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.