President Joe Biden will meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Geneva on June 16. US-Russia "disarmament discussions have been pushed to the back burner. Instead, treaty compliance disputes have dominated bilateral engagements. Meanwhile, each side is rushing to replace and upgrade its bloated nuclear arsenal," writes Daryl Kimball in Arms Control Today.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is intensifying technological and economic competition with China and using US-China military tension to justify an increased Pentagon budget. Congress is preparing to pass Sen. Robert Menendez' Strategic Competition Act of 2021 (S.1169), which constitutes a de facto declaration of a New Cold War with the People’s Republic of China. It would codify a comprehensive, and systematic strategic competition with China as the organizing principle for U.S. domestic, foreign, and defense policies, and possibly for other nations as well.

For analysis of these developments, we will be joined by Lawrence Wilkerson.
Note: June 22 is a tentative date, please check back closer to the date. Those who register will be notified of any change.

Lawrence Wilkerson

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson is a distinguished professor of government and public policy at the College of William and Mary and was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.   He was the Keynote Speaker at Massachusetts Peace Action’s annual meeting in March 2019. Wilkerson is a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the ongoing War on Terror now in its 18th year, and the turn to a new nuclear arms race. He asserts the U.S. is not a democracy but a war state that forces its will on the global community, and in 2020 worked on bipartisan projects to prepare for the possibility that a defeated Donald Trump would refuse to leave office.