Cold War Against Russia—Without Debate (The Nation)
Cold War Against RussiaWithout Debate
The Nation Magazine
The Obama administrations decision to isolate Russia, in a new version of containment, has met with virtually unanimous support from the political and media establishment.
Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen
President Barack Obama delivers a speech at Palais des Beaux-Arts
in Brussels, Belgium, March 26, 2014. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Future historians will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russiaand that, in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from the American political or media establishment.
The Obama administration announced its Cold War indirectly, in a front-page New York Times story by Peter Baker on April 20. According to the report, President Obama has resolved, because of the Ukraine crisis, that he can never have a constructive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and will instead ignore the master of the Kremlin and focus on isolating
Russia by cutting off its economic and political ties to the outside world
effectively making it a pariah state. In short, Baker reports, the White House has adopted an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment. He might have added, a very extreme version. The report has been neither denied nor qualified by the White House.
No modern precedent exists for the shameful complicity of the American political-media elite at this fateful turning point. Considerable congressional and mainstream media debate, even protest, were voiced, for example, during the run-up to the US wars in Vietnam and Iraq and, more recently, proposed wars against Iran and Syria. This Cold Warits epicenter on Russias borders; undertaken amid inflammatory American, Russian and Ukrainian media misinformation; and unfolding without the stabilizing practices that prevented disasters during the preceding Cold Warmay be even more perilous. It will almost certainly result in a new nuclear arms race, a prospect made worse by Obamas provocative public assertion that our conventional forces are significantly superior to the Russians, and possibly an actual war with Russia triggered by Ukraines looming civil war. (NATO and Russian forces are already mobilizing on the countrys western and eastern borders, while the US-backed Kiev government is warning of a third world war.)
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