"Suddenly, we’re back in the Cold War"

From U.S. Recklessness Toward Russia Set Stage for Current Conflict by Matthew Rothschild:

What we’re witnessing now is the bankruptcy of almost two decades of U.S. policy toward Russia.

When Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Washington had a great opportunity to broker a global peace with only country, Russia, still capable of destroying the United States.

Bush Sr. seemed to recognize this, and pledged in 1991 not to try to incorporate the Eastern bloc nations and the former Soviet republics that border Eastern Europe right into NATO’s sphere.

But Clinton reneged on that pledge, and George Jr. has done everything in his power to further the incorporation process and to encircle and humiliate Russia.

Read the rest here.

From McCain’s Foreign Policy Product of a Weird Mindset by Amitabh Pal:

But where McCain has most manifestly revealed his black-and-white thinking is in the recent Russia-Georgia conflict.

Now, Russia should be assigned a good share of the blame for initiating hostilities, as Professor Emeritus Richard Falk of Princeton points out. But as he also states, Georgia was not blame-free, and the causes of the war were complex.

Not in McCain’s worldview. Propelled by his friendship with Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili (whose name he kept oddly mispronouncing) and Scheunemann’s lobbying work for that country, McCain led the charge against Russia, imagining the episode to be a Cold War morality play.