Last week’s launching of the American Committee for East-West Accord was an important step in the nascent movement against what many are now calling a new Cold War between the United States and Russia and their increasingly dangerous confrontation over Ukraine.

The committee’s launch is of particular moment since the fragile Minsk II Accords, perhaps the best hope for a negotiated settlement of the crisis, have come under renewed assault. Indeed, many observers think that the Ukrainian crisis is on the verge of entering a new and more protracted phase with the potential to further inflame East-West relations.

The American Committee for East-West Accord is a nonpartisan, tax-exempt educational organization of American citizens who are deeply concerned about the possibility of a new and prolonged cold war between the United States/Europe and Russia, including a renewed nuclear arms race.

The committee is new but not without a distinguished predecessor. Its name derives from the American Committee on East-West Accord, a pro-détente organization founded in 1974 by illustrious Americans—among them, CEOs of multinational corporations, political figures, educational leaders, and policy thinkers such as Pepsico Chairman Donald Kendall, former under secretary of state George Ball and the scholar and diplomat George F. Kennan.

The Board of Directors of the new committee also brings together highly respected public servants like former US senator Bill Bradley and former ambassadors Jack Matlock and William vanden Heuvel; with scholars such as Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen and Duke professor emeritus Ellen Mickewicz; and business leaders like John Pepper, a former CEO of Procter and Gamble and Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a Brussels-based multinational corporate executive.

The primary mission of the committee is to promote a balanced dialogue regarding 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.

You can visit the committee’s website for more information, up-to-date news and unconventional analysis on US-Russian relations and the crisis in Ukraine by informed observers at EastWestAccord.com.