The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com) is watching events in Venezuela, now being dragged into all-out dictatorship. Hit this link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/venezuela-ushers-in-new-pro-government-chamber-as-opposition-vows-rebellion/2017/08/04/9c0c71e2-7883-11e7-8c17-533c52b2f014_story.html?utm_term=.abb99f0a3bea

Much of New England’s heating oil has come from once-prosperous Venezuela, now facing economic collapse and political violence.

 
Meanwhile, with Russian intrusion into American politics and government such an issue,  PCFR planners thought it would a good idea to recruit a Russia expert to start off its 2017-2018 season. Thus it has the distinguished Prof. David R. Stone of the U.S. Naval War College lined up for  its Wednesday, Sept. 13 dinner.

He'll explain Putin  and the new Russian nationalism and how it affects us.

Professor  Stone received his B.A. in history and mathematics from Wabash College and his Ph.D in history from Yale University. He has taught at Hamilton College and at Kansas State University, where he served as director of the Institute for Military History. He has also been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. His first book Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926-1933 (2000) won the Shulman Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the Best First Book Prize of the Historical Society. He has also published A Military History of Russia: From Ivan the Terrible to the War in Chechnya (2006), and The Russian Army in the Great War: The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (2015). He also edited The Soviet Union at War, 1941-1945 (2010). He is the author of several dozen articles and book chapters on Russian / Soviet military history and foreign policy.

The rest of the PCFR fall season:

French Consul General Valery Freland will talk about how the French presidential-election outcome might change that nation’s foreign policy and the Western Alliance, on Wednesday, Sept. 27. By the way, he went to school with French President Macron.
 
Then on Wednesday, Oct. 11, Graham Allison, who has been running Harvard’s Belfer Institute, will talk about, among other things, Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.   He'll talk about his new book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? 
 
On Wednesday, Nov. 1,  comes Michael Soussan, the writer and skeptic about the United Nations. He’s the author of, among other things, Backstabbing for Beginners, about his experiences in Iraq, which is being made into a movie starring BenKingsley.