International security

The Fictitious ‘Russian Attack’ vs. the Real Imperative to ‘Cooperate With Russia’

Today’s perilous reality is unprecedented and twofold. On the one hand, never have Washington-Moscow relations been so multiply fraught with the possibilities of war. American and Russian forces are in close and increasingly hostile military proximity from Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Georgia to Syria, and now possibly Venezuela. On the other hand, the “cooperation” and “contacts” known as détente that kept the United States and Soviet Union safe from war in the 20th century, conceivably nuclear war, have been anathematized, even criminalized, by nearly three years of false Russiagate allegations. So much so that a 2018 Trump summit meeting with the Kremlin leader, a traditional presidential practice since President Eisenhower, was called “treason,” and more recently his diplomacy with Russia generally branded “appeasement.”