I have lost one friend in arguments about Russia and Ukraine. When not even Stephen Cohen (late), the husband of Katrina Vandenheuvel and one of the world’s experts on Russia, didn’t convince her that the US/NATO had crossed Russia’s long-declared red line – that being, that for the past 30-plus years Russia has warned that if NATO advanced beyond East Germany towards Ukraine, its red line would be crossed, Ukraine being the flank through which the Nazis attacked in WW II — when not even quotes from American venerable officials of 30 years past, did not convince her, I got angry, and there went the friendship. I do take a non-American-liberal position on Russia/Ukraine. I am convinced that one doesn’t immediately make enemies with one’s adversaries; one negotiates. But Americans scorn this. And they come back at me with the idiotic “So you love Putin?” when of course it matters not whether I love or hate him; I’m talking about foreign policy, not personalities. (Noam Chomsky, when I told him this, said, “Well, people have been brainwashed about this.”) Liberal Americans swallow the hawkish Democratic Party line about Russia and Ukraine: that Russia is seeking to expand its boundaries limitlessly, that Ukraine is the poor victim, and that if we don’t come to that poor victim’s aid (“What would you want us to do, Ellen? NOT help Ukraine?”) then we are to blame. Anyway, John Mearsheimer in a recent talk (YouTube) says that if the US pushes Russia too far, Russia may use – as it has threatened to do – nuclear weapons. It WILL use them if the US pushes it too far. And there will go a large portion of humanity including us. Because we have nuclear weapons as does Russia, and we would get into a nuclear war between two great powers. And that would fulfill Noam Chomsky’s prophecy: the human race and many other species – most of them – would go extinct through nuclear war. The other way life seems headed is death through global heating (who calls it “warming” anymore, with monkeys dropping dead from trees in Yucatan and Indians dying of heatstroke? The human species seems intent on doing itself and every other species in either via ramped-up use of oil rather than immediate ramping-down of it (and the always-touted natural gas which has an even greater impact on the environment), or via nuclear war. I wish I had a cheerier reflection today. The cheeriest thing I can say is that we can all do something, we must continue our protests — although there is no American antiwar movement now, as opposed to what we had in my youth.