The reverence with which some liberals greet pronouncements made by today’s intelligence chiefs is in sharp contrast to their past critiques of the malevolence and misinformation spread by the CIA, the FBI and other agencies.Īnother Cohen target is the hallowed institutions of the American media, especially the New York Times and the Washington Post, whose reporting on Russia he sees as not merely tendentious but actively mendacious. The new cold war is being fought directly along Russia’s borders, most dangerously in a proxy civil war being battled out in Ukraine.Īmong Cohen’s many controversial claims is that the greatest scandal in American politics is not Russiagate but Intelgate – the myth propagated by elements of the US intelligence community that Putin is attempting to subvert American democracy. During the old cold war the communist bloc acted as a buffer between the two sides. As Cohen points out, even at the height of the Soviet-American cold war – an existential struggle between capitalism and communism – there were many mainstream advocates of détente with the USSR. American elites seem to have lost their fear of atomic warfare, while there is little or no mainstream political opposition to current hawkish policies aimed at Russia. The resultant hysteria has been ramped up by US media, by grandstanding politicians, and by blatantly self-serving military and industrial interests. Russiagate has been accompanied by a pernicious Russophobia that demonises not just Putin but the Russian people. There is an urgency and anxiety running through Cohen’s commentaries because he sees the new cold war as much more dangerous than its predecessor. The broadcasts began in 2014 but Cohen had long argued that a new cold war was unfolding in American-Russian relations.
#HILLARY NUCLEAR TIME TREASON SERIES#
This book is based on a series of weekly radio broadcasts made by Cohen under the rubric The New US-Russian Cold War. It was not Putin who caused what Cohen calls the new cold war, but Nato’s expansion to Russia’s borders US and EU meddling in Ukraine and western regime-change wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Central to that memory is the disdain with which a triumphalist West treated post-Soviet Russia, deemed to be a weak power whose interests and sensibilities could be trampled on with impunity. Russia’s traumas in the 1990s were mostly home-grown, but Cohen felt the US shared responsibility for the so-called economic shock therapy that impoverished the Russian people, created an elite of super-rich oligarchs and corrupted the country’s politics.Īs Cohen never tires of reminding us, you can’t understand Putin and contemporary Russia without reference to the country’s historical memory of the 1990s.
You can't understand Putin and contemporary Russia without reference to the country's historical memory of the 1990sīut after the collapse of the communist system in 1991, Cohen became a dissident of a new type – a severe critic of the US’s crusade to reinvent Russia as a liberal, free-market democracy.
Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times The author rejects the Russiagate narrative that Putin’s meddling in American politics led to Trump’s election. He was also an ardent supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to democratise Soviet socialism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cohen was deeply involved with dissident circles in the Soviet Union, doing much to propagate their views to the wider world. A highly respected historian of Soviet Russia, he made his name with a masterly biography of Nikolai Bukharin, a moderate Bolshevik leader executed by Stalin in 1938. The greatest threat to American security, argues Cohen, is not Putin’s foreign policy but international terrorism, nuclear proliferation and instability in the Middle East.Ĭohen was not always so notorious. Far from being a subversive threat to the United States, Putin is a potential partner in a revived Russo-American détente. He rejects the Russiagate narrative that Putin’s meddling in American politics led to Trump’s election as not just false but dangerous and damaging to American interests. Adding to their outrage is Cohen’s endorsement of US president Donald Trump’s pro-Putin sentiments, even though he is a life-long Democrat.īy his own lights, Cohen is a “patriot of American national security”.
According to his critics, Prof Stephen Cohen is “Putin’s No 1 American apologist”, a fellow traveller of an authoritarian rogue state and an implacable opponent of western efforts to contain Russian aggression and expansionism.
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