{"id":637,"date":"2014-07-11T12:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T16:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/?p=637"},"modified":"2022-03-11T18:51:16","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T22:51:16","slug":"stephen-cohen-rides-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/2014\/07\/11\/stephen-cohen-rides-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Cohen rides again"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am blogging less here these days, and I expect that will continue through the summer (unless some radical change occurs in Ukraine and its relations with Russia).<\/p>\n

One thing I shouldn’t let go without mention, however, is Stephen Cohen’s recent article in The Nation<\/em>, “The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities<\/a>.” I’m one of the many Ukraine-watchers who disagree with Cohen’s analyses of Ukraine, who find them overfocused on geopolitics, oversympathetic to Putin and his nationalist\/neo-imperialist regime, and almost completely lacking in on-the-ground knowledge of Ukraine itself.<\/p>\n

The letters responding to Cohen’s article are worth reading; they can be found here<\/a>. My own — third from the bottom on that page — is harsher than is my typical style, but as a long-time reader of The Nation<\/em>, I can’t help feeling betrayed by it on this issue. I’m generally in agreement with the Brookings Institution’s Steven Pifer’s more detailed response<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Other Ukraine scholars tend to be less generous with Cohen (see, for instance, Alexander Motyl’s\u00a0“Contradictions Define Kremlin Apologists<\/a>“).\u00a0But he is influential on the left and his defenses of Putin’s Russia\u00a0deserve a hearing (however misguided they\u00a0may be). My disagreement is less with Cohen’s right to speak his mind than it is with The Nation<\/em>‘s unwillingness to look more deeply into the issues he writes about. Since Cohen is married to the magazine’s editor-in-chief, that may not be surprising; but readers should still press for better from the leading newsweekly on the U.S. left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am blogging less here these days, and I expect that will continue through the summer (unless some radical change occurs in Ukraine and its relations with Russia). One thing I shouldn’t let go without mention, however, is Stephen Cohen’s recent article in The Nation, “The Silence of American Hawks About Kiev’s Atrocities.” I’m one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[103253,1],"tags":[103252,103251],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-left","category-uncategorized","tag-stephen-cohen","tag-the-nation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdPO21-ah","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":640,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}