Stephen F. Cohen

Cohen attended Indiana University Bloomington, where he earned a B.S. in economics and public policy in 1960 and an M.A. in government and Russian studies in 1962. While studying in England, he went on a four-week trip to the Soviet Union, where he became interested in its history and politics.

After completing his Ph.D. in government and Russian studies at Columbia University in 1968, he became a professor of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University later that year and remained on its faculty until 1998. He then taught at New York University until his retirement.

During the Cold War, Cohen was critical of both western hawks and also the Soviet government, which banned him from visiting the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1985.[5] He supported the perestroika, the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev.[5] In his book War with Russia?, Cohen explains his suspicion that at "least one U.S.-Soviet summit seems to have been sabotaged. The third Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting, scheduled for Paris in 1960, was aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US U-2 spy plane sent, some think, by 'deep state' foes of detente."[6]

Cohen has said that Putin's handling of the Ukrainian crisis, his annexation of Crimea, and his support for rebel fighters in the east were in reaction to the aggressive behavior of the United States and its allies, when they supported the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych. In a June 30, 2014 article in the left-liberal publication The Nation, Cohen criticized the US political-media establishment for being silent about "Kiev's atrocities" in the Donbass region.[7] Cohen stated that even if Putin's reaction was aggressive, the US should immediately negotiate with Russia to avoid escalation of the conflict.[8]

Cohen has said that the US continued the Cold War after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. He cited President Clinton's backtracking on the promise of his predecessor not to extend NATO eastward and the flawed interpretation of an "American victory" and a "Russian defeat," which led US leaders to believe that Russia would submit completely to US foreign policy.[9] Cohen cites the cancellation of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the refusal to admit Russia to the World Trade Organization at the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in 2006. Cohen also criticizes the "pointless demonization" of Vladimir Putin as an "autocrat."[9]

In a July 2015 interview, Cohen said: "Even Henry Kissinger — I think it was in March 2014 in The Washington Post — wrote this line: 'The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It’s an alibi for not having a policy.' And then I wrote in reply to that: That's right, but it’s much worse than that, because it's also that the demonization of Putin is an obstacle to thinking rationally, having a rational discourse or debate about American national security. And it’s not just this catastrophe in Ukraine and the new Cold War; it's from there to Syria to Afghanistan, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to fighting global terrorism. The demonization of Putin excludes a partner in the Kremlin that the U.S. needs, no matter who sits there."[8]

In an article for The Nation that was published in February 2014, he made an accusation of "media malpractice,"[10] including the journalism of The New York Times and The Washington Post, with the result that the "American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War."[11]

In a May 17, 2017 interview with Tucker Carlson, Cohen said: "You and I have to ask a subversive question: are there really three branches of government, or is there a fourth branch of government – these intel services?" He also stated that a military alliance that Obama had tried to establish with Putin against terrorism was "sabotaged by the Department of Defense and its allies in the intelligence services." Each of Trump's efforts to "cooperate with Russia" was "thwarted [by] a new leak of a story."[12]

Cohen participated in a Munk Debate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada over the proposal "Be it resolved the West should engage not isolate Russia..." He and Vladimir Posner argued in favor of engagement, while Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov argued against. Cohen's side lost the debate, with 52% of the audience voting against the motion.[13]

In 2015, a proposed deal with the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for a fellowship that would bear Cohen's name caused controversy and was initially revoked after some ASEEES members objected to it.[14] Following a special meeting in May 2015, the board of ASEEES explained that it voted in favor of accepting "the Cohen–Tucker Fellowship as named, should the gift be re-offered" and the establishment of the Cohen–Tucker fellowship programme was announced shortly afterwards.[15][16]

Also in 2015, Cohen and other intellectual colleagues reestablished the American Committee for East–West Accord, which describes itself as a pro détente advocacy group.[17] From 2015, Cohen has been a member of the board of directors of the revived ACEWA.[4]

Cathy Young characterized Cohen's 2014 article on "Kiev's atrocities" (mentioned above) as "error-riddled" and an "embarrassing" repetition of Kremlin propaganda.[5] In a 2015 interview, Cohen said that "this notion that this is all Putin’s aggression, or Russia’s aggression, is, if not 100-percent false, let us say, for the sake of being balanced and ecumenical, it's 50-percent false. And if Washington would admit that its narrative is 50-percent false, which means Russia's narrative is 50-percent correct, that's where negotiations begin and succeed."[8]

His views on Ukraine have been criticized and described as pro-Putin and pro-Kremlin,[18][19][20][21][22][23] and Cohen, in turn, has rejected such labels.[23] According to The Chronicle of Higher Education Cohen's writings at The Nation have also helped lead to “[s]taffers at The Nation… openly revolting against the magazin’s pro-Russian tilt.”[24]

Cohen has denied the existence of Ukraine as a sovereign independent European Country. He refers to Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine as a "civil war". Cohen also asserts that Russia did not shoot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a calamity that killed all 298 people on board. He points out that the Ukrainian government had possession of Russian BUK surface-to-air missiles, and suggested the country "was playing with its new toys and made a big mistake."[25][26]

Historian Timothy Snyder disputed Cohen's claim that the Ukrainian prime minister described the government's adversaries as subhuman. Snyder wrote that the prime minister, in a message of condolence to families of killed Ukrainian soldiers, described the attackers as 'inhuman' and suggested that the origin of Cohen's claim was Russian media mistranslation of 'neliudy' as 'nedocheloveki' (subhuman).[27]

His views on US-Russian relations have been criticized by Julia Ioffe and others as being pro-Putin.[10][28] Ioffe's assessment has, in turn, been criticized by James W. Carden.[29] Carden is executive director[30] of the American Committee for East–West Accord (ACEWA).[4]

Cohen uses the radio platform of the John Batchelor Show on Talkradio 77 WABC (Westwood One) to dispense his narrative of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Cohen's grandfather emigrated to the United States from Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire).[31] Cohen was born in 1938 in Owensboro, Kentucky where his father owned a golf course.[32] He has a son and a daughter from his first marriage to opera singer Lynn Blair, whom he later divorced, and second daughter with Katrina vanden Heuvel, whom Cohen married in 1988.

He is a long-standing friend of former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev,[8] advised former U.S. President George H. W. Bush in the late 1980s, and helped Nikolai Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, rehabilitate her name during the Soviet era.[33]

• American Committee for East–West Accord
• Détente

• Firestone, Thomas. "Four Sovietologists: A Primer." National Interest No. 14 (Winter 1988/9), pp. 102–107 on the ideas of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Stephen F. Cohen Jerry F. Hough, and Richard Pipes.

• Stephen F. Cohen at The Nation

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