Anyone who follows the news even in a cursory fashion has probably heard about President Biden’s response to what Ben Aris has referred to as a “journalist trap” from George Stephanopoulos during an interview released earlier this week. Stephanopoulos asked Biden if he thought Putin was a killer. Biden said, “Mmhmm. Yes, I do.” The exchange is in the below video:

Stephanopoulos knows his job. Amplify U.S. policy. So he asks Biden if Putin is "a killer." Russia is not having it and recalled their ambassador from the U.S.
The Russiagaters won. It's impossible to have any relationship with Russia.
BTW, Putin didn't kill 1 million Iraqis. pic.twitter.com/1yDmVckuBB

— Margaret Kimberley (@freedomrideblog) March 17, 2021

Needless to say, this – along with the announcement that US intelligence believes that Russia interfered in the 2020 election and more sanctions may consequently be on the way – didn’t go down well in Russia. Moscow has recalled its ambassador from Washington for “consultations.” According to the Wall Street Journal:

A statement by the Russian foreign ministry said the most important thing for Moscow was to identify ways to rectify the relationship, blaming Washington for bringing relations between the two countries to “a blind alley.”

Furthermore, Putin has commented directly on Biden’s remark, suggesting that Biden was engaging in psychological projection. According to an RT report:

Speaking on Thursday, Putin suggested that Biden may be projecting, noting that evaluating other countries “is like looking in a mirror.”

“When I was a kid, when we were arguing with each other in the playground, we used to say, ‘Whatever you say [about others] is what you are yourself,’” Putin added.

Putin also reportedly said he wished Biden “good health.”

Later in the day, it was reported that Putin had offered to have a live public discussion with Biden in the near future. According to ABC News:

“I’ve just thought of this now,” Putin told a Russian state television reporter. “I want to propose to President Biden to continue our discussion, but on the condition that we do it basically live, as it’s called. Without any delays and directly in an open, direct discussion. It seems to me that would be interesting for the people of Russia and for the people of the United States.”

Some are interpreting this as Putin’s way of implying that Biden doesn’t have the cognitive ability to engage in an intellectual exchange with him.

I agree that it is highly unlikely that Biden will agree to this, especially considering the fact that Biden or his handlers are not even willing to subject him to questions from a lapdog DC press corps. The U.S. president has not given a press conference in which he has taken questions since he took office.

I’ll make a couple of points that are just based on thinking aloud more than anything else.

The first is that Biden has a history of not using discretion and running his mouth off. An example is when he bragged at a think tank years ago that he’d gotten Ukraine’s prosecutor fired by using a major financial package as leverage over the Ukrainian government. There were also numerous examples of him saying insulting and/or just off-the-wall things to people during his presidential campaign. If, in fact, this could be characterized as a “journalist trap” as Aris suggested, then Biden is the perfect target for a journalist to pull this on.

Second, there is reporting within the past couple of days that the U.S. will be participating in a Russian-led conference to be held in Moscow on the future of Afghanistan. According to Antiwar.com:

Beginning Thursday, the Moscow Summit is looking to see Russia and the United States trying to sell the interim government peace proposal to both the Afghan government and the Taliban. This summit is the biggest event in awhile in trying to get the peace process revived.

It’s not Russia’s first bid at having influence on post-war Afghanistan. It is, however, the first time the US has acknowledged such a summit as a real thing, and participated in it. Both the US and Russia seem to be united in their proposal.

There was also the renewal of the New START Treaty as soon as Biden took office. Renewal of that treaty may seem like a no-brainer to any rational person, but rationality when it comes to policy vis-a-vis Russia has been in very short supply in DC in recent years. As someone who has been in national politics for decades, Biden may be thinking that in order to have the space to even accomplish these minimal steps that involve cooperation with Moscow, he will need to placate the hawks that pervade Washington. To do this, he may feel he needs to keep the ugly rhetoric toward Putin at maximum volume.

This is not new. During the Kennedy administration, even though the president wanted to tamp down the Cold War with Khrushchev, Kennedy had to throw a bone to the hardliners once in a while. Those bones did not always come cheap and sometimes they caused serious problems with the Kremlin.

So what do you readers think? Am I wishful thinking about what Biden may be up to? Does Biden even still have the cognitive ability to think strategically like this? Feel free to give your opinions on this in the comments.

18 years ago today, Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli bulldozer while volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home in Rafah. In June of 2004, I got the opportunity to interview Rachel’s parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, before a speaking engagement at the local Peace and Justice Center in Walnut Creek, California.

I had been writing for the Peace and Justice Center’s newsletter for about a year or so and had recently branched out from summarizing pre-published material on foreign policy to creating more original content, including interviewing folks who had special knowledge and/or experience about topics we were covering that involved war/peace and international affairs. This was my second major interview and I actually went back and forth in my mind in preparing the questions about whether and how to approach the question about how Rachel had been portrayed in the mainstream American media after her death. On the one hand, I knew it was a legitimate question to ask. On the other hand, it involved a painful personal loss and not just discussion of something in the abstract. My hesitancy about this made Cindy’s answer all the more interesting.

I spoke to both Craig and Cindy, but at one point Craig excused himself to help with the setup for their presentation, so I spoke to Cindy for longer. This was a little over a year since Rachel had been killed and Cindy seemed physically weighed down with the grief. I saw her and Craig a few years later at the performance of a play that had been written about Rachel and adapted from her prolific journal entries from high school through college. She looked much happier and did not have the weighed down look from 2004.

Below is the edited interview. – Natylie

Natylie Baldwin: It sounds like from a young age, Rachel had this sensitivity…

Cindy: Yes, she did. She was our third child and I think that made some difference in [forming] uniquely who she was. Each of our kids is very different. She was also able to be in this school program. It was called the Options Program. It was an alternative elementary program in the public school system in Olympia [Washington state]. It’s a program that I worked with other parents and teachers to begin and part of the emphasis was on connecting to the community and also trying to have a lot of hands-on experiences for children, but also connecting the community to the larger world. So I really feel like that program, during those really young years, did have an impact in making her feel she could have an impact on the real world and that she had some responsibility to find out what was going on in the real world and to ask questions and so forth…

NB: When did Rachel start to become interested in the Israeli-Palestinian issue in particular?

Craig: Rachel’s response to 9/11 was that she wanted to become a peace activist. So, within weeks after that, within the community of Evergreen [state college Rachel attended] and of Olympia, she really melded both of those communities together…she joined a number of peace groups. There were people who had been with ISM. She had met with Simona Sharoni who is an Israeli who grew up in Israel and teaches at Evergreen and she was one of the founders of Women in Black. Simona is a powerful woman and a powerful voice and she had been a teacher to Rachel and some of her friends. So she started to learn about that and as she worked with the peace groups I think she got more and more centered on Israel/Palestine and came to the conclusion that that’s really the linchpin of the strife that the United States centrally finds itself involved in after the Cold War. And I think that she learned about Rafah and realized that that was one of the most forsaken places on the earth, and so it’s really right in the center of the problem…

Craig: [Speaking about the conditions in Gaza]….it’s hard – now I’m a Vietnam veteran and when I was in Vietnam – well, I was out in the jungle, I wasn’t very often in populated areas – but we were individuals walking and you look at someone and they look like a soldier, yes; but down here, particularly at Rafah, they are all in armored vehicles. The children there may never have seen an Israeli as a human being; they see them as somebody sticking their head out of a tank – these incredible war machines. There’s a tremendous difference, I think, in the humanity. It’s kind of awful to talk about those relative levels of humanity, but seeing somebody in a tank [versus a regular vehicle]…

NB: The local newspaper and a local TV news station that covered Rachel’s death had an image that they used. I guess an older image of Rachel burning an American flag. It seemed that people in my community and other communities across the country relying on the mainstream media, got this image of Rachel as angry, unappreciative, America-bashing.

Cindy: I’m so glad you asked me about that because I think some people are refraining from asking me about it. And it’s not that old of an image…On February 15th she was at the Children’s Parliament with the ISM [in Gaza] and they organized this little protest. It was not actually an American flag. It was a paper image where they had drawn with crayon, and they had Israeli flags and American flags. You can’t see it in the photo, but one of Rachel’s friends told me that she had written onto the stripes the names of all the corporations she thought would benefit from a war with Iraq. And the children handed up to her these images of the flags to burn. And I think burning flags is a lot more common there. Anyway, she said she looked at those images and she knew she couldn’t burn anything with the Star of David on it but she thought she could protest by burning the image of her own flag.

She called me because that photo was actually available; it came out that day. Craig and I came home and I think it was on the phone message, “Mom, I just wanted to warn you that there’s a photo I’ve seen out on the wire and it makes me look like a mad woman.” And I don’t know if it was something about the fire or the burning or whatever that just made her look strange and, uh, angry. And that’s not Rachel’s personality. I just wouldn’t describe her as an angry woman; it’s just not at all my image of her, but I can see that she looked that way in that photo…[there] was actually a different image, one where she’s still burning this paper flag, but her eyes are open and her face is kind of lit up with a smile and it conveys something different…

It was such a lesson about the power of photos, and then you always have to wonder about the selection of photos on the part of the media because there are choices…it would just make me feel better if they got the full story behind them, because I think it can really distort a human being and even a situation they were involved in at the time…it was not anti-American or even anti-Israel, for that matter. It was on behalf of these people who are suffering…

A very touching thing happened after she died. Traditionally, people carry the bodies of people who have died through the streets, but we didn’t permit that in Rachel’s case. But they did have mock funerals with a mock coffin for her – one where there was this picture of children with flowers and the coffin is draped in an American flag. I don’t think it was a real American flag, it almost seemed like it was painted on, and people said that that was the first time in years that they could remember seeing the American flag treated in a respectful way.

I don’t think Americans understand how throughout the world we are viewed as being complicit in what is happening with the Palestinian people – and how much anger that creates toward us. And Rachel, I think, showed an image of a different kind of American, who had compassion for what was happening to these people…

Fyodor Lukyanov is editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

Originally Published at Carnegie Moscow Center, 2/26/21, as part of the “Relaunching U.S.-Russia Dialogue on Global Challenges: The Role of the Next Generation” project, implemented in cooperation with the U.S. Embassy to Russia. The opinions, findings, and conclusions stated herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Embassy to Russia

….The evolution of EU-Russia relations from the hopeful dawn of the early 1990s to the despairing sunset of the 2010s is one of the most revealing episodes in the history of the post-Cold War global transformation. Ever since the idea of a formalized community consisting of Europe and Russia lost its relevance (no practical steps have been taken to that end since the late 2000s), the relationship’s original principles have been meaningless.

The attempt at institutional partnership represented the culmination of about 200 years of efforts by a school of thought in Russia to Westernize the country. For the first time, the Westernizers saw an opportunity to qualitatively change the nature of Russia’s relations with the West.

That opportunity turned out to be a treacherous one. Russia’s Westernizers never intended for their country to formally submit to Europe’s rules and regulations, even as they pushed for modernization, active cooperation with Europe, and emulation of its ways. Yet that was precisely what Europe asked of Russia after 1992.

Europe’s experiment with its transformation into a politically consolidated subject, one projecting its normative framework outward, presupposed hierarchical relations between the EU and its direct neighbors. From the start, Russia was expected to not only cooperate with the EU, but also develop joint institutions. In its relations with Russia, Europe countenanced no retreat from its insistence on rule transfer.

Had Moscow resolved to become part of this “wider Europe,” the concessions it was expected to make would have been justified. But Russia’s Westernizers failed to persuade the country of the merits of qualitatively limiting its own sovereignty for the sake of following the European model….

Read the full article here.

From the Center for Citizen Initiatives:

We are very pleased to announce that CCI’s latest trip to Russia will be co-led by the Honorable Jack Matlock, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia. 

The dates are September 15 through October 1, 2021. It is anticipated by this time that COVID vaccines will permit Americans and Russians to meet, discuss issues and generate solutions to ease tense bi-country relations. We plan to take 100 Americans on this trip.

Never has it been more important for citizens (and leaders) of our two nations to work through the rumors and propaganda that exists at this moment.

We can travel to Russia during this critical time, meet with Russian experts in numerous fields, interview Russians in cities and regions across 11 time zones, get their perspectives on the U.S.-Russia relationship, share our perspectives, discuss innovative ways to get beyond media hype, rumors and propaganda that could … and may yet destroy our Earth … leaving a barren planet orbiting the sun.CCI has a 38-year history of developing Citizen Diplomacy between Russians and Americans. Fearing Nuclear War in 1983, we took a small delegation of citizens to the USSR to investigate the “Enemy.” We found no enemies at home … we found only people like ourselves deeply frightened of Nuclear War and thinking that the U.S. would start the final war! We began taking numerous delegations to the USSR in the ensuing years. They led up to the amazing Gorbachev/Reagan era when the Berlin wall came tumbling down. The USSR collapsed in 1990, but so did Russia ... as Russians struggled to get rid of Communism and find a new way to govern themselves. 

During Russia’s tragic 1990s and painful 2000s, CCI trained young Russian entrepreneurs how to develop their first tiny businesses, we helped their volunteer environmental groups clean up weapons’ dumps, sent tons of vegetable seeds to their first private farmers, started Alcoholics Anonymous across Russia and brought more than 6,000 Russian entrepreneurs from 71 regions to the U.S. for industry-specific business internships mostly set up by Rotary clubs across America. This resulted in Russians seeing the need for their own Rotary clubs. These clubs began to spring up all across Russia. Throughout those years CCI earned the trust of both U.S. and Russian officials. 

We feel it imperative to use CCI’s reputation for the good of both countries during this fateful and dangerous year of 2021. We intend to work toward shifting relations between these two nations that could destroy our world as we know it. We need your help!

Come travel with us on this most comprehensive-ever Citizen Diplomacy Trip to Russia! Trip costs range from $3500 to $8000 depending on which option one takes:  “bare-bones” for students, two levels of economy class or Elite accommodations.

If you are interested in learning more about this opportunity, please email Sharon Tennison at sharon [at] ccisf.org.

By Medea Benjamin & Nicholas Davies, AntiWar.com, 2/24/21

The February meeting of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Defense Ministers, the first since President Biden took power, revealed an antiquated, 75-year-old alliance that, despite its military failures in Afghanistan and Libya, is now turning its military madness toward two more formidable, nuclear-armed enemies: Russia and China.

This theme was emphasized by U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a Washington Post op-ed in advance of the NATO meeting, insisting that “aggressive and coercive behaviors from emboldened strategic competitors such as China and Russia reinforce our belief in collective security.”

Using Russia and China to justify more Western military buildup is a key element in the alliance’s new “Strategic Concept,” called NATO 2030: United For a New Era, which is intended to define its role in the world for the next ten years….

….As Michael Klare explains in a NATO Watch report on NATO 2030, every step the US is taking with NATO is “intended to integrate it into US plans to fight and defeat China and Russia in all-out warfare.”

The US Army’s plan for an invasion of Russia, which is euphemistically called “The US Army in Multi-Domain Operations,” begins with missile and artillery bombardments of Russian command centers and defensive forces, followed by an invasion by armored forces to occupy key areas and sites until Russia surrenders.

Unsurprisingly, Russia’s defense strategy in the face of such an existential threat would not be to surrender, but to retaliate against the United States and its allies with nuclear weapons.

Read the full article here.