the Cold War. In a follow up interview with Newsweek magazine, Cohen said Putin was the "best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security". In a CNN interview around March 2014, he said Putin was not "anti-American". In a May 2014 Nation column coauthored with his wife, Cohen wrote that President Barack Obama had unilaterally declared a new Cold War against Russia and that those inside the Beltway were complicit in it by their silence. Julia Ioffe in The New Republic saw this as Cohen disagreeing with a consensus that did not exist. Cohen's views on US-Russian relations were criticized by Ioffe and others as being pro-Putin. Writing in The American Conservative, James W. Carden, a former advisor to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission and soon-to-be executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord, described Ioffe's article as a "scurrilous — and frankly hysterical — ad hominem attack on his work and character". Carden agreed with Cohen's view that the US had failed to conduct a public debate prior to making a major shift in policy toward Russia to try to "isolate" and make it a "pariah state". Cohen participated in a Munk Debate in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in April 2015, on the proposal "Be it resolved the West should engage not isolate Russia." With Vladimir Posner, he argued in favor of engagement, while Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov argued against. Cohen's side lost the debate, with 52% of the audience voting against the motion. In a July 2015 interview, Cohen said:Even Henry Kissinger—I think it was in March 2014 in The Washington Post—wrote this line: 'The demonization of Putin is not a policy. It's an alibi for not having a policy.' And then I wrote in reply to that: That's right, but it’s much worse than that, because it's also that the demonization of Putin is an obstacle to thinking rationally, having a rational discourse or debate about American national security. And it’s not just this catastrophe in Ukraine and the new Cold War; it's from there to Syria to Afghanistan, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to fighting global terrorism. The demonization of Putin excludes a partner in the Kremlin that the U.S. needs, no matter who sits there. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on May 17, 2017, Cohen said: "You and I have to ask a subversive question: are