ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 argues that no adequate understanding of RussiaGate is possible without consideration of a much broader context than is usually applied by mainstream media. This goes beyond the history of hostile relations between the USA and the Soviet Union during the first Cold War, and the escalating hostility between Russia and the USA in a second Cold War since the accession of Vladimir Putin to power. Rather, it has to do with a geopolitical struggle for power across EurAsia, considered essential by many strategists for a claim to world hegemony. This struggle now involves the USA/European Union and Russia/China. US geopolitical strategies veer between fashioning wedges between Russia and China, on the one hand, or simultaneous fostering of global hostility to both powers. The only way in which Russia is a meaningful threat to the USA is its status as the only nuclear power whose nuclear forces rival or surpass those of the USA. The threat to the world of nuclear war remains very real, and the threat increases with the escalation of hostile rhetoric between these nuclear powers. Contributing to that rhetoric is a continuous stream of western anti-Russian propaganda, much of it apparently fabricated, as this and earlier chapters of the volume have argued with respect to Skripal, Ukraine, and Syria.
