Announcement: Committee for East-West Accord

Subject: Announcement: Committee for East-West Accord
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2015
From: James Carden <jcarden@eastwestaccord.com>

Announcing the launch of the Committee for East-West Accord and its official website, Eastwestaccord.com

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Today I am pleased to announce the creation of the new Committee for East-West Accord, a nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization of American citizens from different professions – business, academia, government service, science, law, and others – who are deeply concerned about the possibility of a new cold war between the United States/Europe and Russia.

The Committee is new but not without a distinguished predecessor. Its name derives from The American Committee on East-West Accord, a pro-detente organization founded in 1974 by illustrious Americans – among them, CEOs of multinational corporations, political figures, educational leaders, and policy thinkers such as George F. Kennan

The primary mission of the Committee is to promote such discussion about East-West relations and thus to create broad public awareness of the new dangers and of ways to end them. The Committee encourages open, civilized, informed debate of all the related issues, current and past, among Americans with different, even opposing, positions, perspectives, and proposals.

Please visit us at Eastwestaccord.com

James Carden
Editor, ACEWA

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Mission Statement of The American Committee for East-West Accord

The American Committee for East-West Accord is a nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization of American citizens from different professions – business, academia, government service, science, law, and others – who are deeply concerned about the possibility of a new (potentially even more dangerous) cold war between the United States/Europe and Russia. Our fundamental premise is that no real or lasting American, European, or international security generally is possible without essential kinds of stable cooperation with Russia.

Since early 2014, we have therefore watched with growing dismay as East-West cooperation created over decades – in diplomacy, arms control, economics, energy, education, science, space, culture, even in preventing nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and environmental threats – have been heedlessly discarded or gravely endangered. While experts warn of an unfolding new nuclear arms race, and with it the risk those weapons may actually be used, there may already be less East-West cooperation than existed during the latter decades of the preceding cold war.

The primary mission of the Committee is to promote such discussion about East-West relations and thus to create broad public awareness of the new dangers and of ways to end them. The Committee encourages open, civilized, informed debate of all the related issues, current and past, among Americans with different, even opposing, positions, perspectives, and proposals. And the Committee seeks to do this in as many ways as possible, including an informational website for engaging individuals and other groups; sponsoring or cosponsoring public events in Washington, at universities, and across the country; and in the national media, including social media.

The Committee’s Initial Proposals

At this perilous moment, in mid-2015, the Committee urges that the governments most directly involved in the crisis take the following mutual steps:

– The Obama Administration should formally join the “Normandy Four”

– The U.S., NATO and Russia should reactivate the NATO-Russian Council

– Washington and Moscow should restore the provisions of the 1991 Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program

– Moscow and Washington should take all necessary steps to preserve the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)

– Washington and Moscow should protect educational and related exchange programs