New McCarthyism Could Literally Kill Us All

"Would a Russian puppet do THIS?" Trump tweeted as he mashed the nuclear codes to destroy Russia and Earth. Watch the full Aggressive Progressives episode here

"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.)

Cohen points out that he has been warning against a new Cold War since the early 2000s, as reflected in the subtitle of his 2009 book Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War and in his earlier publications. He and Batchelor have been discussing the new Cold War almost weekly since 2014. For years, leading US policy-makers, media commentators, and scholars have denied its existence, even its possibility, citing Russia’s purported weakness; the absence of “ideological conflict”; the non-global nature of conflicts that had unfolded since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991; the benign nature of US policy toward Russia; etc. In truth, these Cold War deniers were either uninformed, myopic, or unwilling to acknowledge their own complicity in the squandered opportunity for a post-Soviet peace, even an American-Russian strategic partnership. Now the deniers’ most prestigious and influential foreign policy organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), has issued an official report fully acknowledging, even eagerly declaring, that “The United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia.”"*

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