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All is easy to attribute to Vladimir Putin’s appetite for empire, but for a long time now the West has pursued economic policies toward Russia that ill serve its objectives. Since the Berlin Wall came down, the United States and its European allies have acted as if Russia’s transition to a non-threatening democracy could be hastened through economic engagement. After World War II, deepening trade helped end centuries of enmity among western European states. Russia provides 30 percent of Europe’s natural gas—half flows through Ukraine—and it is a major supplier of crude oil and other resource based products to the...

When Putin Met Reagan Written by Alex Selwyn-Holmes December 7, 2009 In May 1988, President Ronald Reagan travelled to Moscow for his 4th summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets prepared a grand welcome; buildings across from the Kremlin were repainted, streets repaved and trees and flowers planted along the boulevards. The president’s schedule included attending the Bolshoi Ballet, speaking to students at Moscow’s State University and visiting Danilov Monastery, while First Lady would tour Leningrad.The visit was not without its own share of diplomatic incidents. The First Couple took an unscheduled walk through the Arbat, a Moscow shopping pedestrian street,...

WASHINGTON - How Barack Obama deals with Russia's invasion of Ukraine will likely define his presidency in the history books. But after five years of coddling Moscow and its brutal, authoritarian regime, there's little confidence left in his leadership. The immediate reaction among Washington's top political and media power centers to President Vladimir Putin's audacious military incursion in Crimea is that it's the result of Obama's foreign policy incompetence in an increasingly dangerous world. One in which we face a treacherous foe who thinks the Cold War never ended. "Obama's critics assert that this is largely his doing --...

What an Oscar-winning production: No sooner had the Olympic torch been doused at Sochi than Russian troops, in uniform and out, began landing in Crimea. The script was as familiar as "Casablanca" as key points are seized, highways blocked, airports occupied, parliament buildings taken over, and the flag of the once and future Occupying Power raised everywhere. Not since the 1936 Olympics in Berlin has aggression been so glamorously presaged, the mailed fist wrapped in such a velveteen glove. Even the excuse for this barely concealed act of aggression is borrowed from the Nazi Anschluss with Austria: An oppressed...

With Vladimir Putin’s dispatch of Russian troops into Crimea, our war hawks are breathing fire. Russophobia is rampant and the op-ed pages are ablaze here. Barack Obama should tune them out and reflect on how Cold War presidents dealt with far graver clashes with Moscow. When Red Army tank divisions crushed the Hungarian freedom fighters in 1956, killing 50,000, Eisenhower did not lift a finger. When Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, JFK went to Berlin and gave a speech. When Warsaw Pact troops crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, LBJ did nothing. When, Moscow ordered Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski to smash...

...the United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. ....when American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept". There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe to-day? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the...

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Yesterday “TheBlaze” published an interview with Romanian Lt. Gen Ion Pacepa, a discussion which arose around the publishing of his work, “Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism.” Pacepa is a defector to the United States, but not just any run-of-the-mill defector. He is the highest-ranking Soviet intelligence officer to ever defect. He crossed over back in 1978 and was given political asylum by then President Jimmy Carter. He has made a practice since that time to write in defense of freedom while living his life under threat of assassination, hiding out...

Cold war spy Kuklinski movie premieres in Warsaw 05.02.2014 09:10 President Bronislaw Komorowski has heaped praise on a new movie about a Polish colonel who defected to the CIA in 1972, saying the hero of the film deserves to be honoured by Poland. “This film, thanks to wonderful acting, and a script that's rooted in real history, will always make a tremendous impression,” Komorowski said at the premiere of Jack Strong in Warsaw. “It's an extraordinary film about an extraordinary man,” he added. The movie follows the career of the late Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski (pseudonym Jack Strong), who handed thousands...

For nearly a decade, an awkward debate has raged about the U.S. military's nuclear force: Did top Air Force officials really choose "00000000" as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile? Ten years later, in a document obtained by Foreign Policy, the U.S. military told Congress that it never happened. But is the Pentagon telling the truth? Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert and former launch officer , says no. Blair, now a scholar and author at Princeton University, first raised the idea in a piece published in 2004. He accused the Air Force of circumventing...

    ~The FReeper Canteen Presents~ Road Trip: White Sands Missile Range, New MexicoWhite Sands Missile Range is a rocket range of almost 3,200 square miles area, the largest military installation in the United States. WSMR includes the Oscura Range and the WSMR Otera Mesa bombing range. WSMR and the 600,000-acre Fort Bliss Range Complex to the south form a contiguous swath of territory for military testing. White Sands Missile Range is a Test and Evaluation Command Installation operated primarily for the support of research, development, test, and evaluation of weapon and space systems, subsystems, and components. WSMR, established in...

On May 1, 1960, the Soviet Union shot down a CIA U-2 spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers. It was an international crisis for America’s intelligence agencies. A planned summit between Pres. Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita Khrushchev was scuttled, much to Eisenhower’s embarrassment and to the fury of the Pakistanis, from whose territory the flight had been launched. First flown in 1957, the 63-foot-long, jet-powered U-2—capable of flying as high as 70,000 feet—is still used by the U.S. Air Force. But after the Powers incident, basing the plane in foreign countries became problematic. Their mere presence...

During the 1980s with no end of the Cold War in sight, the CIA became alarmed at the number of Soviet spies working for the U.S. who were being arrested and executed. The U.S. network of informants within the USSR was rapidly being dismantled, severely damaging American intelligence gathering capabilities. It became apparent that the CIA had a mole who was compromising their efforts. Based on the book Circle of Treason by former CIA agent Sandy Grimes, the ABC series The Assets dramatizes the events and investigation leading to the arrest of traitor Aldrich Ames. The show is a grim...

Archbishop Schevchuk: As a teenager, at that time I was not aware of the dangers because it was completely a secret and every teenager had his own secret. Neither my mother nor my father were aware of this and this was my personal secret. It was after a year that I understood the dangers that could have resulted had I been discovered by the secret police. My parents: my mother was a music teacher and my father was an engineer. Had I been discovered my parents would have lost their jobs. Many people in Ukraine, in the past, who were...

Full Title:The Return of History We are not locked in a new Cold War, but China and Russia are bringing back Cold War tactics. “Is this a new Cold War?” Every time I say anything to anyone anywhere about Russia nowadays, that’s what I’m asked. And there is a clear answer: No. This is not a new Cold War. Neither the United States nor Europe is locked in a deadly, apocalyptic competition with Russia, China, or anyone else. We are not fighting proxy wars. The world has not been divided into two Orwellian halves, democrats vs. communists. But although we...

Just how strong were the ties between the world's largest and oldest democracies that an incident involving a diplomat and a maid led to anger threatening the relationship itself to cold war era? Or had the relationship been weakening in the past few years, masked by the empty symbolism of State dinners, asks Devesh Kapur. The sharp deterioration in India-US relations stemming from Devyani Khobragade's arrest raises a question: Just how strong were the ties between the world's largest and oldest democracies -- whose common value systems supposedly make them 'natural allies' -- that an incident involving a diplomat and...

Joseph Kennedy had befriended McCarthy because he found him to be a likable fellow Irish-Catholic who had all the right ideas on the domestic communist menace. These warm feelings were quickly transferred to the entire Kennedy family. JFK liked the fact that McCarthy went after the "elites" in the State Department whom JFK regarded with contempt. (13) Even before McCarthy made accusations against the State Department of subversion, JFK had already aligned himself with the militant anti-communists who blamed the Truman State Department for the "loss" of China. So JFK declared on the House floor in January 1949. "The responsibility...

On Saturday, Nov. 16, the United States marks a milestone: the 80th anniversary of when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union and "normalized" U.S.-USSR relations. It is a day that should live in infamy. But it's a day that hardly anyone has ever heard of. I certainly hadn't before researching my book, "American Betrayal." As I studied the event, however, it became clear that it was on this day 80 years ago that what I call "American betrayal" began. It is the date on which the U.S. government institutionally learned to lie. After the Bolsheviks seized dictatorial powers...

The ninth of November marked the twenty-fourth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, probably the most important historical event since World War II and the most important lesson about human freedom experienced within the living memory of most of us. Presumably, next year there will be more of a commemoration, but the salient question now is how this lesson is being taught in the nation’s classrooms. For while those of us in our forties and older remember the fall of communism and its causes, today’s teenagers are wholly in the dark. What, then, are the high-school students of...

Why does it matter to the rest of us what happens in Georgia and environs? Answer: if the West cannot help an aspiring ally with dreams of joining Nato and the EU, cannot even protect it from Russian hegemony, what are we doing meddling in the Middle East or anywhere else? And if we can’t help Georgia, then what is left of the West’s victory in the Cold War? I reported on the national elections in Tbilisi, Georgia, last October. On one occasion, I was shown a text from a politician of the party that won the election to a...