Washington Appears to Reject the Opportunity to End the New Cold War With Russia

Instead of cooperating with Moscow’s air war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Obama Administration is threatening to send US planes and possibly troops to counter the Russian military operation there, while also stepping up NATO ground, air and sea exercises in areas on Russia’s own borders. The dangers inherent in such “exercises” were documented in a November 10 NYT article recounting how such NATO maneuvers in 1983, in similarly fraught political circumstances, led the Soviet leadership to fear an impending US nuclear attack and to put its own nuclear forces on high alert, replicating the high noon moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years before.