What a difference an altered global balance of power makes.
With Hillary Clinton having wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination, there's little doubt that her campaign is effectively posing her as Pax Americana's last, great hope. And who is the existential enemy to vanquish? Surprise, surprise!
Russia scholar Stephen Cohen blows the lid on what he deems to be a neo-McCarthyism pertaining to the new Russia-US cold war - a true paradigm shift in that it comes not from the right, but from the left. "Red-baiting" has been supplanted by "Putin-baiting", or perhaps just plain "Russia-baiting" - and Donald Trump is the prize catch.
This could end up being the supreme irony of the twilight of the lame-duck Obama administration, one that can leave a permanent mark on his historic record: entering office as a man of peace and disarmament, as he leaves he will have been dragged into an unwinnable and downright preposterous confrontation with the sole adversary that can easily and rapidly kill tens of millions of Americans.
In recent weeks, the Washington establishment of which Hillary is the representative in the 2016 race has steadily reached panic mode with respect to its faltering gambit for supremacy against the Kremlin - and of course, it's lashed out.
Though the US will never admit it, it appears that the botched coup against Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan of July 15 was, if not aided and abetted by covert elements of the US military and intelligence bureaucracy, then at least tolerated by the Washington "deep state" as being in line with US interests: how very convenient to be rid of Erdogan just as he was suddenly (and alarmingly) cozying up to Putin again!
This explains the harshness of Ankara's backlash: even as Obama was busy imploring Erdogan that Washington (and pro-Western Turkish exiles) had nothing to do with the putsch, the latter's own intelligence apparatus was unveiling foolproof evidence that some US military personnel stationed in Turkey as part of NATO not only had some foreknowledge of the plot by renegade Turkish officers, but didn't do anything to warn the regime.
Innocently, of course, you can argue that this was a case of American negligence or, to be more noble and altruistic, a prudent refusal to interfere in an internal Turkish affair (yeah, right - as if Washington can be counted on to not meddle in other people's sovereign matters). But when you couple this with leaked reports that it was Russian intelligence which tipped Erdogan off just before a team of heavily armed commandos backed by air and armored assets stormed his vacation resort, then an unmistakable conclusion has to be reached: America is no friend, but Russia is a lifesaver.
If you place the whole Turkish fiasco in context of what came just before it and what has transpired afterwards, it's clear that it's thrown haywire the Washington deep state's whole strategy to contain and roll back Moscow's recent strategic gains in both Europe and the Middle East.
The shock of Brexit back on June 23-24 handed Putin a geopolitical victory of tremendous significance, if even primarily in the realm of public perception: a tangible split between US and European foreign policy (including joint security policy). Moscow had initially feared the ramifications of the UK's "leave" vote on its heavily British-linked finances, but when the smoke had cleared as the world's central banker cartel calmed the waters of investor nerves, this proved negligible, leaving the Kremlin with an unadulterated strategic win: the West's own electorate was now in open revolt against the US imperial project of forcing liberal democratization upon an unwilling Islamic world - specifically, against the collateral damage of unwanted Muslim refugee flows that this had caused.
The wider ripple effect in western Eurasia was swift and gave Russia quite a windfall: that very weekend after Brexit, Mr. Erdogan, having realized that his effective blackmailing of the EU on the refugee crisis had failed, telephoned Putin an apology for the downing of the Russian fighter-bomber over the Syrian border in November, which had severed their bilateral ties by putting Turkey firmly (though provisionally) in the Western camp. Turkey was then rewarded for this rapprochement with an ISIS bombing of Istanbul airport - carried out by Turkic-speaking citizens of former Soviet republics (including one of the Russian Federation itself). We can surmise that Russo-Turkish détente and cooperation (including intelligence cooperation) mushroomed immediately and drastically in the wake of this incident.
From those events in the last week of June, the situation unfolded even more tellingly. In early July, Ankara began making not-so-secret overtures to its arch-nemesis, Bashar al-Assad's despised Syrian regime in Damascus. This ratcheted up the pressure on anti-regime rebels in northwestern Syria, who had long funneled fighters and weaponry into that front through the porous Turkish border with US and Turkish support; it also threw a monkey wrench in US plans against ISIS in the country, which depended on the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast whose activity had long alarmed Turkey, whose still-simmering Kurdish insurgency in the southeast made it imperative to restrict Kurdish militancy beyond the mountainous Syrian (not to mention Iraqi) frontier.
Now that Putin had become Erdogan's champion against Kurdish autonomy in Syria - and had extracted the price of his Turkish counterpart's relaxation of hostility towards Assad - the US was cornered. Its anti-ISIS air campaign from Incirlik Air Force Base in southern Turkey continued and intensified with Turkish support, but the endgame had suddenly soured: even the Turks had now given up on ousting Assad, and seemed content to watch Kurds die taking ISIS territory in the knowledge that they could be expediently undercut in negotiations later.
This dramatically tightened the noose around the entire US effort in Syria, which even after the setbacks foisted on it by Putin's intervention last winter had not really given up somehow getting Mr. Assad to step down, and had thus deliberately shunned cooperation with Russia. And unless Washington now changed tack on Moscow's policy in Syria, it risked undermining its position in the political process at the cessation of hostilities, which would render even its most resounding military successes against ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra hollow victories. Seeing the writing on the wall, in the first week of July Obama clearly resolved to finally start working with Putin on the Syrian crisis.
Knowing that its president would be negotiating with the Kremlin on such a central strategic front largely on the latter's terms, the Washington deep state sought to ramp up American leverage: it goaded Obama to use the July 8-9 NATO Warsaw summit as a platform to project with fanfare an unprecedented US military deployment on Russia's very frontiers - the Baltics - as well as host Russian archrival Poland. Surely such a show of American firepower on his own front door would wisen Putin up to the dangers of not playing along with US plans in the Middle East - even now; it would leave him - and by extension Erdogan - little choice but to start doing (and still do) America's bidding in Syria, after all.
Only sadly for the CIA and DOD, that's exactly the kind of frightened overreaction that an old KGB spook has a trained nose for. While Putin must have been dismayed that such hopeful proposals being floated for a joint US-Russia command center against ISIS and Al Nusra in Jordan would be dashed to pieces by the usual neocon suspects at Langley and the Pentagon (in league with residual holdouts at Foggy Bottom), it helps his cause immensely that such high-level American incoherence or even confusion is becoming harder and harder to hide: meeting with Secretary of State Kerry in Moscow less than two weeks ago, he gave an unmistakable impression that Washington is at last coming round to treating Russia as an equal partner in resolving the Syrian conflict and fighting terrorism; that Kerry's actual proposal still had regime change as a precondition for joint military action was so completely contrary to the spirit of the dialogue that it effectively paints the top US diplomat (and by extension, Obama himself) as the affable velvet glove covering the sinister iron fist of the neocons. Thus is the Obama administration coming off as one that sincerely desires peace, and that at this point almost as sincerely seeks Russian cooperation and trust in achieving it, yet remains in thrall to the executive bureaucracy - military and civilian alike - that's slower than anyone else to question its own imperial prerogatives.
Against this backdrop, the Turkish putsch has opened up a potentially lethal crack in the whole edifice of American credibility in the Middle East and quite possibly western Eurasia more generally. Deep down, Obama almost certainly knows that his global legacy hinges on a genuine and sustainable rapprochement with Putin; yet he's far too thinly supported and isolated in that position to act boldly on such a conviction. That's doubly so because it puts him in cahoots with Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton!
But time may be running out. With each passing week, the situation on the ground in Syria and Ukraine - and more generally western Eurasia - worsens not improves for Washington's tattered and rusted liberal imperial crusade. By such a provocation as stationing troops on the Russian border for the first time ever, our unrepentant war party is only sealing the Russian populace's patriotic embrace of their powerful and charismatic leader. By our own expert admission, even with this kind of tripwire to supposedly deter Russian aggression, Moscow retains enormous escalation dominance.
Neither will it help that such countries as Poland and the Baltics are themselves among the most anti-liberal members of the EU who in fact have the deepest misgivings about the more progressive aspects of Western postmodernism that the American empire aggressively promotes, namely sexual permissiveness and open borders.
The die may be cast on a Russian-dominated Europe and Middle East, and not even Obama's cool-headed reason and temperament might block its realization. War or not, Russia finds herself increasingly united under a beloved leader and pitted up against an increasingly fractured Western and American imperium that mistrusts its own subjects. Neither Moscow nor Putin himself asked for such a long and pitiful string of US blunders which have conspired to put it back in the position of a traditional great power predisposed to strategic hegemony in continental Eurasia; but as events run their natural and irrevocable course, considering the self-imposed straitjackets that the administrators within the Beltway operate under, no other outcome becomes plausible.
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