It features work by people like Bacevich himself, Anatol Lieven, and Jim Lobe who established a solid record of critical analysis of US foreign policy during the famous Global War on Terror and its subsidiary parts, notably including the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War.
Their general approach is a "restrainer" outlook, one that asks sensible questions about American plans for wars and regime change operations.
They tend to have a lot in common with the "realist" view notably represented by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Bacevich himself expresses considerable admiration for Reinhold Niehbuhr's brand of theologically-informed "realism" as expressed in his Book, The Irony of American History (1962).
The restrainers and the realists and more left-leaning foreign policy analysts often refer to the mainstream, "establishment" foreign policy advocates as "the Blob," because they see the Blob perspectives as too constricted and sometimes excessively solicitous of views that happen to coincide with the sales prospects of military contractors.
Decades before Q-Anon, the Council on Foreign Relations was a favorite villain in rightwing conspiracy theories and a bogeyman of the John Birch Society. Since conspiracy-theory bogeymen never disappear entirely, I'm sure there are more contemporary Q-Anon-, COVID-denier-, Putinist and other versions that still feature the CFR. If you dig into anti-"critical race theory" fantasies, it probably shows up there, too.
But the CFR is a respectable establishment organization whose members feature diplomats and former State Department officials. It publishes the journal Foreign Affairs. It is a longtime ritual for potential (non-Trumpista) Presidential candidates to publish an article on their foreign policy positions in Foreign Affairs. Fun fact: the journal has been called Foreign Affairs since 1922. It had previously been titled The Journal of International Relations (1919-1922) and, originally, The Journal of Race Development (!!! 1910-1919).
The Council does have an incentive to take more-or-less reality-based views of the world. They also have a lot of sources and contributors who are actual experts in practical diplomacy and international-relations studies. In other words, you don't have to be an admirer of ghouls like Henry Kissinger to get decent information from some parts of the Blob. (Although Lord knows Kissinger was and still is more reality-based than the "neoconservatives" who gave us the famous cakewalk we now know as the Iraq War.)
The Foreign Affairs website is publishing a lot of publicly-available articles on the Ukraine war. Critical reading is always in order, of course. The website at this writing features a piece by Robert Kagan, one of the neocons who managed to be wrong about pretty much everything about the Iraq War. Sometimes it's helpful to read analyses by people who have a solid record of being wrong, just to see what to watch out for.
The current president of the CFR is Richard Haass, who tends to fall within the liberal-internationalist perspective. Here are a couple of fairly recent commentaries of his on Ukraine which give some decent background on how the current situation developed. And they don't come from the "we-always-knew-that-Russia-was-an-expansionist-Evil-Empire-and-thank-the-war-gods-that-we-may-be-in-a-new-Cold-War" point of view which is popping all over the place right now.
"Perspective on Ukraine, With Richard Haass" 03/02/2022, a week or so into the war, is a podcast with a transcript, io which he reminds us about how this whole nuclear war thing works:
[W]e avoided a world war during the cold war and certain rules were, or unwritten rules were understood about avoiding direct conflict, that we could back proxies and allies, but not come into direct conflict and nuclear weapons were there above providing a kind of blanket over the whole thing. And when Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet leader backed down in 1962, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, in some ways that really reinforced that bias against the use of nuclear weapons, because any victory would be pyrrhic. Somebody once said the living would envy the dead. But there were unwritten rules about avoiding conflict directly, because that could always escalate. Things could get out of hand. And the Biden administration essentially took that possibility off the table by saying, "We are not going to directly intervene in Ukraine." (my emphasis)This is a recent long presentation by Haass, The State of the World 04/07/2022:
One notable feature of that interview is that Haass speaks very pragmatically about the limitations of the formal rules of the "world order" (for which liberal-internationalists are advocates). And about how raw power still makes a huge difference (as the "realists" always remind us). But he does so in a way that doesn't dismiss either the value of international law or the very practical limitations to it. There's a particularly interesting section where he discusses why he doesn't subscribe to the New-Cold-War mantra of democracies-vs.-authoritarians. And he also talks in an accessible way about how the recognition of national sovereignty is still a fundamental feature of international relations, something which many liberal internationalists and advocates of "humanitarian intervention" find particularly uncomfortable.
Haass also takes note of the spectacularly dumb move by the Cheney-Bush Administration in 2008 to insist that NATO make a public statement that both Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members in the future, without any formal measures under way to prepare for that. As he notes, that was the worst of both worlds, declaring they would do something they knew Russia regarded as a security threat but without any substantive steps to actually do it. Saying that is something like blasphemy to the New-Cold-War hawks who deny that the West's expansion of NATO and intent to expand it further could have had any possible relation of any kind to subsequent Russian actions.
And here's an informative CFR discussion on military aspects of the current war, The Struggles of the Russian Military in Ukraine 04/14/2022:
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