Last week was interesting for me. I spent about half my time getting up to speed with the latest happenings in the crypto-coin world, and got really excited about a lot of what I saw. In fact, this was the first time I became totally consumed by the space in several years, going back to when I first investigated and started becoming involved with Bitcoin.
What really caught my attention is the booming ICO market, and while it’ll invariably produce its fair share of total scams, I find it nonetheless captivating. I’m attracted to its dynamic wild west spirit, as well as its capacity to function as an alternative funding mechanism for startup projects utilizing a wider participatory structure consisting of anyone with a bit of crypto currency and a high-risk tolerance. It’s an entirely new experimental ecosystem funded by crypto currencies (mostly ethereum, but also bitcoin). It’s pretty mesmerizing (for more see: A New Financial System is Being Born).
Spending so much time on this esoteric world kept me away from following U.S. politics as closely as I typically do, which was a great thing. The level of discourse from nearly all sides of the political spectrum has turned so toxic, divisive, hysterical and counterproductive, leaving that environment for several days made me feel great, as if I had taken a vacation from idiot island. As such, today I once again decided to spend some time reading up on the crypto-coin space and getting further up to speed on ICOs and how they work. That said, I realize I still need to pay attention to the crazy happenings in the wider world around me, so I thought I’d share an interview with a rarity in today’s political discourse, a voice of reason.
What follows are excerpts from a Slate interview with Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton:
Stephen F. Cohen has long been one of the leading scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union. He wrote a biography of the Bolshevik revolutionary Nikolai Bukharin and is a contributing editor at the Nation, which his wife, Katrina vanden Heuvel, edits and publishes. In recent years, Cohen has emerged as a more ideologically dexterous figure, ripping those he thinks are pursuing a “new Cold War” with Russia and calling for President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to form “an alliance against international terrorism.” Cohen has gone so far as to describe the investigations into the Trump campaign and Russia “the No. 1 threat to the United States today.”
Cohen has been criticized by many people, myself included, for his defenses of Putin. (He once said the Ukraine crisis had been “imposed on [Putin] and he had no choice but to react.”) He scolded President Barack Obama for sending retired gay athletes to Sochi and recently went on Fox News to speak up for Trump’s war against leakers.
I spoke by phone with Cohen, who is also a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at NYU and Princeton and the author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed why Cohen won’t concede that the Democratic National Committee was hacked, whether it’s fair to call Putin a murderer, and why we may be entering an era much more dangerous than the Cold War.
I heard you recently on Fox News. You said that the “assault” on President Trump “was the No. 1 threat to the United States today.” What did you mean by that?
Threat. OK. Threat. That’s a good word. We’re in a moment when we need an American president and a Kremlin leader to act at the highest level of statesmanship. Whether they meet in summit or not is not of great importance, but we need intense negotiations to tamp down this new Cold War, particularly in Syria, but not only. Trump is being crippled by these charges, for which I can find no facts whatsoever.
Wait, which charges are we talking about?
That he is somehow in the thrall or complicity or control, under the influence of the Kremlin.
I think it would help if he would admit what his own intelligence agencies are telling him, that Russia played some role in …
No, I don’t accept that. I don’t accept that at all, not for one minute.
People in the Trump administration admit this too.
Well they’re not the brightest lights.
And the president is?
No. You didn’t ask me that. You asked me, you said, some of the president’s people. You’re referring to that intel report of January, correct? The one that was produced that said Putin directed the attack on the DNC?
I was referring to that and many news accounts that Russia was behind the hacking, yes.
The news accounts are of no value to us. I mean you and I both know …
No value? None?
No. No value. Not on face value. Just because the New York Times says that I don’t know, Carter Page or [Paul] Manafort or [Michael] Flynn did something wrong, I don’t accept that. I need to see the evidence.
OK, let’s just go back to what you were saying about Trump being hamstrung.
You need Trump because he’s in the White House. I didn’t put him there. I didn’t vote for him. Putin’s in the Kremlin. I didn’t put him in the Kremlin either, but we have what we have, and these guys must have a serious dialog about tamping down these cold wars, which means cooperating on various fronts. The obvious one—and they already are secretly, but it’s getting torpedoed—is Syria.
So we come now with this so-called Russiagate. You know what that means. It’s our shorthand, right? And Trump, even if he was the most wonderfully qualified president, he is utterly crippled in his ability to do diplomacy with the Kremlin. So let me give you the counterfactual example.
Imagine that Kennedy had been accused of somehow being, they used to accuse him of being an agent of the Vatican, but let’s say he had been accused widely of being an agent of the Kremlin. The only way he could have ended the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been to prove his loyalty by going to nuclear war with Russia. That’s the situation we’re in today. I mean Trump is not free to take wise advice and use whatever smarts he has to negotiate down this new and dangerous Cold War, so this assault on Trump, for which as yet there are zero facts, has become a grave threat to American national security. That’s what I meant. That’s what I believe.
To use your Kennedy example, there was no evidence that Kennedy was an agent of either the Vatican or the Kremlin—
No, but Isaac you’re not old enough to remember, but during the campaign, because he was the first Catholic, they all went on about he’s an agent of the Vatican.
I know that. I’m old enough to have read “news accounts” of it. Anyway, there was a hacking of the DNC and—
Wait actually no, Isaac stop. Stop. Now, I mean we don’t know that for a fact.
That there was a hacking of the DNC?
Yeah we do not know that for a fact.
What do we think happened?
Well …
So you’re really going to argue with me that the DNC wasn’t hacked?
I’m saying I don’t know that to be the case.
OK.
I will refer you to an alternative report and you can decide yourself.
Can we agree on this much at least: that Trump said there was a hack, refused to say who he thought did it, encouraged the hackers to keep doing it, at the same time that he was getting intelligence reports that it was the Russians, and that he continued to talk very positively about Putin after he was told this?
You’ve given me too many facts to process, but if Trump said he knew it was a hack, he was not fully informed. We just don’t know it for a fact, Isaac.
So we don’t have any forensic evidence that there was a hack. There might have been. If there was a hack, we have no evidence it was the Russians, and we have an alternative explanation that it was actually a leak, that somebody inside did a Snowden, just stuck a thumb drive in and walked out with this stuff. We don’t know. And when you don’t know, you don’t go to war.
Let’s turn to Putin and America. Why do you think we have entered a new Cold War?
My view is that this Cold War is even more dangerous. As we talk today, and this was not the case in the preceding Cold War, there are three new fronts that are fraught with hot war. You know them as well as I do. The NATO military build-up is going on in the Baltic regions, particularly in the three small Baltic countries, Poland, and if we include missile defense, Romania. That’s right on Russia’s border, and in Ukraine. You know that story. That’s a proxy civil war right on Russia’s border, and then of course in Syria, where American and Russian aircraft and Syrian aircraft are flying over the same airspace.
And there is the utter demonization of Putin in this country. It is just beyond anything that the American political elite ever said about Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and the rest. If you demonize the other side, it makes negotiating harder.
In 2017, being a voice of reason has become a revolutionary act.
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Continuing down this insane path it could well soon be ‘an act of terrorism’ in itself, to possess a brain that actually can think for itself! To not listen to endless bullsh!t and unquestionably believe it will be a revolutionary (‘commie’) act against the status quo. Very sad and pathetic, as well as dangerous indeed, how the ability to perform statesmanship behavior is basically now crippled in this nation. Oh for a few dozen politicians of Putin’s calibre! Or Lavrov … Oh dear, there be ‘an act of treason’ most likely, drawing a conclusion from intelligent analysis, and not blindly believing our ‘intelligence agencies spin doctors’. Whoa, and down we go. An empire in decline, indeed.
I agree with everything he said.
Good article. I agree that all this Russiaphobia stuff is very bad. I still think Seth Rich is behind the leaks and they killed him for it. I can’t prove that. It is a feeling deep down in my gut.
You might think that someone at Slate, the people who, just before the election, chose to run a story screaming that Trump was secretly communicating with the Kremlin only to find that it was simply a Trump hotel computer spamming addresses in Russia (as well as elsewhere) would be a little more modest regarding this story, but no.
Of course you might think that having run this article, “Why bubbles are great for the economy”
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2007/05/pop.html
just before the financial crash 9 years ago would have resulted in serious repercussions. According to Wikipedia, since 2012 the author of that awesomely inopportune piece has been the “editor of Global Finance” for the Daily Beast/Newsweek.
Being part of a certain coterie of the media means never having to face accountability for how stupidly wrong you were.
I have mixed opinion about Cohen also. He is largely correct concerning a Cold War 2 but on domestic policies I find him intolerable. His marital ties to “The Nation’ speak to this as this rag is MSM lurking as an alternate news and opinion site. Another academic in the Chomsky semi dissident ‘gatekeeper’ style.
Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel are members of the Rockefeller/CFR. See member lists at cfr org.
When one hears the phrase”Russian Federation is an intrinsic threat to the United States,” what does that mean?
To me it does not mean that Russia is threatening to militarily attack the USA or the European Union, — rather, it means that the Russian Federation is strong enough to act as a a competitor to the United States and thwart or neutralize the American idea of making decisions for every country on the planet and having world hegemony.
It takes little brain power to realize that the Russian Federation-China-Iran-India bloc is chiseling away at the American Empire. In response the American elite just does not know what to do.
In the meantime they have relied on the average American citizen to quietly accept substandard infrastructure, poor albeit expensive health care, endless wars against little nations with resulting multiple failed states and chaos, terrorist creation, refugee creation, poor education systems, stagnant incomes, increasing American suicides, hidden inflation, entering into what can only be called neo-feudalism.
The elite want a war with Russia for distraction and temporary economic revival.
It will not work, and I am afraid the nation is now on spiraling auto-pilot descent.
Well said!
Imagine if Russia helped engineer a coup in Mexico and installed a leader that was anti-US and pro-Russia? The US would do the same thing as Russia did in the Ukraine in response. Only it would have been a much larger military response.
Yes, Putin is a gangster. But we’ve got more than our fair share of gangsters operating inside the beltway and in NYC as well.
As I keep saying, the gangsters running the Peoples Republic of China are absolutely loving this entire Russia fiasco. It’s a classic diversionary tactic.
It is a pity that the United States has very few Russian experts working in the State Department and the Pentagon.
Russia has always been “different”and somewhat strange.
While occupying half the land mass of Europe, one can draw an imaginary line from St. Petersburg, Russia, to the Italian island of Sicily. Everything west of that line is Western European culture — which includes the New World as well.
East of that line the people there never experienced the three major movements that shaped “Western” culture, viz., the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment. Instead Russia had centuries of Mongolian occupation, centuries of cruel absolute monarchies, and finally, 70+ years of Communism. On top of this, the religion is different, the alphabet is different, the calendar was different — even the rail road gauge is different.
Despite this, the Russian Federation in the last 30 years has managed to develop into a modern European state –albeit still a tad different than the rest of Western Europe.
Only two unprovoked occupations occurred in the 20th century (both when Russia was a part of the USSR) when it occupied half of Poland in 1939 — and only then because of a desire to protect itself from Nazi Germany — in Afghanistan as the USSR was crumbling. (They spent less time there than we have). The Russian Federation gave independence to the other 25 countries in the USSR as well as pulled back to its own borders leaving the rest of Europe to seek their own path.
Today everything the Russian Federation does, is looked at by us through the microscope of the old USSR. After losing up to 30 million people in WW2, there is not a Russian family who would support an offensive war. Russia only has 150 million people; their defense budget only $76 B.
It would appear to me that the Russians have been very mature and wise in their response to the United States’ attempt to encircle them with bases. But, I am reminded that the President of the Russian Federation also takes an oath of office to protect and defend his country. Why can we not see that our attitude is so misguided by the elite/neo-cons and their press?
“So you’re really going to argue with me that the DNC wasn’t hacked?”
*sigh* But we’re finally starting to see the cracks, at last! It was unsustainable though, I do have to wonder what their end-game was supposed to be. Disclosure: I cracked (old) Apple games in the 80’s, sold pirated DirecTV and warez in the 90’s, and now I don’t. So I know the scene. Anyways, today I’ve got the overpowering urge to share my rip on just how monumentally and blindly stupid this whole episode has been. Please indulge me, it’s therapeutic.
Russian hackers are tops, best in the world! It’s a generational thing going back to when it was one solid method of resisting the state, freedom of information and communication, and of course throwing a spanner in the works. Back in the day, nobody wrote tighter viral code than the Bulgarians and Albanians, a paucity of resources don’t you know. So it makes sense that for something like this they’d completely forget what a VPN is, how to spoof an IP address, and how to write a basic script to clean up after yourself on the way out. Well, I have days like that too.
One of them was the day that FBI/DHS report came out. Terrible! It must have taken me all of ten minutes to track down half of the malware packages and exploits they listed, but I did have to get a coffee on and feed the hounds. Fortunately, most of them were sitting in a convenient archive on Github, where they’d been for the last two years. Ran across one of the authors too, of the BlackEnergy package. Nice guy, goes by Cr4sh, a Ukrainian aeronautics student. Hey… I’ll bet he’d have some interesting inside info, what with chatter the way it is in those circles. One of those… what are they again? Re-port-ars? Yeah, might want to say high at least, this being kind of important and all. Oh never mind, I’ll bet they’re all busy talking to McAffee, Dvorak or Carr, cause those guys know all sorts of stuff. Wait… but how would they find these people! I mean, the web is pretty big! You’d have to have some fancy machine or something, like an engine of some kind that could find stuff for you and things like that.
Has it been almost a year? I feel as if I can count the months by the rings on the bump in the middle of my forehead. Is this finally the beginning of the end? Has the monumentaly obvious finally become apparent to a few outfits corageous enough to close their mouths and open their eyes long enough to see? Dear lady Ada please let it be so because I can’t take much more of this. Well there is one good thing that’s come out of this… It seems that every housewife and mechanic in America is now a l33t hax0r with mad spells. Can you even begin to guess how much smarter everyone is now? Wild!
I deserve a “Thank You Masked Man”. No! I must have my “Thank You Masked Man”! I must have, for only then may I ride off and spend my remaining years rendering 3D fractal videos for bad Psy-Trance artists in peace. Thank You.