The New U.S.-Russian Cold War—Who is to Blame?
Video Statistics and Information
Views: 40,388
Rating: 4.7619047 out of 5
Keywords: Russia, Putin, Cold War, Ukraine, NATO, Crimea, Georgia, US-Russia Relations, McFaul, Stephen Cohen
Id: Z4dJcdM2Dkg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 111min 15sec (6675 seconds)
Published: Tue May 15 2018
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4dJcdM2Dkg&feature=share
Prof. Stephen F. Cohen argues that unwise US policies since the 1990s have been responsible for the new Cold War. Former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul argues that Russia’s leader since 2000, Putin, is to blame.
A discussion of the Stephen F. Cohen–Michael McFaul debate.
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. (You can find previous installments of these conversations, now in their fifth year, at TheNation.com.)
On May 9, at a public event jointly sponsored by Columbia University’s Harriman Institute and NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Russian Studies, Cohen and McFaul—a Stanford University professor and previously President Obama’s top Russia adviser in the White House and then his ambassador to Moscow—debated a crucial historical but also urgent contemporary subject: “The New US-Russian Cold War—Who Is to Blame?” Cohen argues that unwise American policies since the 1990s have been largely responsible. McFaul, drawing on themes in his new book, From Cold War to Hot Peace, argues that Russia’s leader since 2000, Vladimir Putin, is to blame. (A video of the full debate can be seen here.)
Batchelor plays several statements by Cohen and McFaul at the event, which he and Cohen discuss. Among the main points made by Cohen are the following:
— The new Cold War has unfolded for more than twenty years without any substantive mainstream debate—not in elections, Congress, the media, think tanks, or universities. In a democracy, such debates are the only way to challenge and change official policy. As a result, Washington’s unwise policies toward Moscow have been guided by the same underlying assumptions and principles since the 1990s. This situation is dramatically unlike the preceding 40-year Cold War, when US policy was regularly debated both at high and grassroots levels from the 1960s through the 1980s. And this lack of public debate is one reason why the new Cold War is more dangerous than was its predecessor. Therefore, Cohen emphasizes, if this event sets a precedent, inspires more such debates between representatives of fundamentally opposing American views, as he and McFaul are, there will be no loser only winners in the making of subsequent US policy toward Russia.
— Cohen locates the origins of the new Cold War at the time when the preceding one was said to have ended. The three leaders who declared that the Cold War had ended in 1989–1990—Presidents Gorbachev, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush—publicly agreed it had been terminated through negotiations and “without any losers.” But in 1992, Bush changed both the timing and terms of that epochal event, dating it from the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, two years later, and declaring: “America won the Cold War.” Thus arose the US triumphalism and sense of entitlement that has informed Washington’s policies toward post-Soviet Russia ever since.
— At the same time, in 1990, another major agreement was successfully negotiated and then violated by Washington. In return for Gorbachev’s agreement that a reunited Germany (the political epicenter of that Cold War) would be a NATO member, the Western powers, led by President Bush, pledged that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” Violating that pledge a few years later led to two primary causes of the new Cold War: today, NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, is encamped on Russia’s borders; and the Russian policy elite’s abiding belief, expressed not only by Putin, that Washington has repeatedly broken its promises to, even “deceived,” Moscow.