Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (You can find previous installments, now in their fifth year, at
TheNation.com.)
Cohen reminds listeners that the Russiagate scandal, which first leaked into the media in mid-2016, has already done immense political damage during these two years.
It has cast doubt on the legitimacy of this presidency and possibly future ones. It has questioned the authenticity of a popular election and probably future ones, and thus of American democracy itself. And with high-level former US officials, influential columnists, and an array of mainstream-media outlets regularly declaring that President Trump is "a quisling" and "a Russian agent," the scandal has greatly diminished his capacity to avoid war with Russia, conceivably nuclear war. Meanwhile, as happened during the McCarthy era, a myriad of official and media "investigations" have cast an ever-widening net in search of evidence of other "colluders," from peripheral Trump "advisers" and shadowy "informants" to a Russian prostitute and her pimp in Thailand.
After all this time and frenzy, substantiated charges and indictments amount to little more than customary financial corruption on the part of the bipartisan top 2 percent and "lying to the FBI," the latter apparently open to interpretation as to what was actually said and perhaps involving entrapment. Meanwhile, reputations are slurred, lives ruined, once-respectable media degraded, and public discourse-especially about international affairs, but not only-chilled by self-censorship and growing institutional forms of "preventing disinformation."
Amid this daily frenzy, it's often forgotten that Russiagate's "core narrative," as one of its most devout and prominent
promoters terms it, was inspired by, and continues to be based on, two documents, both published in January 2017: an "
Intelligence Community Assessment" and the anti-Trump "
dossier" compiled by a retired UK intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. The "core narrative" of both was, of course, that Putin's Kremlin had intervened in the 2016 presidential election-essentially an "attack on America" - in order to damage Hillary Clinton's candidacy and abet Trump's.
At the time, a few critics questioned the authenticity of the ICA and the dossier, but for political and media Russiagaters, they instantly became, and have remained, canons, despite their deficit of facts and logic. Reread today, in light of what is now known, they are examples of the adage "rubbish in, rubbish out."
Comment: In the wake of the US vs world trade war and sanctions, France isn't the only European country hawking for alternatives:
- Trade War with China - Easy to Win?
- Chinese state newspaper calls Trump's trade war a 'symptom of paranoid delusions'
- OPEC agreeing to ramp up production is a win-win deal for Russia & Saudi Arabia
- France: anti-Russian sanctions 'contrary to our vision of multilateral organisation', sees 'relations rebalancing'
Also check out SOTTs: Behind the Headlines: Trump Ditches Europe, Europe Bluffs, Russia and China Carry on With Eurasian Integration