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Trump-Putin Summit: How the New Cold War is More Dangerous Than the Last

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Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are scheduled to meet in Helsinki on Monday, July 16. Beginning tomorrow, Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will be among the participants of the NATO summit. See accuracy.org/calendar for upcoming events.

STEPHEN F. COHEN, via Caitlin Graf, press@thenation.com
Available for a very limited number of interviews, Cohen is professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. His most recent book, from Columbia University Press, is Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.

See his recent pieces and interviews in The Nation, including “Who’s Afraid of a Trump-Putin Summit?” “Russiagate’s ‘Core Narrative’ Has Always Lacked Actual Evidence” and “The Necessity of a Trump-Putin Summit,” which states: “U.S.-Russian military relations are especially tense today in the Baltic region, where a large-scale NATO buildup is under way, and in Ukraine, where a U.S.-Russian proxy war is intensifying. The ‘Soviet Bloc’ that once served as a buffer between NATO and Russia no longer exists. And many imaginable incidents on the West’s new Eastern Front, intentional or unintentional, could easily trigger actual war between the United States and Russia. What brought about this unprecedented situation on Russia’s borders — at least since the Nazi German invasion in 1941 — was, of course, the exceedingly unwise decision, in the late 1990s, to expand NATO eastward. Done in the name of ‘security,’ it has made all the states involved only more insecure. …

“Today’s U.S.-Russian proxy wars are different [than the Cold War], located in the center of geopolitics and accompanied by too many American and Russian trainers, minders, and possibly fighters. Two have already erupted: in Georgia in 2008, where Russian forces fought a Georgian army financed, trained, and minded by American funds and personnel; and in Syria, where in February scores of Russians were killed by U.S.-backed anti-Assad forces. Moscow did not retaliate, but it has pledged to do so if there is ‘a next time,’ as there very well may be. If so, this would in effect be war directly between Russia and America. Meanwhile, the risk of such a direct conflict continues to grow in Ukraine, where the country’s U.S.-backed but politically failing President Petro Poroshenko seems increasingly tempted to launch another all-out military assault on rebel-controlled Donbass, backed by Moscow.”