The RPI Challenge

General Martin Dempsey, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a lengthy interview to Judy Woodruff on Friday night's PBS News Hour and delivered a carefully balanced picture of how the U.S. military is managing the unfolding Ukraine crisis, both reassuring European NATO allies that treaty obligations will be honored, while maintaining constant communications with Russian counterparts, to assure there are no miscalculations leading to conflict. Gen. Dempsey, clearly aware of the...

Soviet leader Josef Stalin used to shrug off critics by his favorite Central Asian saying: “The dogs bark; the caravan moves on.” Russia’s hard-eyed president, Vladimir Putin, is following the same strategy over Ukraine and Crimea. Putin swiftly moved his knight into the empty chess square of Crimea, thereby regaining full control of one of Russia’s four strategic port regions: Sevastopol, Murmansk, St Petersburg and Vladivostok. Sevastopol, now firmly in Moscow’s hands, is Russia’s sole...

All the assumptions on which… this policy [was] based turned out to be wrong…. British domestic opinion would prove hard to persuade that seeking the return… of a fortress on the Black Sea merited the risk of a war with Russia. -UK Foreign Secretary William Hague on the Anglo-Russian Crisis (1791) [1] The current imbroglio over Crimea may be America’s first crisis with Russia in the Black Sea, but it is not Britain’s. Even the Crimean War (1854-56) was not Britain’s first face-off with Russia....

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a Washington D.C-based quasi-governmental organization funded by the U.S. which boasts that it is "supporting freedom around the world."[1] Alan Weinstein, one of the founders of the NED, explained in 1991: A lot of what we [NED] do was done 25 years ago covertly by the CIA [2] Most of the NED, and its affiliated organizations, deals with influencing political processes abroad. The means employed range from influencing civil society, media,...

At the end of the Cold War, the American people had a grand opportunity, one that entailed the dismantling of the national-security state apparatus that had been grafted onto our governmental system after the end of World War II. It would have made sense, given that the justification for making the national-security state apparatus a permanent feature of American life was the Cold War itself. No more Cold War should have meant no more national-security state. Unfortunately, however, that was...

Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz appeared on Fox News's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" last week and was asked about the rising security situation. He answered with a long pause: “Ronald Reagan ...” he said, and it just hung there, for a provocative moment before he started up again. It seemed just briefly that Shultz’s worshipful intoning of The Gipper’s name alone would be an "enough said" answer. But many in the mainstream media first turned to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Time...

US officials and the mainstream press are aflame with outrage and indignation over Russia’s invasion of Crimea. If only they would feel the same degree of outrage and indignation over what the US national security state, which was grafted onto our governmental system without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment, has done to our American republic. Isn’t it fascinating how US officials and the mainstream media are able to quickly arrive at a moral judgment condemning foreign...

“The First Amendment was intended to secure something more than an exercise in futility.”—Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Minnesota Board for Community Colleges v. Knight (1984) Living in a representative republic means that each person has the right to take a stand for what they think is right, whether that means marching outside the halls of government, wearing clothing with provocative statements, or simply holding up a sign. That’s what the First Amendment is supposed to be about....

Today in an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin dropped a bombshell: President Viktor Yanukovich had sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin requesting Russian military assistance to restore law and order in Ukraine. Churkin read the letter from Yanukovich to Putin: People are being persecuted for language and political reasons. So in this regard I would call on the President of Russia, Mr. Putin, asking him to use the armed...

Last week Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel proposed an additional 40,000 reduction in active duty US Army personnel, down to 450,000 soldiers. As US troops are being withdrawn from the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it might make sense to reduce not only the active duty military but the entire military budget. However, from the interventionists’ reaction to Hagel’s announcement you might think President Obama announced he was shutting down the Pentagon! Rep. Michael McCaul, Chairman of the...

It is becoming clear that the Nuland/neocon/NED campaign against Russia in Ukraine was probably a covert action intended to punish Russia for not supporting US/Israeli/Saudi and Turkish policy in Syria and to some extent with regard to Iran. I have no specific knowledge of US actions in this but "back azimuths" run into events and actors make the true story obvious. Was there to be a second phase of the spread of revolution, a phase aimed at Russia itself? We will probably never know. In any...

President Obama delivered a brief press statement today in which he stated that rumors about Russian military activity in Crimea were "deeply disturbing" to the United States. He then drew dangerous red lines that threaten a serious international military conflict. What is the backdrop to the president's warning?Post-coup Kiev is not Ukraine -- even the media has noted that Ukraine is deeply divided -- and therefore it should have been expected that regions of Ukraine with a vast majority of...

The EU's so-called "crisis plan" for Ukraine is itself a recipe for catastrophe. It is a brokered plan by the wrong people, under extreme (western) outside pressure, and on behalf of a small group of backward looking and dangerous ideologues. The plan essentially leaves Ukraine ungovernable and inadvertently promotes a secessionist agenda.The EU's really bad planThe idea to return to the constitutional order of 2004 is pointless and truly bizarre. One of the key issues during the Orange...

Last week Ukraine saw its worst violence since the break-up of the Soviet Union over 20 years ago. Protesters occupying the main square in the capitol city, Kiev, clashed with police leaving many protesters and police dead and many more wounded. It is an ongoing tragedy and it looks like there is no end in sight. The current conflict stems from a divide between western Ukraine, which seeks a closer association with the European Union, and the eastern part of the country, which has closer...