Ukraine is the key in 2016: a forecast for the new year

The ongoing geopolitical shift in the post-post Cold War era (2014-present) is likely to progress further, and possibly accelerate, in 2016.

The EU has just extended its sanctions against Russia, while Ukraine and Russia are now in a full-blown trade war. All this while Russia struggles with persistent low oil prices and Ukraine has apparently hit a big obstacle on its road to reform, as entrenched oligarchic interests are all but stymieing the much-needed restructuring of the economic system that has its roots in the Soviet era.

Unfortunately, unless there's a magical conversion of powerful and influential hearts and minds in Kiev and other Ukrainian power centers (hey, it's Christmas), this "last chance" at reform, as US Vice President Joe Biden recently put it, is unlikely to end well for the strategically crucial country that is the focal point of the East-West confrontation.

That's because there's no quick fix to corruption in Ukraine - at least, not one that doesn't wipe out most of the ruling class overnight. In an environment where just about everyone has dirty laundry and skeletons in their closets - or, at least, effectively enable people that do - it takes a very brave soul to put his or her personal interests below that of the country, because in practice this means letting yourself be eaten alive by rivals. It's therefore unrealistic to expect corruption to be eradicated in the short term: Ukrainian leaders, like those anywhere, have no natural inclination to put themselves on the chopping block.

Perhaps it's not so important that the present corruption be rooted out as it is that future practices be cleaned up through incentives and disincentives, but it's hard to see how the former can be decoupled from the latter. Ukraine's fundamental problem is the very nature of its system as it actually runs every single day: a network of powerful rent-seeking oligarchs, i.e. local or regional monopolists and magnates, whose support for the government is absolutely contingent on their private operations remaining essentially unimpeded by the bureaucratic regulators. No matter how many papers get shuffled, how many laws and regulations get rewritten, and how many judicial and administrative posts get restaffed, so long as the oligarchs' supreme position in Ukraine's socioeconomic hierarchy is unchanged, these will only be cosmetic fixes.

But after a quarter century of broken promises, of dashed hopes and dreams, the Ukrainian people can hardly tolerate the status quo any longer. Their patience was wearing very thin two years ago during the Euromaidan uprising; should that revolution now devolve into yet another failure to change, i.e. little more than another rotation of members of the same corrupt ruling class, then Ukraine will be effectively lost to the West without a single additional hostile act by Russia.

After all, if corruption can't be resolved through democratic reforms, but can't be tolerated any longer, a ruthless dictatorship is waiting in the wings. In Ukraine, that looming threat of fascism has been ever present in the current crisis: the Right Sector, the Azov battalion, and the ultra-nationalists in general are circling overhead like hungry vultures, ready to feast on what may soon be the carcass meat of the dying post-Soviet Ukrainian state. As I have said before, this is the pretext Putin needs to launch a full-blown invasion - one that he clearly cannot have any other way.

So 2016 - the centennial of the preliminary angel apparitions at Fatima - promises to be a key year. This analyst sees something giving way in Ukraine - not in the West's favor, but in the Kremlin's.

Huge victory for Russia: US gives up its regime change policy in Syria

Joy to the world: Mr. & Mrs. Assad join an Advent service at a Syrian Christian church in Damascus:

Less than three months into a Russian military intervention in Syria that he dismissed as an inevitable quagmire, President Obama has conceded that Washington's policy of regime change against Assad's Syria is no longer viable.

This isn't so much a victory for Assad - who still has a monumental task regaining the swathes of his country lost to ISIS and the rebels - as it is a triumph for the Kremlin, i.e. the personal leadership of Vladimir Putin, and a humiliating blow to the US neoconservative policy of removing unfriendly dictators under the pretext of democracy building. It is a great victory for the human race, which will now breathe easier from a humbled Washington that has finally been put in its place, at least in one corner of the world for perhaps a little while.

It is also a stunning recognition of how US, NATO, and allied Sunni Muslim air power has effectively been neutralized in the northwest Syrian battle space by a single weapon system: the S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM), which, while it hasn't exactly created a no-fly zone, has effectively given the Kremlin a veto on any anti-Assad actions taken from the air by anybody.

Putin has avenged the shoot-down of a Russian jet a month ago by Turkey by turning the tables not only against Turkey but, in the process, the NATO alliance. Turkey's Erdogan may not have intended to draw the US and NATO into a confrontation with Russia in the skies over northwestern Syria, but he was hoping the Su-24 incident would cause enough sympathy for the Turkish position that both his and the Western air forces would intensify their operations in such a way as to constrict the Russian air campaign. In this respect, he has now been thwarted completely. The US has withdrawn its F-15s from Turkey which were clearly positioned there to counter Russian air dominance, and since Turkey itself doesn't dare fly its own jets even near the Syrian border, let alone across it, it's now left to watch Assad and Putin cut its proxies to pieces.

This is a great strategic victory that will long be fondly remembered should the Syrian conflict in fact wind down in the coming months per the new UN resolution for peace talks, which by glossing over the disagreements on Assad's future give the dictator tremendous bargaining power in an environment of slow but steady military gains against the rebels.

Assad can now enter the peace talks with the opposition next month with a starting position of offering no concessions short of the rebel's complete disarmament, because the rebels are still too divided to be able to claim any credible alternative to continued Assad and Alawite control of the central government. While Assad and his backers doubtless want more military victories and recapture of territory from the rebels to strengthen their negotiating leverage, the real question is, If the priority is to build a transitional unity government around the existing Syrian state, what credible choice is there other than to construct it on the battered but still resilient foundation of the Alawite minority regime?

Assad will doubtless insist that he himself personally leads the transition government as a figurehead, with the common understanding that he will step down at the end of the 18-month window decreed prior to the conduct of new elections. Though this would represent a catastrophic defeat for the rebel movement to remove him, it's essentially the position that even Obama has now capitulated to.

The Syrian military's Facebook page, which in its most recent post celebrates the seizure of areas in Aleppo and Latakia, also has a December 13 post showing the surrender and capture of rebels who were given amnesty. The regime of course hopes for as many such surrenders as possible: it will push these amnesty recipients as those best suited for roles in the transition government, hoping that other opposition will follow suit and likewise lay down their arms. If this creates real rifts in the already fractured opposition - between those who want a shot at political influence and those who see this as a ploy by the government to disarm the resistance - it could greatly strengthen Assad's position.

All in all, things aren't looking too shabby for Assad, Putin, or Iran. Even the neocon American Enterprise Institute has conceded that reports of Iran's drawdown in the face of heavy casualties in Syria are overblown.

And Donald Trump - possibly the best single barometer of US public opinion these days - has all but thrown in his lot with the Axis of Fatima.

A short letter from the US ex-viceroy of Iraq says it all (by what it doesn't say)

Paul Bremmer, the Washington-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that administered the occupation of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq in 2003-04, wrote a brief letter to the Economist trying to refute the common belief that the Iraqi state was effectively dismantled in the wake of the dictator's fall, i.e. that the blanket de-Baathification pushed by the Allies hollowed out Iraqi government ministries. No, Bremmer writes, only the top 1 percent of the Baath party was purged - and the government kept running just fine.

You'd think from this letter - especially the concluding protest that Iraq's economy grew by a whopping 43 percent (according to the IMF) in 2004 - that today we're celebrating Iraq as the shining example of Western-imposed Arab democracy that it is.

Bremmer is right that the situation in Iraq wasn't as bad as the near-daily headlines of IEDs, suicide bombings, and skirmishes with militants and insurgents suggested: life was pretty normal for most Iraqis in the early post-Saddam years, and it got better but for the simple fact that years of sanctions, followed by the proudly hailed US "shock-and-awe" campaign to bomb the country back to the stone age, meant that things couldn't have gotten any worse.

But removing the top 1 percent of the Baath party was effectively an emasculation of the state apparatus in the one realm that overrides all others: security. The Baath leadership was removed because it was structured in the manner of a police surveillance state which oversaw the organs of daily governance and administration. It was so designed to give Saddam's family and inner circle a seamless channel to transfer their security assets to any part of the bureaucratic apparatus in order to protect it against both non-state threats and internal disloyalty. Though this system had weakened over the years after the first Gulf War (1991), it was still the only thing holding most of the country together. And it was this mechanism of internal security that, once dismantled, has proven impossible to satisfactorily replace to the present day.

Closely related to this, what Bremmer wouldn't want to mention is that the decision to disband the 400,000-strong Iraqi army - for the same reason that its command structure was designed according to Saddam's Baath police state - was the immediate cause of the insurgency that erupted in the Sunni triangle in late spring and early summer 2003.

Granted, the Baath leadership couldn't have been left intact as is: some shakeup was indeed necessary post-Saddam, not least while he was still at large. But American, Western, and Shia Iraqi aversion to the Sunni Baathist police state as a whole - not just to Saddam's immediate clan or tribe - drove thousands of critical ex-military and ex-security personnel into the ranks of the insurgency in the early days, which should instead have been co-opted (as many were later) to snuff out foreign jihadists like Zarqawi who wasted no time planting themselves into the security vacuum of the Sunni triangle.

Ultimately, what makes a state? Quite bluntly, the monopolization of violence in a given geographic area - no more, no less.

As Mao Zedong would say, revolutions are violent and nasty affairs: they're not dinner parties. Today, we Americans are paying the price for inciting revolutions when in fact all we had the resources (and guts) to accomplish was small-scale, cosmetic dictator swaps.

Forget ISIS: the real war is between Eastern and Western civilization

As more developments come along in our chaotic world, it becomes clearer that ISIS is just a bogeyman for the real matter at hand: an existential clash of civilizations between East and West, specifically between Eastern and Western Christianity.

Maverick Russia expert Professor Stephen Cohen (my onetime NYU teacher) argues convincingly that the US and NATO are intensifying their confrontation with Russia in the wake of the Paris and San Bernandino attacks - far from joining with the Kremlin to tackle the common threat of terrorism and ISIS. This is truly Cold War II, as he correctly points out; but he doesn't seem to understand that Russia is every bit as intent to exploit Islamic extremism to damage US interests as the US is to exploit it to damage Russian interests. War is, after all, only possible when the hostility is a two-way street.

There now seems to be zero chance that ISIS will be eliminated, whether by Russia or by the West, but even more impossibly by an alliance of the two. The fact is, both Moscow and Washington see ISIS as a useful tool or even proxy to advance their interests against the other. It could even end up with both of them racing to cut a deal with ISIS first - despite more terrorist attacks and mass civilian casualties, including their own citizens.

Or to put it another way, even if ISIS is in fact dismantled, it will only be replaced by another Sunni fundamentalist power in the desert hinterlands of Iraq and Syria that will, at best, have a less overtly anti-Western or anti-Russian - that is, less anti-Christian (whether Eastern or Western) - strain of violent jihadism. But whatever succeeds ISIS will also be a pawn in the real war for global domination waged between Eastern and Western Christianity, i.e. between Russia and the US.

It's useful to remember that the Cold War (1945-1989) was itself a battle between Eastern and Western Christianity, in which the East pretended to be atheist (communist) and the West professed to stand for God and the church, but in fact, under the ideological covers, the Orthodox Christian faith was never even remotely snuffed out in the Slavic heartland of the USSR; just as the most rampant, hedonistic consumerism and materialism were allowed to flourish in the supposedly God-fearing US, which led Western Europe down the same pit of decadence.

Today, Cold War II is similarly nuanced and confused - but with the roles neatly reversed. It is the West that now stands for everything profane and anti-religious, whilst Russia poses herself as the defender of traditional values and especially of Christianity and the holy Apostolic Church; but in fact, the West continues to promote dignity for historically disgraced classes of people like homosexuals and migrant aliens, whereas Russia stands at the head of the neo-authoritarian, neo-fascist global axis that despises open borders and open society.

As during Cold War I, China stands in the middle ground between Eastern and Western Christianity - and stands to capitalize from both sides' need for its goodwill and favors. The communist party seems to have a bright future, and the "China dream" of imperial rejuvenation seems increasingly achievable in a world where Chinese bureaucratic authoritarianism seems tame, sane, and rather orderly in comparison to the lunacy and chaos, whether physical or psychological, that now engulfs so many societies simultaneously. It's a brave proposition to bet against the party when East and West, north and south, not to mention Left and Right, all want Beijing's good graces and have to kowtow to the emperor to get it.

Meanwhile, for a good description of the "seven-front" world war between Russia and the West, from a Russian ultranationalist perspective, check out this excellent piece by the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin.

Professor Cohen has previously asserted that despite the recent attention on Syria, it is Ukraine that remains the geopolitical epicenter of the Russia-NATO confrontation. I would qualify this with Dugin's observation: the epicenter is now Turkey, which is the geographic link between the Syrian and Ukrainian crises, which themselves represent the simultaneous civil wars within Islam (between Sunni and Shia) and Christianity (between Orthodox and Catholic/Protestant).

All eyes should be on the developing Russo-Turkish standoff...if it becomes an actual shooting war, all hell will break loose. It will finally come to the broad daylight that it's a genuine clash of civilizations, in which Western Christianity supports Sunni Islam against Eastern Christianity and its minions of Shiite Islam.

Alas, perhaps the only thing that can avert this outcome is if we in the US recognize what's happening and how our insistence on saber-rattling right in front of the Russian bear's lair is making disaster a less and less unlikely eventuality. Read: don't expect much help on our part.

As both Professor Cohen and Dugin point out, the spark will most likely come in Ukraine: the time is running out on the US-installed government there to make some meaningful reforms, after which window closes it can only resort to war to recover Crimea and eastern Donbas as the basis of legitimacy, thus surrendering to the far-right fascist (heavily Catholic) radicals.

It's already looking pretty bad. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was physically assaulted by fellow Ukrainian parliamentarians a few days ago - a clear indication that the revolutionaries are fed up with their leaders' pretenses of reform. If the reality is that Ukraine is becoming a giant version of neighboring basket case Moldova - where "reformers" have used the threat of Russian invasion to plunder what's left of the already pathetically depleted national treasury, thus forfeiting all credibility - it's only a matter of time before the fascist warmongers seize power.

That is, only a matter of time before Putin's tanks will have a pretext to make a dash for Kiev.

Turkey sends Russia a message that it's not really in charge

Turkey has apparently shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber on its border with Syria, claiming yet another airspace violation. This time, its F-16 interceptors decided to pull the trigger.

Vladimir Putin is calling the incident a "stab in the back", while Foreign Minister Lavrov has cancelled a trip to Turkey. Beyond this, though, basic strategic reality limits the potential fallout with regard to the Syrian peace process.

Direct Russian retaliation against Turkish interests is a practical impossibility: Russia needs the Dardanelles no less today than a century ago during the Allied fiasco at Gallipoli, and Erdogan seems to be reminding Putin that the latter's present air campaign is only possible because of the free passage of Russian shipping from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean through the narrow, Turkish-controlled channel. This is Turkey's way of telling Russia not to get too carried away by its new role as key power broker in the region - that role is subject to a Turkish veto.

Strong elements within the Turkish military - traditionally that country's strongest institution - have doubtless been seething with rage over Russia's repeated (though definitely unintended, inevitable pass-through) incursions into its airspace over the past eight weeks. From the start, Moscow's intervention has been a huge embarrassment to Anakara, given that President Erdogan has risked so much since 2011 to help topple the hated Assad regime - his open southern border with Syria has, to this day, been the main conduit for anti-Assad rebel groups, including various non-ISIS radical jihadists with Al Qaeda affiliations, to funnel men and materiel to the northwest Syrian front lines that are the key to the nearly five-year-old civil war.

But Turkey's anger seems to have boiled over in the past week or so, with a new Russo-Syrian campaign in the far north against her kindred Turkmen in the border highlands. The signature "dumb bombing" by both Russian and Syrian air power claiming a large civilian toll among the mountain Turkmen tribes has crossed something of a red line, and by shooting down the Russian jet (whose two pilots bailed out but were apparently then killed by ground fire), Ankara is sending a message of extreme displeasure to the Kremlin.

Putin's in something of a bind, but he won't jeopardize the fundamental relationship with Turkey over one lost jet and crew; he may yet scale back the assault on the Turkmen enclave, even if it upsets Assad. There's almost nothing to be gained trying to get even; in the objective view, it was Turkey that somehow had to get even after two humiliating months. Perhaps Putin has indeed underestimated Erdogan's resolve to imitate his own strongman rule; that should make it easy to deal with him.

Powers still divided over Assad, but will Assad finally turn on ISIS?

Both Obama and Hollande have reiterated their conviction that Assad must be removed from office to end the Syrian civil war, despite the Paris bloodbath having given more pressing urgency to eliminating the terrorist threat from ISIS in that country.

The only problem: they'll have to do lots of bargaining with Putin to figure out a way to remove Assad while leaving the Syrian state essentially intact. An Australian piece points out the obvious: these Syrian state organs that Assad controls are anything but on the verge of collapse. The conclusion is telling:

And none of the opposition groups will have national reach in Syria or control any of the levers of government or the sources of administrative and fiscal power on which most Syrians rely. Those are held by Damascus and have been maintained throughout the conflict.

The Assad regime’s decision to maintain the functions of the state as far as is possible for as long as it can may end up proving a strategic masterstroke. Even if the regime hasn’t been able to win the war, by maintaining the facade of governance it still aims to win the peace.

But the post-Paris statements by Obama and Hollande won't be enough to reassure the Syrian opposition that Assad's still in the West's crosshairs: now that it's so obvious that Western public opinion wouldn't mind leaving Assad in place as the price for defeating ISIS, they're taking to the Western media to redouble their talking points about Assad, not ISIS, being the true enemy of global security, like here in the Guardian and here in Newsweek (an Italian diplomat apparently writing as a mouthpiece for the Iranian opposition, MEK).

But that brings us to the real question: has Assad now joined Russia in refocusing more of his campaign against ISIS? If so, that would bring to rest persistent Western criticisms, like this one, that Assad and ISIS have actually always been best buddies.

It's true that Bashar al-Assad takes after his father Hafez in that he has always used radical Sunni jihadists, who have no love lost for a secular Alawite Shia like himself, when it suited his purposes. Thus the following statement is accurate:

In the early stages of the uprisings against his rule, Assad released hundreds of jihadists from Syria’s jails, contributing to his strategy of portraying the war as an existential battle between secular forces of moderation and fanatic religious militants.

But that was back in early 2012, when it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that with enough Western and regional Muslim backing, the secular militants of the Syrian opposition would make Assad go the way of Qaddafi. Back against the wall, Assad unleashed his ace in the hole: the very Sunni extremists who hated him most. Extremely Machiavellian, yes; but brilliant strategy. Saddam Hussein tried the same gambit against the US invasion in 2003: releasing thousands of Shia extremists, many of whom had violently opposed his minority Sunni regime, as cannon fodder (the "Fedayeen Saddam") against American high-tech weaponry. Where the Iraqi Baath failed, the Syrian Baath has apparently succeeded - and largely because the deposed Iraqi Baath gave the US occupation so much trouble that American public opinion had no desire left to keep expending the national treasury to secure the peace (which in fact was finally achieved around 2008) when Obama took office.

It's a whole other thing to say that this makes ISIS (and other Sunni extremists) true friends of Assad. I mean, the Nazis and Soviets were also pretty chummy for a while after the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact (1939-1941), before Hitler finally concluded that he'd better break it before Stalin did. Perhaps we have finally reached that same tipping point between these two likewise brutal, anti-democratic forces in Syria, now that secular, pro-democratic insurgents have largely been marginalized on the battlefield. (Or have they?)

That's why these post-Paris Russian raids on ISIS targets are so crucial: if they herald a true intensification of the Russia-led Fatima coalition's campaign against ISIS to a level where the rogue statelet is as much a target as the Syrian rebels, sooner or later Assad will have to commit the boots on the ground against ISIS that he's been reluctant to so far.

Russian jet wasn't intended target of ISIS bomb: providential switch?

ISIS is now claiming that the soda can bomb it used to bring down the Russian jetliner over Sinai was originally intended for a western plane, but apparently some unexpected turn of events got it diverted to Metrojet Flight 9268:

Meanwhile, ISIS explained it had a different target in mind.

“And so after having discovered a way to compromise the security at the Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport and resolving to bring down a plane belonging to a nation in the American-led Western coalition against the Islamic State, the target was changed to a Russian plane,” the message read.

Perhaps this was a providential switch: it has brought Russia and ISIS into more direct confrontation and thus drawn Moscow closer to Washington and European capitals; though it's probable that most Russian airstrikes will still hit predominantly non-ISIS targets, at least it's now undeniable that Putin's at war with the same enemy as France and the US-led coalition as a whole.

Though it's still too early to tell if this will be a sustained escalation, for three days now the Kremlin has been unleashing some of its best long-range air and missile weaponry against ISIS, as well as joining intensified coalition efforts to degrade the group's oil assets. It's already a far cry from the early days of the campaign last month, when Russian attacks on ISIS were so few and far between that they seemed just for show, or to live-test their Caspian flotilla's cruise missiles.

Meanwhile, Moscow seems to be emphasizing to Western and Sunni Muslim powers on the other side of the negotiations at Vienna that just because it agrees that Assad can't stay on to lead a reunified Syrian state in the future doesn't mean he should be undermined now if the common enemy that all must join forces to defeat is ISIS.

Behind the scenes, it's likely Putin has been telling Assad that the manner in which he contributes to his own nation's stabilization - striking deals with moderates and banding together against extremists - will determine his own political future. If Assad does well, he can relinquish power with enough protection from his Alawite power base that it wouldn't threaten him personally; if he does exceedingly well, he may even gain such a long-term rapport with the Alawites that even if he can't win a national election, his own sect (and perhaps other minorities such as Christians) will get behind him to represent them under a new constitution.

An East-West alliance to defeat ISIS? Don't hold your breath yet

Reports that Russia and France are coordinating their intensified air campaigns against ISIS, both in retaliation for the group's recent terrorist attacks against their citizens, have spurred speculation of broader East-West cooperation in defeating this common threat. CNBC has come out rather confident of the possibility; VICE News and CNN argue otherwise.

The other day, what appeared to be the biggest post-Soviet raid by Russian strategic bombers was conducted against ISIS with a go-ahead from US air command in Qatar; this was a day after President Hollande of France urged US-Russia cooperation against the rogue state. Reports have also surfaced of target intelligence sharing between the US-led and Russian air campaigns. While significant, these developments were actually already in the works before either last Friday's Paris attacks or the downed Russian jetliner at the end of last month; however, yesterday's official confirmation from the Kremlin that it was indeed a bomb that destroyed the jetliner was unsurprisingly the occasion for its massive heavy bomber strike.

Don't hold your breath just yet for any genuine US-Russian alliance against ISIS. No doubt both want ISIS punished for its transgressions from the air, but Moscow at this point is still 80 to 90 percent focused on weakening Al Nusra and other anti-Assad jihadists in the northwest of Syria; its attacks on ISIS may yet intensify, but it remains to be seen if these won't be primarily punitive and demonstrative as opposed to a precursor for a wider refocus of its attention against the group.

While one might argue that the Paris tragedy has strengthened Russian and Iranian leverage in Syria, it could also be said that Putin is now more flexible than ever regarding Assad's eventual fate. The key word is "eventual": the renewed Vienna peace talks over the weekend leave the next 6 to 24 months really up in the air in terms of just how much Assad will be involved in a post-ceasefire political transition.

As well, despite stronger calls for the EU to draw closer to Russia after Paris, it doesn't seem sufficient to end sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.

But probably even more crucial to the regional situation in the Mideast, though not much reported in the West, it seems Russia and Saudi Arabia are seriously considering a broader rapprochement. Such an accord has the potential to become the central pillar of Sunni-Shia peace in the region.

Russia and Fatima (part 2)

(Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity)

Part 2: The Western philosophical origins of the Russian revolution

I established in the first part of this series that Czarist Russia was, in essence, a proxy for all of eastern, or Orthodox Christianity.

When the communist revolution of 1917 destroyed this system, it not only took down with it - in one fell swoop - a millennial faith-based society, but created a gaping hole in the global family of civilizations that could only be filled by a radically new creed, whose sheer novelty would be its central claim to legitimacy.

After 100 million deaths worldwide in the 20th century at the hands of atheistic communism, including more Christian martyrs than in the previous 19 centuries combined, as well as the direct triggering of a violent reactionary backlash which killed 50 million in World War II, wiped out European Jewry, and divided the world into two camps that for decades threatened each other with thermonuclear annihilation, the Russian revolution can clearly be viewed as having an utterly apocalyptic dimension.

How in the world did so many souls get dragged down into the abyss decade after decade, most notably in Stalinist Soviet Russia and Maoist China, but also in gruesome mini-replays such as Cambodia (1970s) and, one might argue, even into the present century (North Korea)? The obvious answer is the unique combination of radical secularism with absolute despotism that was first realized by the communists in Russia and thereupon became a global force largely via its spread to China.

This part of the series will outline the radical secularist side of the communist revolutionary formula, by tracing the progressive decoupling of religious faith from political thought and practice in Europe since about 1500. Russia in 1917 represented the last in a chain of upheavals in European Christian societies brought about by this decoupling, which invariably triggered conflicts of varying degrees of violence as the forces of tradition resisted those of change; because Russia was last, hers was a clash between the most durable autocratic system in Europe against the most intellectually sophisticated, well-organized, and ruthlessly determined radical movement the continent had ever witnessed. The results were cataclysmic, especially when considering the subsequent chain of events over the 20th century, and yet, it is important to understand how and why this whole episode was the direct consequence of the history that preceded it.

At the close of the middle ages (circa 1500), European Christendom was at a crossroads. Its Eastern Orthodox branch had been wiped out with the destruction of the Byzantine empire and fall of Constantinople to the the Muslim Turks, and was only in the nascent stages of being resurrected in an ultimately grander incarnation in the form of Czarist Russia. At the same time, its Western Catholic branch was undergoing a devolution of temporal authority from the Roman papacy to increasingly powerful Renaissance monarchs and princes that had consolidated their territories at the expense of the feudal nobility, even as the imperative to find an all-water route to the Orient and the Indies (to outflank the mighty empires of Islam) launched the age of exploration and Western European mastery of the oceans.

Increasingly unfettered from the Pope and the Church hierarchy, Western Europe launched the modern era with the Reformation and scientific revolution (1500s), and commenced a four-century ascent to global domination of every other civilization from 1500 to 1900. Major watersheds in this rise were: the peace of Westphalia (1648), which essentially enshrined each nation-state's sovereign right to choose its own form of government, thus elevating the nation-state above the Church in political precedence; the settlement of the Americas, especially North America (1600s), as an effective laboratory for untested ideas and methods of social organization and governance; and critically, the industrial revolution (circa 1750), which ushered in a completely new epoch of human activity and altered the very fabric of social relations. These all culminated in the historic fruits of the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) which have become the very foundation of the contemporary world: the American (1776) and French revolutions (1789).

The American and French revolutionary period (circa 1776-1815) saw a further segregation of Western European thought into distinctly "Atlanticist" and "continental" wings. The former, founded upon the English and Scottish Enlightenments, emphasized private property rights, rule of law, and a separation of religion from state that was thought to be key to the success of both; these ideals were the basis of the American revolution and undergirded the rise of so-called "laissez-faire", free market capitalism in Britain and the United States. The latter, with its origins in the French Enlightenment, also promoted individual rights, but more as a means to the ultimate end of a just and equitable organization of the collective state and society; thus its liberal elements acquired such concerns as the egalitarian redistribution of wealth, an overhaul of the residual quasi-feudal stratification of society, and most significantly, a removal of traditional organized religion from not just governance, but general civic and public influence; these were the principles underlying the French revolution and undergirded the rise of the various strains of modern socialism.

This Atlanticist-continental divergence was a direct function of the respective positions of religion in the Anglo-American versus the continental European worlds: in the former, religion had steadily been eased out of social and political power structures and increasingly privatized since the 1600s with comparatively little violence; in much of the latter, religion and its associated social structures had remained largely intact in their archaic and rigid forms, even as society itself changed dramatically in the 1700s. The radicalization of the French revolution, in which the nascent republic erupted with horrific violence against the deposed monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy, was the consequence of this unresolved tension and fear of reactionary retrenchment.

The Napoleonic era (1799-1815) represented an accord between the revolution and the Church, whereby the former essentially co-opted the latter into a subservient but relatively secure position, thus mediating between those who wanted to extinguish religion and those who wanted to roll back the revolution. This equilibrium, which Bonaparte's conquests spread throughout Europe, truly matured in France herself only through two more iterations of revolution in 1830 and 1848, during the second empire of Napoleon III (1852-1870), and became a founding pillar of a new kind of increasingly secular national statehood that would peak in Europe in the late 19th century.

Meanwhile, heavily influenced by French republicanism, a new breed of predominantly German thinkers led by Georg Hegel laid the foundations of modern political philosophy in the first half of the 1800s, particularly with regard to the evolution of state and society in the new industrial age. The Hegelians, as they were called, branched off into a "right" and "left" faction, which respectively became the conservative nationalist and progressive socialist wings of political ideology that have retained their influence in the West to the present day. Notably, both right and left Hegelianism reinforced the tendency of the continental school of European thought to emphasize the whole over the individual. This planted the seeds of both extremes of totalitarianism which arose in Europe in the following century: fascism and communism.

Marx himself, a hard left Hegelian, published the Communist Manifesto as a young radical in the revolution of 1848, inspired by a sweeping vision of international workers' revolt against the capitalist (i.e. bourgeois) ruling class to establish a classless society (communism) in which material sufficiency for all would replace God as man's highest happiness. The revolution of 1848 had begun in France but attained its longest-lasting effects in his native Germany: within a generation she was unified as a single centralized state for the first time by an alliance of Prussia's military might with the economic nationalism of other German polities which had subscribed to right Hegelianism, a union that was crowned by Bismarck's resounding defeat of Napoleon III's second French empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Along with the unification of Italy for the first time since the Roman empire over the previous decade-plus, along with the first truly significant communist uprising, the Paris commune (1871), this fundamentally altered the political landscape of continental Europe, ending an over two-century French domination and setting up an unprecedented period of nationalist rivalry between the so-called Great Powers (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia), which collectively industrialized rapidly in four-plus decades of no major conflict between them (1871-1914) and, along with the upstart United States, propelled European Christian civilization to new heights of global domination in the golden era of imperialism (1880-1914).

And so, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, all the key ideas and principles, and even most of the actual modes of action and organization, that would vie for supremacy - capitalism versus socialism, nationalism versus internationalism, democracy versus dictatorship - took their clear shape across Europe.

Yet it was now Russia's turn, at long last, to be fundamentally transformed by the momentous social, economic, and political changes which had begun far to her west and had steadily worked their way eastward across the European continent over the course of the 1800s. By 1900 she was the only remaining true absolute monarchy among the Great Powers, whose rule remained inseparably united with the spiritual authority of her ancient Church even in the face of considerable socioeconomic changes. While the Kaiser's German empire ceded much domestic policy to the parliamentary social democrats, and Hapsburg Austria exercised an increasingly decentralized control over the polyglot collection of territories that formed her own empire, Russia moved in essentially the opposite direction under Alexander III (1881-1894) and Nicholas II (1894-1917), rolling back even the limited local democracy instituted by Alexander II after the emancipation of the serfs (1861); similarly, the regime redoubled its efforts to solidify Russian control over subservient nationalities on its periphery.

As it turned out, these were futile attempts by the decaying Czarist system to prolong its archaic and untenable autocracy, with ultimately dire consequences for the empire. The state's hardening of opposition to reform inevitably hardened the reformers themselves, creating a vicious cycle that would eventually spiral into violent confrontation. At the turn of the 20th century, the critical mass of socio-political elements which would topple the entire edifice of the Czarist state had begun to coalesce: its vigor was the relatively small but key minority of industrial workers, many of them peasants who had taken factory jobs since the late 1800s; its leadership was a tiny but influential elite of the urban intelligentsia.

There was considerable diversity of opinion within the reform movement, with truly radical Marxist socialists (i.e. those who advocated armed insurrection) such as Lenin's Bolsheviks only a small minority. More moderate socialist reformers aspired to the trade-unionist, social-democratic track that had made impressive gains in Germany without officially altering that state's monarchic character; still more moderate liberals whose focus was constitutional reform were stronger than all the socialists combined. This was the political landscape of Russia on the eve of the first round of its revolution, the 1905 revolution, which traces directly to the later, much larger events of 1917.

In the next part of this series, we will see how and why the Czarist state's continued reactionary retrenchment necessitated more repression of its own citizens, thereby not only hastening its own fall, but in the process ensuring that the most uncompromisingly radical and violent faction of the revolutionary movement - the communist Bolsheviks - would eventually rise to subjugate all others.

Paris burning: War with ISIS just got hotter by a few degrees

A horrendous series of attacks in Paris, apparently by ISIS, have reportedly left at least 153 dead.

This after it was reported earlier in the day that "Jihadi John" of beheading videos fame was killed in a US drone strike, and the Kurds and genocide-threatened Yazidis recaptured the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar from ISIS.

The Paris attack is a day after a Hezbollah-controlled suburb of Beirut was bombed by an ISIS twin suicide attack, and less than two weeks after the apparent downing of the Russian jetliner by ISIS over Sinai.

When combined with the ISIS twin suicide attack in Ankara (the deadliest ever terrorist incident in modern Turkey) just a little over a month ago, the group has now inflicted four mass casualty attacks against four diverse target states within just five weeks: one Shia, one Sunni, one Catholic, one Orthodox.

And even as the international powers reconvene at Vienna for Syria peace talks this weekend, the fate of Assad and his Alawite minority regime appears as intractable a disagreement as ever.

The Paris attacks have already inflicted the first curfew in Paris since World War II, in addition to President Francois Hollande's emergency closing of French borders.

Are the chickens now coming home to roost for Europe? EU potentate German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under unprecedented domestic pressure for her open-arms policy towards Mideast refugees; perhaps this French disaster will compel her to slow down the rapid absorption of up to one million predominantly Syrian migrants. It absolutely doesn't help that cries of "For Syria!" were mixed with "Allah Akbar!" as the attackers cut down their helpless victims.

Vladimir Putin is no doubt smiling grimly behind all the consolation calls he's been making...France and Europe as a whole are in no position to retaliate strongly against ISIS without his help.

And the US? Well, just yesterday, Obama declared that ISIS has been "contained" and isn't gaining strength; needless to say, rabid right-wingers are mocking him for it now. In fact, Obama's technically right: ISIS has on the whole been contained since its peak in summer 2014. But events like today's massacres in Paris show that containment of such an entity is incompatible with open borders.

It would be quite shocking if something doesn't give now that more Europeans than ever will sense a critical choice between a wall and a total war to destroy ISIS. In fact Europe needs both: more secure borders and a tougher assault on the terror state. On both points, she looks set to lean even more heavily towards Moscow.

Syrian army regains key airbase as powers gear up for next round at Vienna

The Syrian army scored perhaps its biggest victory since the start of the Russian air campaign six weeks ago, liberating the long-besieged airbase of Kweires in Aleppo province, apparently outlasting ISIS in a battle of attrition that could be a milestone in the broader effort to reclaim the country's besieged second city of Aleppo.

The combined involvement of Syrian government troops, Russian air power, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Lebanese Hezbollah in this operation indicates both its importance to securing the Assad regime and the potential effectiveness of this Fatima-Shia coalition against ISIS when working in close coordination, which doubtless has not been a piece of cake at times.

Even more significant, if true, would be Russian reports that Syrian opposition actually supplied government forces with intelligence for targeting ISIS. Along with mention of the opposition providing targeting against Al Nusra in Homs province, this is an initial indication of what would be a tectonic shift in the almost five-year-old conflict.

It seems from recent reports that the most determined resistance against the Russia-led coalition in Syria is coming from either ISIS, Al Nusra, or other jihadist outfits linked directly or loosely to Al Nusra. The battle space for secular opposition like FSA has seemingly diminished, at least judging from who has been reportedly making the boldest counterattacks against the Syrian army.

If so, Moscow is well on its way to realigning the conflict to its liking: Assad versus terrorists, with all moderates having to choose one or the other.

So even as the West views the resumption of the Vienna peace talks this weekend as only the start of a long and protracted negotiation process, the ground may already be shifting decisively in Fatima's favor. The US has now come round to Assad sticking around at least for the early stages of the political transition - it may even assent to his being on the ballot in the presidential election to be held under a new constitution, which is clearly what Russia and Iran want.

That leaves Saudi Arabia and Turkey out in the cold: they still want Assad's departure before any substantive start of the political transition process. But if the moderate Syrian opposition is indeed beginning to cross over to the Fatima coalition, if even temporarily and tactically, they don't want to find themselves in a position where their only remaining battlefield leverage is Al Qaeda, i.e. Al Nusra and other jihadist affiliates. The peace process will inevitably expose the true extent to which the regional Sunni powers have been supporting "moderate" versus "terrorist" elements of the Islamist resistance to Assad.

Russia for its part knows it must get Syria on the political track soon. While I don't agree with this interesting assessment that Syria is already a quagmire for Moscow, I think it correctly highlights the degree to which Putin sees his air campaign as only a means to achieving a distinctly political end. To this end, he has indeed bargained away Yemen (mired in its own Sunni-Shia civil war which has become a proxy war between Iran and Saudi) for Syria:

Russian sources said that in return for Saudi concessions on Syria, including agreeing to Iranian participation in the talks, Moscow has offered what may be described as the Chinese approach to tough conflicts: Non-interference, non-objection, non-obstruction and non-facilitation with regard to the Saudi-led Arab coalition's actions in Yemen. According to sources in the Security Council, this development has been obvious in the Russian positions during the council's meetings, where Moscow has replaced obstruction with non-interference.

And so it appears Putin has played his political game well: his military card looks well-thought-out as only a tool of the regional politics. If he is wise, he will engage the Syrian conflict diplomatically at this juncture not so much because he's already in a quagmire, but because the present stalemate is easy to defend. The ball's in Saudi Arabia's court: will they accept a deal now as the best they can hope for, or will they succumb to their own less compromising elements and still push for a military-induced Assad ouster that will likely all but expose them as Al Qaeda's bedfellows (which in fact they originally were when fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 80's)?

A little primer about Russia and Fatima (part 1)

The apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 are well-known for her prophecy about Russia - the second of the so-called three secrets of Fatima. As the centennial of this most famous spiritual revelation of the modern Church approaches, I will use this blog to explain the continuation of the events that were foretold by the great Mother of God not only at Fatima, but in a series of her later appearances over the course of the last century.

A lot of historic background is needed, and I can't help but break this whole exposition up into parts, but I'll try to be as to the point as possible.

Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity

For starters, why Russia? Well, in 1917 Russia became the first communist country, and because of her sheer size and centrality to global geopolitics - each of the other five major power regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and North America) have frontiers on the Russian world - communism quickly spread out from her and became a global force.

But even more importantly, in the context of religious history and God's plan for human salvation, modern Russia represents the eastern half of the Christian faith, the Russian Orthodox Church having been by far the largest and most influential Eastern and/or Oriental Orthodox communion since the end of the middle ages. Under Czarist rule from the late medieval period onward, Moscow prided itself as the "third Rome" (Constantinople having been the second), with the Czar himself the successor to the great emperor Constantine via a divine mandate bestowed upon him by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn traces its ancestry to the Apostolic succession of Saint Andrew via Byzantium (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) through Kievan Rus'.

So the nation of Russia - and in a wider sense, the earlier Czarist Russian empire which over the course of its last dynasty, the Romanovs (1613-1917), controlled at one point or another a total area exceeding even the USSR - is practically a proxy for eastern, i.e. Orthodox or Greek rite Christianity. Western Christianity, of course, is rooted in the Latin rite See of Saint Peter (Rome and the Vatican), and includes not only the flagship Roman Catholic Church but also all the breakaways that branched out from it in the Protestant Reformation, whose own 500th anniversary will also come in 2017.

The crucial distinction between Western versus Eastern Christianity is that whereas in the West, spiritual authority saw a steady separation from political authority at the conclusion of the middle ages, in the East - and Russia particularly - it continued to exhibit a strong unity.

In the West, the Protestant Reformation and maritime migration of Europeans to the New World (the Americas) gave birth to strongly codified (that is, law- and rule-based) individual freedom and liberty - most critically private property rights - that promoted the decoupling (to various degrees) of religion from government. By contrast, in the East, Czarist Russia remained an essentially feudal system, with the spiritual power of the Church offering a divine mandate to rule to the sovereign dynasty and its supporting elite caste of landowning aristocrats, who practically owned the masses of ordinary peasants working the soil as their own property (serfdom).

This primitive edifice of the Russian state grew increasingly brittle as Europe as a whole progressed deeper into the modern era of the great revolutions: socioeconomically, the industrial revolution; socio-politically, the American and French revolutions. The freeing of the serfs in 1861 by liberal-minded Czar Alexander II unleashed an upsurge of social consciousness among ordinary Russians at just the moment when the intellectual forces of Russian society were acquiring the means to pressure for more threatening changes and reforms to the Czarist autocracy in much the same way that western and central European intelligentsia had already done since the French revolution and Napoleonic period.

Alexander II's tragic assassination in 1881 triggered a fierce reactionary retrenchment against political and social reform by his son, Alexander III. When Alexander III's own son, Nicholas II, ascended to the throne in 1894, he inherited the last major European power without even a semblance of representative rule, i.e. a parliament or constitution that, if managed well, would bolster the monarchy. But there wasn't enough urgency to liberalize in that manner yet: Russia was still at an early stage of industrialization compared to her western and central European peers, and at the turn of the 20th century it seemed as if she really just needed a better educated, technocratic central bureaucracy to close much of the gap with the West. With better infrastructure like the new Trans-Siberian railroad and a national telephone/telegraph system, the Czarist regime seemed to have a good shot at harnessing modernity to prolong or even strengthen its unelected rule.

Unfortunately, it was the ruling class itself that failed: young Nicholas II turned out to be too timid to deal with popular and intellectual currents clamoring for a greater voice for the masses, and the aristocracy - already mired in a long moral and spiritual decline - became increasingly lethargic and even decadent, with the result that the millennial bedrock of Czarist rule - the great divine mandate from the holy Orthodox Church - progressively weakened and crumbled from within.

Since it was all but unthinkable to alter its age-old essence, the Czarist regime could only resort to further military adventurism in both Europe and Asia - facilitated by its new infrastructure - to shore up its tottering legitimacy. So long as it did a fairly good job defending and promoting Orthodox civilization in the international arena, it could still claim to speak for its masses of still-destitute and illiterate peasants. This, however, would end up being its ultimate undoing.

Part 2 of this series will delineate the contours of the cataclysmic collapse of Russian Orthodox civilization - and of eastern Christianity - that occurred in 1917 with the Russian revolution.

Conflicting views of Russia's role in Syria

My onetime professor at NYU, Stephen Cohen, one of America's foremost Russia experts and formerly preeminent Sovietologist, was again interviewed on The John Batchelor Show. This was before the revelation that Russia's Metrojet Flight 9268 was probably downed by a terrorist bomb.

Since the Maidan revolution and Russian annexation of Crimea in early 2014, Mr. Cohen has become the best-known defender of Russia and Putin in Western media and academia. He isn't personally linked to Putin, so far as I've learned, but back in 2001 his friend Sergei Glazyev, who has been sanctioned by the West in relation to Ukraine and Crimea, spoke to our class in New York about early-Putin era Russia.

Thankfully, there are sane voices like John Batchelor who are clearly conservative white Americans, yet who aren't drunk on power lust and feel it's their God-given birthright to control the whole world. I'm personally sick of lunatics like Mark Levin who talk as if Russia's just a basket case that can be threatened into submission with Reagan-era "Star Wars" antics, and as if China's still a Maoist Potemkin village. But then again, they're such lunatics because they're sore losers whose worldviews are about 30 years behind and are rapidly being consigned to the dustbin of history, and they're not taking it too well at all; so may the Lord forgive me, as I should be praying for them to actually see some light.

Russia Today on the other hand just interviewed Foreign Policy's David Rothkopf, the typical Washington neoconservative Jew, in an at-times confrontational session that has him bashing Putin and saying that Russia's actually best served by continued chaos and bloodshed in Syria, i.e. it's not serious about defeating ISIS and only wants to perpetuate a horrible Baath dictatorship.

We should know before too long whether the Kremlin is in fact already focusing most of its efforts against true terrorists - i.e. Al Nusra and other Al Qaeda affiliates - even as it prepares for the more ultimate showdown with ISIS.

Black boxes point to bomb attack: ISIS has launched jihad against Russia

It has been revealed that a black box on the doomed Russian jetliner exhibited a sudden failure, strongly suggesting that it was indeed a terrorist bomb attack. Elsewhere, it had been reported that US/UK intelligence had traced down terrorist communications pertaining to smuggling an explosive device on board (most likely the luggage bay).

So ISIS has struck its first blow in its promised jihad against Russia...in all likelihood, this information disclosed today has been known by American, British, Egyptian, and Russian intelligence for days already, but held back pending confirmation and, as far as Moscow and Cairo are concerned, political timing.

A hint that the Kremlin has known this was an attack well before today is the fact that it apparently deliberately bombed key civilian targets in ISIS capital of Raqqa, Syria, back on Tuesday, November 3.

No one is surprised by these developments - least of all the Russian government and public, with their long experience of terrorism much closer to home in the 1990s and 2000s during the strife in Chechnya, Dagestan, and other predominantly Muslim parts of the Russian Federation-ruled south Caucasus.

So what now? A CNN breaking news report has pointed out that one positive which this tragedy has brought out is the level of international cooperation: despite their geopolitical differences in the region, the West and Russia have not hesitated to share intelligence and coordinate their security policy, which needless to say has now entailed the suspension of virtually all commercial air traffic from outside the region to not just the Sinai but also Egypt as a whole, even as thousands of British and Russian tourists remain stranded at Sharm el-Sheikh awaiting safe return passage.

So whatever else, the silver lining here is closer US-Russia cooperation over the problem of ISIS, and Moscow could engineer a propaganda coup against those elements in the West who still insist that its goal is not to defeat ISIS but to prop up Assad - at the very least, this attack dispels the loony theory, popular among Western liberals who still cling to their fantasies of Syria becoming a model Arab democracy without Assad, that Russia and ISIS actually like each other because in fact their greatest fear is the power of "free" people (lol).

In a larger sense, Moscow's geopolitical isolation has continued to decline, with even Europe now tilting back toward the Kremlin and away from the White House; perhaps it'll finally dawn on Obama that most of the civilized world doesn't view Russia as a rogue state with a basket case economy that's about to implode any minute that makes big foreign adventures necessary to shore up its leader's approval ratings.

US/UK now say a bomb probably downed Russian jet, after all

Even as Russia and Egypt haven't said so, the US apparently believes it most likely that ISIS planted a bomb on the doomed Russian jetliner, while the UK has also come out in support of this theory.

While it's true that a US satellite detected a "heat flash" in the moment of the plane's sudden descent, this is completely inadequate to conclude that it was a bomb which caused it. If it was a mechanical failure, however, that doesn't preclude sabotage. Have US intelligence agents already gained access to some key investigation forensics that they can't disclose? Despite tensions with Washington since the failure of the Arab spring and the retrenchment of the military to power, Egypt remains a key American ally that probably wouldn't hesitate to have US intelligence involved in this investigation on account of concerns over ISIS - notwithstanding the potential awkwardness of joining Russia's own intelligence efforts on this case.

On the other hand, a Daily Beast article questions why UK Prime Minister David Cameron spoke as if a bomb is in fact the most credible explanation of the tragedy without any apparent evidence, at least publicly available, to back it up. And the Egyptian government itself was surprised by Cameron's remarks.

Whatever ends up being confirmed as the culprit, this disaster has already brought into focus the extremist presence in the Sinai that makes the bomb theory particularly believable.

Condolences and prayers to the families of the 224 victims.

More positive news: Syrian troops regain the southern supply route to Aleppo from ISIS, while US-backed forces make their own advances against ISIS in Iraq.

Iran threatens to pull out of peace talks as Al-Nusra forms at least a temporary alliance with ISIS

Citing Saudi intransigence, Tehran has threatened to leave the Syria peace talks. Should Iran pull out, that would almost ensure the continuation, perhaps even escalation, of the Syrian civil war, especially the virtual proxy war raging between Saudi Arabia and Iran not only in that country, but also in Yemen and to a small extent in Iraq.

The seesaw conflict continues. ISIS has captured an important town in central Homs province, while the Syrian army made some gains recovering the supply lines to Aleppo.

As my blog suggested, last week's thrusts by ISIS and Al Qaeda were in fact coordinated against the dramatic resurgence of the common threat from pro-Assad forces:

The triple attack on Syrian opposition forces in Aleppo has pushed the Islamic State group and al Qaeda's Jabhat al-Nusra to coordinate attacks and even, in some cases, work with rebel groups they previously fought.

To halt pro-regime advances, last week Jabhat al-Nusra launched an attack on the western front from Bilal al-Hus mountain range. In a simultaneous operation, ISIS fighters attacked the eastern frontline targeting a major supply road in hopes of cutting off the regime’s reinforcements.

Further:

Nusra and ISIS are working together in Aleppo, not because of an ideological partnership between the two militant groups, but rather political expediency -- a temporary military alliance to survive the regime’s sizable attack on their individual territories, which “forced them to retreat under heavy airstrikes by Russian warplanes,” Mustafa Suleiman, a rebel fighter in Aleppo told ARA News.

Of course, as Ayman al-Zawahri's recording indicates, given the scale of the new threat from the Fatima coalition of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah, this marriage of convenience between Al Nusra and ISIS may well solidify into something more substantive.

Perhaps last week's setbacks weren't so bad for the Axis of Fatima, after all: Assad, Putin, and Iran may have determined that given their limited resources, they should focus on retaking Aleppo and securing at least one major supply route to it, even if it means conceding some less populated areas to ISIS, Al-Nusra, and other rebels between Aleppo and Damascus.

Like Assad, Russia clearly wants ISIS (and Al-Nusra) to gain at the expense of moderate rebels, squeezing their operating room between the truly hardcore takfiris and the Fatima axis, effectively compelling them to choose between Assad and ISIS. Moscow has already hosted talks with the secular FSA; it may be striving to make similar overtures to less extreme Islamists such as Ahrar al-Sham.

Meanwhile, not at all surprisingly, the new US coalition centered on the Kurdish YPG militia in northeastern Syria is struggling to get off the ground.

And finally, although ISIS' claim of responsibility for Saturday's tragic Russian jetliner crash over the Sinai in Egypt has been dismissed, especially given the current geopolitical climate of the Mideast, terrorism can't be ruled out yet, meaning Western airlines won't be flying over the Sinai until the investigation finds the cause.

Important development: Al Qaeda now urging reconciliation with ISIS to band together against everyone else

In possibly another major reshuffle of the geopolitical landscape since Russia's intervention in Syria a month ago, Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri (Osama bin Laden's physician, still wanted for his role as co-mastermind of 9/11) has urged all radical Sunni militant groups to put aside their differences and unite against Russia, the US, and the Shiite axis of Iran-Iraq-Syria-Hezbollah.

Such a statement has bearing on the situation in northwestern Syria, where a number of Al Qaeda affiliates, led by the Syrian Jabhat al-Nusra in a coalition dubbed the "Army of Conquest", form the main muscle against Assad's embattled Baath regime. It could herald a decisive break between jihadist and secular Syrian rebels that have to date cooperated, often reluctantly, against their common foe in Damascus.

The recent Vienna peace talks have opened the door, if only initially, to a political settlement in Syria that prioritizes the preservation of the Syrian state from total disintegration. A BBC article makes plain that concessions must be made by all sides for peace to have a chance: just as Assad can't be asked to leave before meaningful deliberations on the political transition even begin, neither can moderate opposition, like the Free Syrian Army (FSA), be asked to sacrifice all their hopes of a less dictatorial regime in their country's near future.

Another article in The Atlantic takes a decidedly anti-Assad stance, but even it acknowledges that Assad's removal must leave his security state fundamentally intact lest extremists like ISIS and Al-Nusra fill a power vaccuum.

However, the hard fact that Zawahri's recording reminds us of is that even if Syrian moderates reach an accord with Assad, they will have to be joined by at least some of their fellow Islamist fighters for the proposed ceasefires to stick. The trouble that can develop is easy to foresee: if more extreme elements of the opposition like Al-Nusra don't go along, they can effectively scuttle everything for everybody. They just need to cause enough instability where they can to wipe out whatever leverage the moderates have with Assad, by giving Assad justification for continued bloody repression; this will disillusion the moderates and may even turn some of them to extremism, thus continuing the vicious cycle that has "jihadized" most of the effective armed opposition to Damascus since the very start of the uprising in 2011.

And unfortunately, Al-Nusra and its fellow radical jihadists probably have every reason by now to torpedo the peace process. For one, they will feel a deep sense of betrayal that, after doing the brunt of the fighting (and dying) against Assad's murderous war machine, they're being put out to dry by secular apostates whose bargaining power with Damascus was bought largely by their own jihadist martyrs. Even worse, this is probably how Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states - whose support for the Al-Nusra-led "Army of Conquest" became all but open early this year - will feel, too.

Will the new Saudi King Salman go against human (especially Bedouin tribal) nature and lay aside the sense of vendetta against the hated Alawite heretic-thugs? Peace in the Middle East and security from terrorism in the entire world may hinge on it.

I'm not particularly optimistic...but whatever happens, it must happen because it can't be forestalled indefinitely anyway.

Vienna peace talks: depends on actual military situation in Syria

All key international stakeholders of the Syrian conflict finally met in Vienna earlier today, and that in itself was the biggest step forward to peace. Despite pledges to meet again in two weeks to begin discussing details of proposed ceasefires between the Assad regime and rebels seeking to overthrow it, neither side demonstrated willingness to compromise their polar opposite viewpoints as to the fate of Mr. Assad.

Most likely, this means both camps - the Axis of Fatima consisting of Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Assad on the one hand, versus the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Gulf monarchies on the other - will focus their efforts on improving their actual positions on the ground in the multi-front conflict, as Obama today approved the first detachment of US special forces to northeast Syria to help the Kurds against ISIS.

Since my last post on the military situation, it appears the rebels have swung the war back into effective stalemate: one report has them erasing all Syrian government gains since early this month in the crucial Hama province and threatening yet again to advance on Assad's core areas of control. This would be a stunning setback for Damascus considering a whole month now of heavy Russian air support.

In the meantime, the regime-controlled portion of Aleppo remains cut off by ISIS, even as Syrian army gains in the sector since mid-month were further confirmed.

These next two weeks before the Vienna powers reconvene will determine will be critical for Assad and Putin. If the Syrian military suffers additional setbacks, it will prove that even Russia can only hope, at best, to preserve a small Assad statelet around Damascus and the Mediterranean coast. Such an outcome would make Putin much more amenable to compelling Assad into negotiating with moderate opposition, including armed groups, on terms not to the latter's liking.

Iran has been invited to the newest round of Syria peace talks Friday in Vienna, a potentially significant development that will increase the chances of a successful political settlement.

One must hope and pray that moderate voices in Tehran will win out, and not only will Iran attend these talks, but it won't come with such demands that Turkey and especially Saudi Arabia, who see the mere fact of Iranian participation as a concession on their parts, will be hardened in their opposition to Assad.

Two weeks ago, an article noted that Russia's intervention on Assad's behalf could wrest the Syrian war out of Iran's control. Indeed, this is what Ayatollah Khamenei must be wrestling with in deciding whether or not his nation should attend the Vienna peace talks: such a move would signal to the world that his clerical regime's hardline religious war policy has been tempered to some degree by Westphalian-sovereignty realpolitik among its more pragmatic elements.

It's likely that Khamenei, like Assad, had originally hoped that Putin's intervention would afford them the chance to actually win back Syria militarily; but now all signs indicate that even if Putin thinks this is feasible, he's more willing to settle for a much cheaper partial success here and now that secures Russia's key interests; if Khamenei and Assad still want their resounding military reconquest with Russian air cover, they'd better hope and pray that the Syrian rebels and their Turkish, Saudi, and US sponsors are so stupid that they still won't concede anything in the negotiations short of Assad's immediate exit from power.

Russia, for its part, is serious about finding moderate Syrian opposition to work together with against ISIS. This most certainly isn't music to Assad's ears, but with Russian aircraft now dominating his war effort, he's in no position to do much about it.

And unsurprisingly, despite the clear inaccuracy of sensationalistic reports earlier this month about China joining Russia's air campaign in Syria, Beijing is quite interested in making some money rebuilding Assad's battered telecom infrastructure.

Syrian updates: despite setbacks, it is Putin's and Assad's to lose now

Both Al-Nusra and ISIS have apparently shifted their focus to cutting the Syrian regime's fragile supply lines from the solidly government-held south to the embattled north.

A YouTube video report indicates that Al-Nusra is trying to sever one such road linking Latakia and Hama provinces, thus threatening recently beefed up regime control of its sector of the country's northwest.

Similarly, the Syrian government's main supply route to the key northern city of Aleppo - now a renewed focal point of the whole conflict - has been compromised by ISIS and is being contested for recapture by Damascus.

The battle for Aleppo pits each of the main camps - Syrian regime, rebel/Al-Nusra/Al-Qaeda, and ISIS - against one another in a three-way fight over the nerve center of the country's north; the regime's ability to supply its forces in the area will determine the speed with which it pacifies it. This is very much Assad's and Putin's fight to lose: until the loss of the road to ISIS, they had already effectively choked off every artery that the rebels within Aleppo itself relied on, and with their complete domination of the skies, neither ISIS nor the rebels can hold open positions for long. But the Syrian army can still be drained of precious strength and slowed down by surprise attacks in soft areas under its putative control, and that's what both ISIS and Al-Nusra seem to be trying.

The more hardcore rebel groups led by Al-Nusra may also find it more appealing to effectively work in tandem with ISIS at this juncture, depending on how much progress Damascus makes how quickly.

Crucially, it seems pro-regime militias are playing an important role consolidating government areas in the north; they are mentioned both in the aforementioned YouTube video and in updates on the unofficial Syrian army Facebook page. They not only fill the defensive gaps against ISIS and Al-Nusra once government units have reestablished nominal control of sectors, but seem to provide valuable local intelligence and nonlethal, including logistical, support for regular army offensives.

As I mentioned, despite various setbacks and inevitable losses, it is now Putin's and Assad's fight to lose. May the Axis of Fatima proceed with prudence, caution, and humility.

Peace in Syria may hinge on Putin bringing Assad and rebels together against ISIS

An article on Russia Today - essentially Putin's main English mouthpiece - titled "Putin: No need to distinguish between ‘moderate’ & other terrorists" has the Russian leader asking Assad during the latter's recent trip to Moscow, rather ironically, about forming a united front with the opposition against ISIS:

Syrian President Bashar Assad has also agreed with the possibility of Russia offering support to the Syrian opposition in their fight against ISIS, Putin said. "I've asked [Assad]: What would you say if we support the opposition's efforts in their fight against terrorists the way we support the Syrian Army? And he said: My attitude is positive," the Russian leader told the Valdai forum.

So behind all the tough talk, in fact Putin's conflation of "terrorist" with "opposition" (to Assad) is more fluid than first meets the eye. Not only has he cultivated ties with secular, nonviolent dissenters that want Assad out of power about becoming part of a new unity government, but earlier this year Russia negotiated with some of the very same "terrorists" they've been bombing lately about fighting ISIS together. Presumably, the door is still open to them if they change their minds or, more likely, find Russian bombs too annoying to continue putting up with.

Newsweek appears to confirm Assad's apparent moderation of stance towards some rebel groups provided they decide to treat ISIS as a common enemy.

The New York Times, reporting on Mr. Assad's recent trip to Moscow, notes that Putin has already expended considerable effort getting his Syrian client to be more conciliatory towards the opposition; and unsurprisingly, Assad has probably stretched his patron's patience thin.

But if Putin now succeeds in finally getting Assad and some rebels to the table, the brilliance of his air campaign will be evident: the sheer dependence of Syrian government forces on Russian jets and pilots means that he's effectively taken Assad's grip on power out of Assad's hands and squarely into his own.

In other words, so long as Assad was fearful of complete collapse because he didn't have Russian air power, he could use Moscow's fear of losing Syria to tweak Putin's beak; but now that his regime is utterly dependent on Putin's air force to lock in its refortified strength, he has every reason to ingratiate himself with the Kremlin, even if that means talking to some "terrorists".

Russia and Fatima: Israel and the Jews are the key link

In my last post, I referenced Henry Kissinger's assessment that the US must now rebuild its role in the Middle East, which Russia's intervention in Syria has reduced to rubble...indeed, Russia is now coming back full circle in terms of its historic relationship with Israel and with the Islamic world. Our Lady of Fatima not only links Russia to Iran, Syria, and the wider Shia Muslim Middle East, but it's also important to remember that the Virgin Mary is Jewish (like her Son, of course), and it's hardly a surprise that this Russian link to the region runs through the nation of Israel, whose rebirth as a powerful state since the 1970s was the direct result of the interaction between American and Soviet Jewry in the late Cold War.

Back in 1973, it was none other than Kissinger - the Jewish childhood refugee from Nazi Germany who is best known for engineering Nixon's historic opening to China - who played a central role in laying the foundation for US-Israeli domination of the Mideast at Russia's expense. That October, the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arab coalition of Egypt and Syria brought the two sides' respective superpower patrons, the US and USSR, to the brink of all-out nuclear war.

The ejection of the Soviet military from the Mideast in the aftermath of that conflict coincided with the mass exodus of Russian and other Soviet Jews to Israel, the US and UK over the remaining 18 years of the USSR's existence; by the USSR's collapse in 1991, international Jewry, bolstered by these Soviet transplants, had attained a dominant position in the so-called "New World Order" of globalization, spearheaded by disproportionately Jewish banks and financial networks centered in New York and London.

In the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia descended into economic ruin as a small clique of Jewish "oligarchs" with deep links to organized crime privatized vast swathes of the national wealth; their greed and corruption made enough of a mockery of the young post-communist Russian democracy that it paved the way for the rise of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000, i.e. the rise of a new strongman.

Putin's consolidation of power since first assuming the presidency 15 years ago has coincided exactly with his string of victories over Jewish oligarchs and disproportionately Jewish political liberals. He first kicked out Yeltsin-era Kremlin power broker Boris Berezovsky; then in 2004 he jailed young oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky for 10 years, seizing and nationalizing the latter's conglomerate Lukos to tighten his own grip on the strategically crucial energy sector; last February's mysterious assassination of Jewish liberal Boris Nemtsov marked perhaps the final nail in the coffin of any credible Jewish opposition to the Putinist neo-autocracy.

Having attained such security at home from potential Jewish efforts to undermine him, Putin is now supremely confident in his dealings with the Jewish state of Israel, about a quarter of whose citizens are Russian or ex-Soviet Jews. The 40-year process of Jewish emigration out of the former USSR is now complete, but it has inevitably left deep social and cultural links between contemporary Russia and Israel which also translate into political ties.

Needless to say, Russia's relationship with Israel is a love-hate one: there's plenty of baggage in this relationship, but with ex-Soviets such a large segment of the Israeli population, it's all outweighed by the thicker-than-water ties of blood and marriage.

Russia and Israel now need each other's cooperation very badly in the Middle East. It's not a comfortable position for either of them to be in, but Our Lady of Fatima is their common mother whose very lifeblood, spiritually speaking, runs through their veins.

And Our Lady of Fatima will lead them to Fatima: the grand bargain with Shia Iran that will stabilize the region between Christian, Jew, Sunni and Shia Muslim once and for all.

America must lead again...but it's time for a balanced debate

This Economist cover cartoon which accompanies the week's leading article, "The New Game" (i.e. great power competition), depicts the current state of world affairs: American dominance being challenged by the new Sino-Russian quasi-alliance.

Americans of all political and social persuasions who can't agree on many things can probably agree on at least one undeniable fact: the world doesn't feel like a warm and fuzzy place these days.

Henry Kissinger has also just written his prescription in the Wall Street Journal as to how America can recover the initiative it has now largely squandered in the Middle East.

Both articles quite aptly conclude, if even just by implying: the core problem is that America is basically reeling from the sense of loss that our botched 2003 invasion of Iraq and 2008 financial crisis produced, which in turn created much of the foreign policy timidity that has characterized Obama's second term. We've not only learned the hard way that our good intentions and firm convictions, backed up by the world's mightiest military and dominant economy, aren't quite enough to shape a global environment we can be secure and confident about; in a deeper sense, we've even begun to lose the foundations of trust in ourselves.

This is true for both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, left and right: we seem caught now between those who say we should simply surrender to our enemies without even resisting on the one hand, and those who basically say we should simply bomb everyone who doesn't like us back to the stone age on the other. Of course, there's also very little love lost between these opposite ends of the spectrum themselves: to take either camp at its word, America would truly get back on track but only for the other camp's shenanigans.

And so, instead of rising resolutely to the challenge of mastering this new world by learning the parameters and contours of a whole new ballgame, we as a nation, from our leaders (including the 2016 presidential candidates) on down, seem more preoccupied with assigning blame and pointing fingers at who we should get even with.

Now is the time for Americans to hear all sides of the story, not just the skewed partisan cacophony that masquerades as unbiased commentary, which filters, skews, and mis-contextualizes all manner of solid argument and analysis to advance goals that are, in the end, downright childish.

It's time for some real debate...

And it had better lead us, still the world's sole superpower, to an appreciation of the absolute necessity of cooperating with Russia and China, even if it means swapping concessions with them that make us feel a little less exclusively blessed by God.