The war in Gaza continues today with scores of Palestinians dead, mostly from airstrikes on shelters and schools and neighborhoods outside hospitals. The displaced have nowhere else to go. In the meantime, the Israeli military has expanded its bombing and ground campaign into Lebanon, with more than 1400 dead and a million displaced since mid-September.
A new generation of reporters and editors at Antiwar.com, which has been challenging U.S. national security policy and militarism since the Bosnia War, has been working non-stop to provide readers with comprehensive, independent news on Israel’s war on Gaza and now its neighbors, since Oct. 7. It represents the libertarian right, a stalwart non-interventionist orbit that draws in fellow travelers from across the ideological and political spectrum and counts as its lodestars Ron Paul and the late Justin Raimondo.
Join us in person or livestreamed on May 23 from 10:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in Room 902 of the Hart Senate Office Building, located at 120 Constitution Avenue NE in Washington, DC. Lunch and refreshments will be served.
In the winter of 2021, the newly minted Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the Biden administration was setting about to establish a “foreign policy for the middle class.” This, of course, had echoes of Trump messaging that Washington’s overseas adventures and expansive military footprint was no longer putting “America first.” Borrowing more New Deal language, the Biden team appeared to be signaling that it too wanted to put American needs and interests back at the center of its policies governing war and peace.
With such powerful forces determined to use 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein for good, the American people really didn’t have a chance in proverbial hell to stop it. As Woodrow Wilson knew with the U.S. entry into WWI, the media must play a central role in controlling the message, mainstraining public support, and crushing all dissent threatening that support.
Wilson, for his part, created the Committee for Public Information and put an accomplished investigative journalist George Creel in charge of it. According to writer and historian Brandon Buck, the committee "shot propaganda through every capillary in the American bloodstream," including and most importantly, the press.
Jack Matlock Jr., who was a young U.S. foreign service officer stationed in Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then ambassador there 20 years later under the Reagan Administration, joined a seasoned panel of national security specialists, scholars, and journalists last week to discuss Oct. 27, 1962 – the most militarily fraught day of the crisis before back channel talks between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and US President John F. Kennedy produced an agreement and averted nuclear war.
Matlock, who has been quite vocal about the diplomatic mistakes made by the US after the fall of the Soviet Union – including NATO expansion – said he was worried that events today in Ukraine have gone well beyond control, with both sides raising the specter of nuclear war again, but this time with no talking. “It’s hard to see how we get out of this,” he said, shaking his head.
He was joined for the event (co-sponsored by the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord and the Quincy Institute) by moderator Katrina vanden Heuvel (ACURA/The Nation), Svetlana Savranskaya (National Security Archive, George Washington University), and Tom Blanton (director, National Security Archive).
Blanton, who has done extensive research into declassified materials relating to the Cuban Missile Crisis timeline, warned that like 1962, “events are in the saddle and riding mankind. The lessons are that nukes are a fundamentally destabilizing dark alley where none of us should go.”
Please listen to the entire event, here (opening remarks by me):
The tension and curiosity was palpable here in America when President Richard Nixon touched down in China with an entourage of government officials and press on February 21, 1972.
The reason was clear: the country had been fighting a war against communism in Indochina for the last seven years and this would be the first time in more than two decades that the United States would be engaging the Chinese Communist Party publicly, and in China. Most Americans — including the press — hadn’t a clue of what China was actually like beyond the politically-driven, exaggerated Hollywood caricatures of the Chinese people. As veteran journalist Dan Rather later put it, it was a bit “like leaving earth and going deep into the cosmos to some distant planet.”
On that plane was Chas Freeman. At the time he was a foreign service officer working for the U.S. State Department’s China Desk. Fluent in several languages, he was tapped to be the principal American interpreter for Nixon. Leaving from Washington on Feb. 17 and traveling to Hawaii, Guam, then Shanghai, Air Force One landed in Beijing (then still pronounced Peking), and was greeted by China’s premier Zhou Enlai. Famously, First Lady Pat Nixon wore a bright red coat, some saying it was chosen because of the color’s Chinese symbolism for luck, others reporting it was planned to contrast with the expected sea of gray and black suits on the tarmac.
From Nixon immediately grasping Zhou’s hand (the premier had been slighted when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand years earlier), to the timed state dinners and speeches for American nightly news, everything was staged for peak visual consumption. It was a spectacle, but one that had serious strategic significance — this detente had been calculated to serve as a wedge between Communist China and Communist Russia on the chessboard of Cold War politics. Nixon had also hoped to gain leverage with China over the North Vietnamese in Washington’s ongoing war in Indochina.
Nixon proclaimed it the “week that changed the world,” and in many ways it did, explains Freeman, who sat down with us recently to talk about his experience as an interpreter during this audacious moment. The “Shanghai Communique,” the tangible outcome of the visit, was a joint statement affirming the detente and movement toward normalization, and set the tone of understanding for the next several decades on the Taiwan issue. Here, the United States underscored support for the “One China policy” and strategic ambiguity. They both agreed that neither party would pursue hegemony in the region and would oppose any third party’s effort to do so — very clearly meaning Russia.
“It was an almost unprecedented instance of American initiative and statecraft,” Freeman said of the trip, referring to the planning, execution, and accomplishments. Too bad it didn’t last. He talks about this — and that warm furry hat — in his interview below:
The Russians want NATO to close its doors to Ukraine and all further expansion into Eastern Europe — this is the red line Moscow as declared. Quincy Institute senior fellow Anatol Lieven talks here about why the U.S. and NATO must decide whether denying Russia is worth the bloody conflict that it might cause. He also talks about the imperative of revisiting the Minsk II agreement, resolving the Donbas dispute, and Ukraine neutrality as a longterm solution.
He also explains why he believes negotiations should take place between the U.S. and Russia only, how Europe is divided, and the consequences of U.S. military intervention (directly or indirectly) in anticipation of, or after a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
