation and Cohen’s wife, has, to her credit, defended him, despite their own disagreements about the Mueller investigation. She opposes the new McCarthyism, but she has said that the investigation is worthwhile insofar as it reveals the corruption of Trump and friends.

Cohen has said that politicians are corrupt — Democrat, Republican and Russian — and that the central reality of the Mueller investigation is its dangerous escalation of U.S.-Russian tensions. He has often said that he doesn’t like Trump, but that Trump is the president we’ve got, for two more years or even six, so any moves he makes toward détente with Russia or military de-escalation anywhere else in the world should be encouraged.

In the introduction to “War with Russia?,” Cohen writes: “The book would not have been possible in any way without the support of my wife. Whatever her own opinions, no matter the external pressures, Katrina posted every commentary I wrote.”

Again, kudos to Katrina vanden Heuvel, but the fact that Cohen’s critique of Russia-gate has stirred such anger even at The Nation, the publication that led the opposition to McCarthyism in the 1950s, is evidence of how much ground Russia-gate has gained, even among liberal progressives.

Cohen and Batchelor readily acknowledge their differences as well — Cohen a liberal progressive, Batchelor a libertarian conservative — but they agree on the dangerous folly of the New Cold War. After a lifetime of scholarship and engagement in Russian history, Cohen says that the current state of U.S.-Russian relations is more perilous than any moments of the First Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, one of his concerns is that Trump has been so fraudulently vilified as a puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin that he may be politically unable to defuse another precipitous confrontation like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Irrational and terrifying as the anti-Communist Red Scare of the 1950s was, he writes, it never led to the claim that a U.S. president was the puppet of a foreign government or that there’s been a silent coup leaving the White House in its clutches.

Wikileaks

In February 2017, in a chapter titled “Kremlin-Baiting President Trump,” Cohen writes:

“But the crux of pro-Kremlin allegations against Trump was, and remains, the charge that Putin hacked the DNC and disseminated the stolen emails through WikiLeaks in order to put Trump in the White House. A summary of these ‘facts’ was presented in the declassified report [the Steele Dossier] released by the US ‘intelligence community’ and widely published in January 2017.

“Not addressed [in the report] is the point made by a number of American hacking experts that Russian state hackers would have left no fingerprints, as US intelligence claimed they had. Indeed, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity believe that the damaging DNC documents were not hacked but leaked by an insider. If so, it had nothing to do with Russia. (The NSA, which has the capacity to monitor the movement of emails, was only ‘moderately confident’ in the report it co-signed, while the CIA and FBI were ‘highly confident,’ even though the FBI inexplicably never examined the DNC computers.) [Later, Cohen said that a source had told him that, in NSA parlance, “moderately confident” means they don’t know.]

“There is another incongruity. At his final presidential press conference, Obama referred to the DNC scandal as a leak, not a hack, and said he did not know how the emails got to WikiLeaks—this despite allegations by his own intelligence agencies. (No one seems to have asked Obama if he misspoke!) On the other side of this alleged conspiracy, nor is it clear that Putin so favored the clearly erratic Trump that he would have taken such a risk, which if discovered, as I also pointed out earlier, would have compromised Trump and greatly favored Clinton. (Judging from discussions in Kremlin-related Russian newspapers, there was a serious debate as to which American presidential candidate might be best—or least bad—for Russia.)”

In a May 8 broadcast with Batchelor, Cohen said even more adamantly that Mueller’s a priori assumption that Russians hacked into the DNC emails, his failure to undertake his own forensic investigation, and his failure to interview Bill Binney, a former technical director at the National Security Agency, and Julian Assange himself, should be enough to discredit the whole report.

Amen, and I hope these highlights recommend the book. It’s a page-turner.

consortiumnews.com

The so-called “liberal-left” in the US – which has nothing to do with leftwing or socialist politics as most of the world would define it – is increasingly warning that Trump is taking America into a dark place of authoritarianism.

Take a recent op-ed in the New York Times by columnist Roger Cohen with the headline: ‘Donald Trump Just Cannot Help It’. It’s a scathing piece which lambasts Trump in very personal terms as a “malignant” conman.

The key line perhaps is when Cohen writes: “The Reichstag Fire was at least a fire. Here, there is smoke and mirrors.” He is referring to what many historians contend was a false-flag arson attack on the German parliament in 1933, which allowed newly elected Chancellor Adolf Hitler to install his Nazi dictatorship by claiming the sabotage was a communist plot.

Many critics of Trump, including Cohen, are concerned that the president is “manufacturing a crisis” over his border wall proposal. They accuse him of using the US government shutdown and the political impasse with Democrats on the proposed border wall funding as a pretext to introduce a state of emergency. Cohen’s mention of the infamous Reichstag Fire has therefore a seemingly radical inference. He, and many others in the American liberal-left, are warning that Trump is a crypto-fascist.

There is some merit to that argument. Certainly, Trump seems to be whipping up a crisis about immigration which is not justified in terms of numbers and conditions on the border with Mexico. The influx of migrants and refugees is widely reported to be at an all-time low going back over the past 40 years. Most of the present migrants are families, fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries. Trump’s scary depiction of “drug dealers” and “terrorists” seems to be unabashed fabulation to incite fear.

His threats of invoking a state of emergency in which he will use executive powers to instruct the compulsory building of a security barriers on the southern border are therefore disproportionate and uncalled for. Trump’s would-be arrogation of emergency powers has disturbing implications of overriding US constitutional law, and sidelining other branches of government. There are genuine concerns that the direction is one of authoritarianism, even fascism.

But here is where too many Americans are deluded about Trump. They think he is the singular problem, an aberrant president. Get rid of him, they say, and we can all return to “normal democracy”.

The reality is that the US has been sliding into authoritarianism, plutocracy and oligarchy, or dare we say fascism, for decades. The political figure of Trump – obnoxious as he is – is merely the culmination of this degenerative process in American politics.

The obscenity of American capitalism and its grotesque exploitation of millions of American citizens – creating islands of super wealth among a sea of poverty – is a repudiation of any notion of a functioning democracy. The two-party pimping for big business, Wall Street and the military-industrial racket that has been going on for decades makes a travesty of any claims about “we the people” and elections. This backdrop of actual functioning oligarchy is why many voters – among the half, that is, who bothered to even vote – reached out to “an outsider” like Trump and his conman promises of change.

However, the inherent problem isn’t Trump. It is the system that produces the conditions and precursors for someone like Trump to end up getting elected.

It should be noted that people like Roger Cohen and other American “liberals” who are wringing their hands about Trump never seemed to express concern about the dominance of big business and banks in running America’s corporatocracy. Cohen and his ilk were also big supporters of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – wars that were illegal, resulted in millions of innocent casualties, destroyed societies and spread the scourge of terrorism.

How is getting rid of Trump supposed to be a return to “normal democracy”? When that purported “normal democracy” is a myth, a fantasy belied by massive poverty, inequality and oppression of ordinary American workers and their families, alongside criminal imperialist wars of genocide.

Cohen’s reference to the Reichstag Fire false flag and Trump’s propensity for authoritarianism may sound like radical criticism. But it is only radical schtick. It is worse than Trump’s con artistry because it propagates the delusion that America has an underlying democracy. The reality is American democracy stopped functioning a long time ago. When exactly it stopped is debatable.

The 9/11 “terror attacks” in 2001 were certainly a candidate for comparison to the Reichstag Fire false flag event. They ushered in executive powers in Washington to wage criminal wars “against terrorism” anywhere on the planet, and for far-reaching police state surveillance of US citizens.

Or we could go back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 when the US created a pretext for the Vietnam War.

Or the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 by his Deep State enemies, which was a coup d’état against American democracy, violating the nation forever.

Or the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 which gave private banks and plutocrats the ultimate power over the creation of money in the US and thus a veto on economic policy.

Many other instances (extermination of native Americans, African slavery) could be cited which testify to the fraud of “American democracy”. The seeds of authoritarianism, militarism and fascism were sown decades ago. To blame this putrefaction of democracy on Donald Trump is the delusion of American apologists for the system’s long-time corruption.

The debate developed along three main questions. The first was on the role of NATO (“NATO is no longer fit for purpose”), the second was about Russia (“The Russian threat is overblown”), and the third was on Iran (“It’s time to take a hard line on Iran”).

To discuss these important issues, five very special guests were invited, namely: Derek Chollet, Executive Vice President of the German Marshall Fund of the United States and former US Assistant Secretary of Defense; Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and History, New York University; Reuel Marc Gerecht, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former CIA Analyst; John J. Mearsheimer, American Political Scientist & Professor at the University of Chicago; and Kori Schake, Deputy Director-General at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Looking at the panel, one immediately notices how Cohen and Mearsheimer were invited to bring a realist point of view to the discussion, as opposed to the other three who have an interventionist view of American foreign policy, viewing the United States as the indispensable nation. Cohen and Mearsheimer have worked for years, if not decades, to explain to American and international audiences how Washington’s hegemonic policies have accelerated the end of the US unipolar moment as well as spawned chaos around the world.

Cohen, and especially Mearsheimer, are pure realists. Without going into the merits of the differences between offensive realism, defensive realism and offshore balancers, they both have a coherent vision of why American actions have provoked the results we have seen around the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For those who follow Cohen and Mearsheimer and see themselves as realists when observing international relations, watching this debate was painful and frustrating, but also immensely useful for understanding today’s divisions. In fact, the other three panelists must be carefully analyzed. Derek Chollet is part of the neoliberal camp, having served in the Obama administration. Chollet finds himself amongst the field of the imperialists who, following the debacle in Iraq in 2003, opted to subvert sovereign countries using a different set of methodologies, namely, coups d’état organized through such things as color revolutions and the so-called Arab Spring. In the name of spreading democracy, countries like Libya, Ukraine and Syria have suffered unspeakable devastation at the hands of the US and her allies.

In order to represent the full spectrum of US foreign policy, former CIA agent Reuel Marc Gerecht was brought in as a hardliner, repeating the type of neo-conservative arguments reminiscent of the Bush era. Kori Schake, a former adviser to G.W. Bush, completed the lethal neocon-neoliberal offering, representing the position of NATO and the most Russophobic and Iranophobic countries in Europe.

Looking at these guests and at the questions asked, it was obvious that positions that were diametrically opposed would emerge. Cohen and Mearsheimer argued practically in symbiosis, with slightly different perspectives but coming to the same conclusion. The United States, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, found itself the sole superpower facing no direct adversaries. Washington’s subsequent mission was to remake the world in its own image and likeness, exporting democracy to the four corners of the world and attacking its geopolitical adversaries with soft or hard power. But this course of action, ironically, only served to accelerate the end of this unipolar moment.

Mearsheimer and Cohen tried to reiterate in their every answer how Washington has only managed to damage itself through its own foolish thinking and actions. Regarding the first question concerning NATO, both Mearsheimer and Cohen emphasized that NATO’s eastward expansion following the end of the Cold War was the main cause of instability in Europe. The three neoliberal-neocons — who for the sake of convenience I will now call “the imperialists” — responded that it was in fact the European countries who demanded America’s presence in Europe for the purposes of protecting them against Russia. The three imperialists brushed off or ignored Mearsheimer’s simple and straightforward riposte, borrowed from Obama and Trump’s election campaigns, that the European allies only wanted the US in Europe in order to avoid increasing their own military spending. Having apparently not heard what Mearsheimer said, the three insisted that as long as Poland and the Baltic countries demanded a US presence, Washington was obliged to respond. It was also frustrating for Cohen to explain, for the umpteenth time, how NATO’s advance towards Russia’s borders damaged relations between Russia and the US, two countries he believes should be global allies on multiple fronts. Mearsheimer even urged the three imperialists to think of the Monroe doctrine and of how intolerable it would be for the US to have a foreign power plant itself militarily in the western hemisphere. He also recalled the Cuban missile crisis, brought on by the USSR’s military proximity to the US.

Unfortunately, the three imperialists, even when painted into a corner by Cohen and Mearsheimer’s arguments, simply ignored or glossed over them. The most aggressive imperialist of all was, unsurprisingly, the former CIA agent, who pushed the arrogant line that America’s presence in Europe is necessary not only to keep Russia at bay, but also to prevent the Europeans from descending into a Hobbesian state of nature and tearing each other apart, as happened in two world wars.

Not surprisingly, the arguments used by the former CIA agent regarding NATO in Europe received the full accord of Kori Schake and Derek Chollet. Cohen’s reminder to those present that the coup in Ukraine was organized and financed by the West was dismissed as false and ridiculous. Derek Chollet averred: “the manifestations of the Maidan were spontaneous, invoking a greater proximity to Europe in the face of a dictator in the hands of Moscow.” The second question was related to the first, discussing Russia and its role in the world. Once again, both Cohen and Mearsheimer had to summon all their patience and explain to the general public how Putin has always acted in reaction to Western provocations. NATO’s eastward expansion (in spite of Bush’s verbal promise to Gorbachev not to extend NATO beyond Germany) was the cause of the war in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014. Of course the three imperialists denied these arguments, accusing Putin of unprovoked aggression, confirming in their mind why the US presence in Europe is needed to oppose Russia as a negative actor on the international scene. Not even Mearsheimer’s echoing of Kissinger’s strategy to divide Russia and China convinced those present that the aggressive attitude towards Moscow and Beijing was only damaging the United States, accelerating the end of the unipolar moment and forging the birth of a multipolar reality that will leave Washington isolated from the other great powers.

The three imperialists affirmed that the cooperation between Russia, China and Iran should not be surprising since dictators always confederate with each other; and besides, they say, this situation should not scare the United States, as it has the capacity to deal with multiple fronts simultaneously. Fortunately, Cohen’s words, recalling the disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya put paid to such delusional optimism, provoking laughter from the audience. Such moments served to highlight how ridiculous the imperialist arguments are. Two or three such arguments were enough to open the eyes of audience members who may not have been familiar with opposing arguments to the ones presented by the imperialists.

Two such instructive moments stand out. The first was in response to the former CIA agent, who called for a coup d’état in Iran, stating that the United States knows how to conduct these successfully. But Mearsheimer’s rejoinder, recalling the failures in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, provoked loud applause from the audience. Mearsheimer reminded how these arguments were employed by Obama and Trump during their election campaigns to win office. The second moment, even more effective, concerned Iran. In response to Kori Schake, who argued for greater pressure on Iran because of its alleged interference in the region in a bid to expand its influence in many neighboring countries (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen), Mearsheimer pointed out the staggering level of hypocrisy involved, where the United States of America is the world champion of regime change and interference in the internal affairs of other countries. The strong applause that followed testified to the incontestable truth of this observation.

Unfortunately, the debate ended with most of the audience continuing to believe that NATO is of fundamental importance, Russia is an evil actor, and the US needs to place more pressure on Iran. The number of people who changed their minds before and after the debate was important (Mearsheimer and Cohen changed the attitudes of about 10% of those present regarding the first two questions) but still marginal compared to the total.

As an online spectator, I experienced different feelings. My main frustration lay in the David-and-Goliath nature of the debate, with the arguments of Cohen and Mearsheimer contending against all the accumulated lies of the mainstream media, amplified and repeated by the three imperialists present. The public was certainly more accustomed to hearing the imperialists’ arguments; Cohen and Mearsheimer hardly had sufficient time to overcome the audience’s conditioning. Yet a part of the public present completely changed its mind following the debate. Some people entered the hall with the conviction that NATO was indispensable and Russia aggressive, but ended up leaving with the belief that NATO is now obsolete and that Russia is not the aggressor here.

What then emerges from this whole debate is the obvious conclusion that Mearsheimer and Cohen are two formidable minds unafraid to confront, dismantle and destroy the received wisdom. Being informed is a fundamental part of our lives today. Without being properly informed we are not properly equipped to vote and elect our representatives. We are thus unable to properly shape and determine the course of events in our putative democracies.

This debate has shown how disconnected the US imperialist world is from the real world, and especially how much damage this neocon-neoliberal way of thinking has actually done, ironically succeeding in producing results opposite to those sought, only serving to accelerate the end of America’s domination over the world. As information spreads and reaches more and more people, there will be an increasing understanding of the disastrous actions of the Euro-American establishment. Cohen and Mearsheimer are acting in service of their country, warning that the direction in which the United States is headed will only have deleterious consequences for the country’s role in the world.

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 fourth year, are at TheNation.com.)

The nearly two-year-long series of allegations and investigations now known as “Russiagate” were instigated by top American political, media, and (probably) intelligence elites (mostly Democratic or pro-Democratic, but not only). What they have wrought suggests profoundly disturbing characteristics of people who play a very large role in governing this country. Cohen specifies six such barely concealed truths, which he and Batchelor then discuss.

1. Russiagate promoters evidently have little regard for the current or future institution of the American presidency. At the center of their many allegations is the claim that the current president, Donald Trump, achieved the office in 2016 because of a conspiracy (“collusion”) with the Kremlin; or as a result of some dark secret the Kremlin uses to control him; or due to “Russian interference” in the election; or to all three. Which means, they say outright or imply daily, that he is some kind of Kremlin agent or “puppet” and thus “treasonous.”

Such allegations are unprecedented in American history. They have already deformed Trump’s presidency, but no consideration is given to how they may affect the institution in the future. Unless actual proof is provided in the specific case of Trump—thus far, there is none—they are likely to leave a stain of suspicion (or similar allegations) on future presidents. If the Kremlin is believed to have made Trump president and corrupted him, even if this is not proven, why not future presidents as well?

That is, Russiagate zealots seek to delegitimize Trump’s presidency, but risk leaving a long-term cloud over the institution itself. And not only the presidency. They now clamor that the Kremlin is targeting the 2018 congressional elections, thereby projecting the same dark cloud over Congress, as some embittered losers are likely to blame Putin’s Kremlin.

2. These same Russiagate promoters clearly also have no regard for America’s national security. This is revealed in three ways:

§ By loudly and regularly proclaiming that Russia’s “meddling” in the 2016 US presidential election was “an attack on American democracy” and thus “an act of war,” comparable to Pearl Harbor and 9/11, as recently inventoried by Glenn Greenwald, they are literally practicing the dictionary meaning of “warmongering.” Can this mean anything less than that Washington must respond with “an act of war” against Russia? Tellingly, Russiagaters rarely if ever mention the potentially apocalyptic consequences of war between these two nuclear superpowers.

§ Still more, by their Russiagate accusations against Trump, whom they characterize as a “mentally unstable president,” they risk prodding or provoking the president to undertake just such a war against Russia in order to demonstrate that he is not the “Kremlin’s puppet.”

§ Meanwhile, by repeatedly stating they do not trust Trump to negotiate with Russian President Putin, Russiagate zealots severely limit his capacity, possessed by all American presidents since the onset of the atomic age, to resolve potential nuclear crises through diplomatic means rather than by military action, as President John F. Kennedy did in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. (Imagine, Cohen adds, the outcome had Kennedy been so assailed by the allegations being leveled against Trump today.)

In short, as Cohen has argued previously, Russiagate and its elite adherents are now the number-one threat to American national security, not Russia itself.

§ Having found no factual evidence of such a plot, promoters of Russiagate have shifted their focus from the Kremlin’s alleged hacking of e-mails at the Democratic National Committee to Russia’s social-media “attack on our democracy.” In so doing, they reveal something bordering on contempt for American voters, for the American people.

§ A foundational principle of theories of democratic representative government is that voters make rational and legitimate decisions. But Russiagate advocates strongly imply—even state outright—that American voters are easily duped by “Russian disinformation,” zombie-like awaiting a signal as how to act and vote. The allegation is reminiscent of, for people old enough to remember, the classic Cold War film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” But, Cohen proposes, let the following representatives of America’s elite media speak for themselves:

§ According to Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker, Russia social-media intrusions “manipulated American thought.… The minds of social media users are likely becoming more, not less, malleable.” And this, she goes on, is especially true of “older, nonwhite, less-educated people.” New York Times columnist Charles Blow adds that this was true of “black folks.” Times reporter Scott Shane is entirely straightforward, writing about “Americans duped by the Russian trolls.” And Evan Osnos of The New Yorker spells it out without nuance: “At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential, embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read.”

§ Cohen emphasizes (though this is hardly necessary) that these are lead writers for some of America’s most elite publications. He adds, their apparent contempt for “ordinary” Americans is not unlike a centuries-old trait of the Russian intelligentsia, which held the Russian narod(people) in similar contempt, while maintaining that it therefore must lead them, and not always in democratic ways.

4. Russiagate was initiated by political actors, but the elite establishment media gave it traction, inflated it, and promoted it to what it is today. These most “respectable” media include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and, of course, CNN and MSNBC, among others. These media outlets constantly proclaim themselves to be factual, unbiased, balanced, and thus another essential component of American democracy—a “fourth branch of government.”

§ But that has been far from the case in their reporting and commentary on Russiagate. Their combined loathing for Trump and “Putin’s Russia” has produced one of the worst episodes of media malpractice in the history of American journalism. This requires a special detailed study, though no media critics or journalism schools seem interested. But a somewhat close reader of these mainstream newspapers, and television “news” viewer, will note their selective, disproportionate coverage of some stories to the exclusion of others; the prejudicial language and prosecutorial slant often employed; the systematic violation of journalistic due process and presumption of innocence; the equal exclusion of contrary “sources” and “expert” opinions in their pages and on their televised panels; and other disregard for long-established journalistic standards.

§ Nor are these elite media outlets above slurring the reputations of people who dissent from their prosecutorial coverage of Russiagate. Very recently, for example, The New York Times traduced a Facebook vice president whose own study suggested that “that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal” of Russian use of Facebook. Even more revealing, a brand name of the liberal-progressive MSNBC, John Heilemann, suggested on air, referring to Congressman Devin Nunes, “that we actually have a Russian agent running the House Intel Committee on the Republican side.” The Democratic senator being interviewed, Chris Murphy, was less than categorical in brushing aside the “question.”

§ And not to be overlooked, these mainstream media have done little if anything to protest the creeping Big Brother censorship programs now being assiduously promoted by government and private institutions in order to ferret out and ban “Russian disinformation,” something of which any American dissenter from the orthodox Russiagate narrative might be “guilty” entirely on his or her own. Indeed, leading media have abetted and legitimized these undemocratic undertakings by citing them as legitimate sources.

§ Cohen leaves to others to decide what the Russiagate role of establishment media reveals about the elites who run them.

5. Briefly regarding the obvious role being played by the Democratic Party, or at least by its leading members, in Russiagate, whatever the serious commissions and omissions of the Republican Party may be: In a word, as it looks ahead to congressional elections in 2018, this essential component of the American (perhaps lamentably) two-party democratic system is now less a vehicle of positive domestic and foreign-policy alternatives than a party promoting conspiracy theories, Cold War, and neo-McCarthyism. (According to conversations with a number of local candidates, these electoral approaches are less their initiatives than cues, or directives, coming from high party levels—that is, from the Democratic elite.) And this leaves aside the Russiagate social-media narrative that blames the Kremlin for “divisions” in America that have pitted American citizens, and Democrats and Republicans, against each other for decades, often in “exacerbated” ways, not merely since 2016.

6. Finally, but no less revealing, American elites have long professed to be people of civic courage and honor. But Russiagate has produced very few “profiles in courage”—people who use their privileged positions of political or media influence to protest the abuses itemized above. Hence another revelation, if it is really that: America’s elites are composed overwhelmingly not of “rugged individualists” but of conformists—whether that is due to ambition, fear, or ignorance hardly matters.

thenation.com

In case you did not know, the “Mirotvorets” is the Ukrainian website which presents and constantly updates the list of people, often including their personal data, whom the local nationalists consider to be the undesirable elements. The list includes not only Russians but also Ukrainians and even prominent Americans and Europeans like actors Steven Seagal and Samy Naseri (French blockbuster Taxi), members of the famous German musical techno band “Scooter”, and others.

The website has been widely and strongly criticized by many journalists, human rights organizations, and even OSCE but this did not stop the “European Values Think-Tank” (EVTT) – a Czech based non-profit funded by George Soros, EU, American Embassy in Prague and some other sources – to produce a report entitled “The Kremlin's Platform for Useful Idiots in the West: An Overview of RT's Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact.”

This report contains a spreadsheet with the names of 2327 people who have appeared on Russian TV channel RT and, says the report, “either due to unawareness of RT's political agenda, or indeed explicit support of it, lend their names and credibility to a pseudo-news network and proxy agent of the Kremlin.”

Well, one could say that all the people mentioned in EVTT report are pretty lucky since some of them like President Trump and Professor Cohen have been called other names in the mainstream media comparing with which the “useful idiot” definition sounds like a compliment.

The research done by EVTT did not require a lot of deep analysis, as its methodology was very simple: as long as one appears on any of RT’s program his or her name is added to this “shameful” list.

The reason, as the report reveals, “RT uses guest appearances by Western politicians, journalists and writers, academics, and other influential public personalities to boost its credibility.”

So, according to EVTT, the current US Ambassador to Moscow Jon Huntsman, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and former CIA director James Woolsey have also joined the “Kremlin stooges” fraternity.

I am not sure if Senator McCain saw this report, but if he did he might have experienced mixed feelings like a man in the old anecdote observing his mother-in-law flying over the cliff into abyss in his new Ferrari.

We also do not know if this report played any role in the almost immediate follow up demand by US government to RT to register as a foreign agent, but the timing was perfect and the folks at EVTT must be jubilant. Their hard work is appreciated and therefore a continuous flow of financial and moral support among the followers and advocates of western values in high places is guaranteed.

One wonders if some lawyers like Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz whose name is on the list and who usually does not mince words will say something but so far, he is quiet despite the EVTT’s accusations being rather strong.

According to the report, “Appearing on RT is not harmless, it enables and legitimates RT's subversive agenda… It is therefore impossible to appear on RT without being ultimately complicit in its efforts to undermine Western democracy and pollute the information space.”

Well, some folks did express outrage. For example, Fred Weir who covers Russia for Christian Science Monitor calls the report “mostly ridiculous, hyperventilating nonsense….creating blacklists is a dangerously fraught operation in almost any circumstance, but this collection of "useful idiots" who have appeared on various RT shows is a travesty of everything the people at this "European Values" think tank claim to be upholding.”

Professor Mark Galeotti from New York University in Prague goes a bit further calling its authors “the witch-hunting charlatans of European Values.”

The only thing I’d replace in Mark’s statement is the word “European” for “Western” as its sponsors and authors definitely want to speak not just for Europe but for the whole western civilization.

We're living in interesting times, which see the conservative leaning Fox News channel having on (albeit comparatively limited) reasonable left leaning observers like Glenn Greenwald and Stephen Cohen (individuals who second guess some of the negative claims against Russia), as the more left (to Fox News) MSNBC and CNN favor neocons like David Frum and Michael Weiss. Besides Cohen and Greenwald, there're some conservative minded Americans second guessing the perceived Russian threat, contrasted with the US establishment left and right critics of Russia. There're also the more eclectic types, who don't neatly match either of the left and right categories. As is true with the left and right, this eclectic grouping is by no means monolithic.  

From within and outside his party, Donald Trump continues to face lingering attempts to have him take a confrontational stance towards Russia. His recent comments indicate positive and not so positive stances towards the Kremlin. Meantime, others like the outgoing CIA Director John Brennan, openly take issue with Trump's more upbeat approach towards Moscow.

The term «bad actor» has been used to characterize Russian President Vladimir Putin and some other world leaders. Brennan and Florida Senator Marco Rubio engage in bad acting, with their pious inaccuracies, that are very much coddled among a good number in US mass media.

Brennan's use of «outrageous» towards Trump is chutzpah, given how the former has described Russian military action (as targeting civilians and non-military assets) to what the US has done (the opposite) – a matter refuted in my last Strategic Culture Foundation article of January 11. The legally educated Rubio scornfully addressed Rex Tillerson (Trump's choice for Secretary of State) for refusing to call Putin a «war criminal», relative to Russian military actions and the deaths of individual Russians.

Tillerson said that an accusation like that should've clear evidence. Rubio suggested the presence of dead bodies as proof. Rubio knows all too well that corpses alone don't prove a guilty party. Over the decades, many civilians have died as a result of US and other non-Russian military actions. War can regretfully come to civilian areas, which in turn could lead to innocent deaths. The hypocrisy of selectively highlighting these situations is most disingenuous. The issue of murders in Russia don't conclusively lead to the Russian government. As has been true in the US: post-Soviet Russia is faced with some people who take criminal action (murder and otherwise) on their own and not by a proven clandestine government effort.

Whether at Moscow State University, Russian newsstands and elsewhere, there's noticeable opposition to Putin in Russia – leaving one to reasonably ask why the need for him to order the liquidation of Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya and Alexander Litvinenko, when the numerous other critics of the Russian president continue on and without much (if any) fear? The murders of Nemtsov (with extremely limited popularity in Russia) and Politkovskaya (who had non-Russian government opponents) aren't clear indications of Putin ordered hits. 

Factually, it remains unclear who poisoned Litvinenko with Polonium – a rather expensive/cost ineffective way to kill someone over other means. A point that has led some to believe that he might've accidentally poisoned himself. Litvinenko reportedly became sympathetic to the Chechen separatist cause and sought to become a Muslim. His Italian Intel connected contact Mario Scaramella was arrested for illicit arms trafficking and violating his country's state secrets – without the accusation of a Kremlin connection. Scaramella was infected with Polonium on the same day (November 1, 2006) that Litvinenko met Andrey Lugovoy. Without clear evidence, the former KGB bodyguard, Lugovoy has been accused of murdering Litvinenko. The ties between Litvinenko and Scaramella remain a comparatively (to Lugovoy) limited point of follow-up.

The belief that a Putin involved Russian government was behind a series of apartment bombings to gain public support for a war in Chechnya is along the lines of believing that the Bush administration was directly complicit in the 9/11 tragedy. The lawlessness which led to the second Chechen war of the 1990s was such that the Russian government didn't need to create an excuse for military action in Chechnya. Given the nature of security operations, it's understandable why Russian security forces don't want their anti-terrorist training exercises in vacated buildings to be publicly detailed. The Moscow theater and Beslan school terrorist attacks underscore this reasoning.

As times passes, there has yet to be conclusive proof provided on the claim of a Russian government attempt to influence the 2016 US presidential election in favor of Trump. If true, any such activity didn't appear to affect the result of that election.

The foreign interference in another country's election is a slippery slope, which I don't support. According to a Carnegie Mellon based study, the US is ahead of Russia, when it comes to election interference in other countries. If the claim of Russian government meddling in the last US election is true (once again noting the lack of disclosed supporting evidence), it was done (as claimed) to prefer Trump over his main rival Hillary Clinton, who was the preferred candidate of the anti-Russian neocons. Hence, the unproven Russian government interference was (if true) motivated by the preference for improved US-Russian relations.

On the geopolitical front, the claim of a threatening Russia is quite weak to reasonably substantiate. The faulty divisiveness include Barack Obama's overly simplistic depiction of a game involving Putin who is on a different team – the suggestion being that Americans differing with that perception are traitors. CNN's Jim Sciutto serves as another example, when he depicted a clear (in his mind and that of some others) Russian adversary with the examples of Crimea and US warships getting buzzed by Russian fighter jets as examples.

Crimea isn't in the US national interest. Sciutto doesn't have a good comeback to the hypocritical hoopla over Crimea versus the northern Cyprus and Kosovo situations. The pro-Russian majority in Crimea clearly and understandably prefer Russia over Kiev regime controlled Ukraine.

The aforementioned buzzing of US warships is something short of war and the result of increased tensions that see a US military build-up near Russia. Consider the buzzing of Soviet military assets in the Caribbean during the Cuban missile crisis. Only this time around, post-Soviet Russia isn't ideologically driven to act well beyond its boundaries.

Russian activity in Syria seeks to prevent an increased Muslim fundamentalist/anti-Russian advocacy with terrorism. What happens in Russia's «near abroad» (the non-Russian former Soviet republics) isn't a simple matter of Russia always being wrong. Why do the Abkhaz and Ossetians seem to prefer Russia over Georgia? Why hasn't Transnistria jumped on the opportunity to join pro-EU forces in Moldova? Noting that Moldova doesn't fully buy into the Russian threat mantra.

The talk of a possible Russian takeover of the Baltics is dubious. These former Soviet republics are NATO members. They'd have to do something extremely provocative to warrant the Kremlin to consider an attack on them. Are any or all of the Baltics likely to have political turmoil, which lead to a regime or regimes that increase hostility towards Russia and Russian speaking Baltic residents? If so, this is something that responsible observers in the West should warn against.

In Russia, there doesn't seem to be much of an inclination to attack the Baltics. At the same time, there's understandable Russian discontent with the anti-Russian posturing of some key Baltic officials. Comparatively speaking, that manner is relatively on par with how some past and present Latin American politicians have been aghast at the Gringo's domineering role in the Western Hemisphere. Keeping in mind that the Baltics have been used as an invasion route against Russia in some major conflicts that brought considerable suffering to that nation.

The Russian view of NATO has been misrepresented. As the Soviet Union was breaking up and for a short period thereafter, Russia openly inquired about possibly joining that organization. That expression was met with astonishment. Shortly afterwards, NATO expansion for some non-Russian states was enthusiastically supported, along with anti-Russian rhetoric portraying an inherently evil Russia that needed to be contained – adding that Russia should never be considered as a NATO member. The bombing of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) in 1999 by (the Clinton administration influenced) NATO targeted a pro-Russian entity. The basis for that attack was hypocritical. Turkey and Israel could've been bombed on the same questionable human rights basis. The faultiness concerns siding with one party in a situation with embattled sides each having valid and not so valid points. 

Russia's military capability has decreased the chance of it being bombed like Yugoslavia. Indeed, some have suggested that Russia could've been bombed over Chechnya for the same reason that Yugoslavia was attacked in reply to the upheaval in Kosovo. The 1999 NATO bombing campaign nurtured the idea of might making right and how pro-Russian advocacy hasn't received a fair hearing. Despite this occurrence, Russia has continued to seek improved ties with the West.

In actuality, US-Russian relations haven't been inherently adversarial towards each other. Compare Russia's stance during America's revolution, war of 1812 and civil war to Britain. Contrast the stances of Russia with Germany during two world wars. The present targeting of nuclear weapons between the US and Russia is an unfortunate Cold War relic, that shouldn't be used as a talking point to oppose better Washington-Moscow relations. This improved relationship can serve to decrease the desire for nuclear weapons.

The Russian consensus of welcoming a US president who seeks better relations with Russia, along with the Kremlin being the first government to console the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy aren't indicative of threatening behavior. The incessant Putin and Russia bashing in neolib, neocon and flat out Russia hating circles are justifiably opposed by pro-Russian realists desiring improved Russia-West ties.