Even as the crisis inUkraine continues to defy easy resolution, President Obama and his national security team are looking beyond the immediate conflict to forge a new long-term approach to Russiathat applies an updated version of the Cold War strategy of containment.

by Nicholas J. Cull

More than two decades after the Cold War supposedly came to a peaceful conclusion,Russia’s encroachment on Ukrainian sovereignty and its outright annexation of Crimea have occasioned a retro flashback. A byproduct of this geopolitical turmoil is NATO’s renewed importance to foreign policy.

Halfway through an otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer last week—the topics included judges, the court system, the police—I was startled by a comment he made about his country’s former government, led by ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said, conspiratorially.   

“The Americans,” a Cold War drama portraying a married couple working in their travel agency, but in reality are KGB spies working for Russia’s Committee of State Security, is returning for a second season on FX Network, at a time when tensions between the U.S. and Russia are on the rise. The first season of the series set in the 80s, launched earlier in 2013, saw an average of 1.85 million viewers, according The Holly Reporter.