A year later, why the Russian intervention in Syria could just be beginning

On the anniversary of Russia's entry into the Syrian civil war, and little more than half a year since Moscow announced the end of its initial mission, it appears increasingly likely that this whole operation in the shattered country is actually just beginning.

With additional Russian warplanes heading back to Syria, it probably won't be long before the previous peak of Russian aerial bombardment over the course of the last year is reached or even exceeded.

The key difference now is that the political process to end the war is all but dead in the wake of the collapse of ceasefire talks with the US, leaving the Kremlin with no choice but military re-escalation. Contrary to the popular Western narrative, Vladimir Putin intervened in Syria out of perceived vital interest, not some vain desire to reassert Russian power or make up for the supposed Russian quagmire in Ukraine. And it is out of this same vital interest - preventing the fall of the Syrian regime to an insurgency increasingly dominated by radical jihadists - that he will now double down for a longer fight.

The West has never understood or appreciated the Russian view that even if a so-called "moderate opposition" takes center stage in a new Syrian government after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, it will very likely be muscled out within months by extremists with whom it was joined in a marriage of convenience so long as both still had a common foe in Damascus. Moscow entered the conflict with few illusions about what had to be done: these "moderates" had to be brought to heel first, so as to be forced into a choice between reconciliation with the regime and a continued devil's bargain with their jihadist bedfellows.

If there's any miscalculation Putin has made, it has been to underestimate the extent to which the whole Syrian crisis had long since become a strategic red line for Saudi Arabia in its deteriorating proxy war with Iran. To the former, any settlement short of Assad's removal was and still is considered a major blow to the millennial Sunni Arab supremacy over Shi'ism in the heart of the Islamic world. As such, Riyadh has taken great care to steer the exiled Syrian opposition in the direction of a blatantly sectarian goal of Sunni Arab majoritarianism in a post-Assad government, with few if any explicit concessions to minority rights in one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse pieces of real estate in the region.

Had the Syrian peace process been driven primarily by feuding Syrians, it would have been a rather simple affair for Russia to mediate: in exchange for the regime's granting of full amnesty for rebels and dissidents and some limited posts in government (including more federalized local administrations) for their leaders, the insurgency would turn its guns away from Damascus and towards Al Nusra Front and especially ISIS.

But the Saudis would have none of this. Knowing full well that those rebel groups with the most leverage over Damascus and Moscow were the very ones it supported most fervently in an uncompromising stance against Assad, Riyadh corralled the Syrian nationalists into its maximalist straitjacket, such that by the time the opposition entered the Geneva peace process last winter, it was effectively little more than a front for the Gulf kingdom's regional agenda.

Clearly the Saudis wanted to keep the pressure on Assad at a very high level and retain a sense of escalation capacity; their new crown prince, the hotheaded young Muhammad bin Salman, was keen on acquiring the credentials of a tough military leader capable of duking it out with Iran (especially in Yemen) increasingly independently of the US. He seems to have pushed his father, the more circumspect King Salman himself, into an overall more hawkish stance vis-à-vis the Russo-Iranian axis than would have been advisable; his confidence, however, was apparently founded on an outdated perception of the depth of American involvement in the region generally and the resolve of the Obama administration to enforce the Iran nuclear deal specifically.

It has finally gradually emerged over the course of 2016 - in the wake of the final cutoff of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in January - just how much of US-Saudi policy since mid-2015 has been predicated on a false assessment of leverage over Tehran with regards to sanctions over the Islamic republic's nuclear weapons program. When the nuclear deal was secured with Russian brokership at the UN in July 2015 - at virtually the same time that Iran was coordinating with Moscow's planned foray into Syria - it was widely thought in Washington that Tehran's desire for renewed access to international markets and investment would outweigh its interest in Assad's survival in Syria (a point on which even Ayatollah Khamenei was expected to be flexible if it came to it).

This has turned out to be the central blunder of the Obama administration - one that it seems to have tried to hide or downplay with its own media and its Mideast allies alike, but which has become increasingly hard to do so.

As Saudi-Iranian relations nosedived over the execution of Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr around new year's, an enraged Tehran saw fit to test the limits of US resolve to ward off the creeping Russo-Iranian usurpation of the longstanding American-Saudi "power couple" status in the region. The campaign to prop up Assad noticeably intensified and scored key successes against the rebels in the following weeks, culminating in the first US-Russian ceasefire agreement of late February; in the meantime the Iranians brazenly stepped up their provocations against US naval personnel and vessels in the Gulf, kidnapping a group of American sailors who were then released in negotiations that involved a secret reimbursement of $400 million of previously frozen Iranian funds.

Since then, through two failed Syrian ceasefires, the Russo-Iranian position has gradually but undeniably further improved at the expense of the American-Saudi one, both in the Levant and more broadly across western Eurasia as a whole. The tectonic paradigm shift is not military or political but socioeconomic: as Europe grapples with the double whammy of a creaky financial system and an unassimilable mass of Muslim refugees fueling a nativist-populist backlash, a resilient Russia's expanding commercial ties with upstart giants China and India make it far less isolated than Western sanctions purport to make it; Moscow has matched Saudi-led OPEC tit-for-tat in the production and market-share battle, notably stealing critical Chinese business from Riyadh since 2014. Iran, too, is increasingly in cahoots with Delhi and Beijing as well as Moscow: the great Eurasian powers are collectively becoming so self-sufficient in their economic and geopolitical heft that it's actually the stagnant and confused West which is beginning to look isolated.

This has enormous implications for Saudi Arabia and its junior Gulf Sunni monarchies: their principal livelihood having been decimated by none other than their great ally and protector (the shale-fracking revolution in the US), whose public has turned increasingly hostile (the US Congress' overriding of Obama's veto of JASTA against the Saudi government), they could soon feel hung out to dry by Washington so badly that they'll have to reconsider the entire basis of their foreign and security policy.

All this means that the Russian operation in Syria, now ramping up once more after a brief halt in March, has far more potential sustainability than the West and especially the US assumes to be the case. The combination of Russian and Iranian austerity and zeal in the face of American fecklessness, halfheartedness, and confusion on top of Saudi exposure and vulnerability in a chronically cheap-oil environment marked by dramatically elevated Western Islamophobia - to say nothing of the badly frayed US-Turkish relationship in the wake of the failed July putsch against president Recep Tayyip Erdogan - points to an irreversible decline of the regional power structure which has enthroned Washington atop the Middle East for four decades. Perhaps the bigger question already is how badly these developments will harm US influence further afield, in both Europe and further eastern Asia.

Russia for its part (and Putin specifically) has little cause for sudden dramatic escalation of any considerable magnitude; its airpower and other support of the Syrian regime's war effort (to include a ground presence of advisers and limited deployment of combat personnel) has the wherewithal to be incrementally upgraded and augmented in such a way that the political and diplomatic aspects of an intensifying "great game" between regional and global powers - founded ultimately upon socioeconomic factors across vast lands and habitats - will predetermine and undergird the actual military strokes and strikes (and counterstrokes and counterstrikes).

In that regard, it's probably little wonder that Obama and Kerry have been reduced to the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off when it comes to the Syrian problem: having long ago been dealt bad cards in the poker match, at long last their bluffs are being called by their opposing numbers who are ever more confident of holding the winning hands.

As Syrian revolution finally dies, fate of Islam is what matters now

The Syrian army has launched a ground offensive to retake Aleppo, in what could be a major turning point in the civil war. Pro-regime media outlets have already trumpeted the retaking of a key district in the central "old town" sector of the city, though the sustainability of this gain will only be confirmed in the coming day or two. Although the regime and its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies are eager to occupy rebel territory, it also suits the Axis of Fatima to draw the Sunni insurgents out into the open in bold counterattacks that expose them to withering air power.

The longer this continues, the more Moscow corners Washington into caving into its demands for a combined front against the terrorist groups ISIS and Al Nusra Front as a precondition for any letup in the brutal attrition of rebel-held Aleppo's remaining civilian population.

With reports leaking out that the deep-pocketed Gulf Sunni monarchies may arm the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons, now is definitely the time to press home the advantage of virtually unchallenged air power.

In fact, the Syrian air force's higher rate of jet losses since spring already indicates the presence of effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles throughout rebel-held territory, so it's questionable just how much more of a difference the stepped-up aid being proposed will make. The regime's aerial warfare tactics have doubtless constantly shifted and adjusted in the face of the growing SAM threat.

A bigger stretch is whether anything at all can be done to significantly dent Russian air dominance: not only do the Russian jets include advanced models like the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35, but even their older Su-24s and Su-25s doubtless employ more sophisticated countermeasures against anti-aircraft threats. It's also likely that should push come to shove, the Kremlin will unleash its long-range heavy bombers like the Tupolev Tu-22M3 to drop larger numbers of massive "bunker busters" (possibly from Iranian airbases again) that have wreaked such havoc on underground civilian shelters and subterranean rebel installations in Aleppo in recent days; these high-flying supersonic beasts need something more substantial than man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to seriously target.

Only a massive jihadist counteroffensive can now save Aleppo from falling back into Assad's clutches and thereby effectively reducing the Syrian opposition to a predominantly rural insurgency with a glaring preponderance of radical Islamists. Absent such a dramatic turn of events yet again, in a month or so pro-regime forces will have neutralized Aleppo without necessarily occupying most of the rebel eastern sector - they simply need to constrict all potential pathways leading in and out of those areas (for both people and supplies) so tightly that it won't be plausible anymore for the rebel-jihadist alliance to ever recover from the encirclement.

At that point, Damascus and Moscow will have a powerful bargaining chip: they can demand that any remaining "moderate" opposition join a proposed national unity government if they still desire to salvage anything at all from their long and ultimately failed struggle for Western-style democracy. The only alternative would be to be ground down slowly and painfully over a further period of months as a pocket once containing close to half a million inhabitants is drained down to potentially less than 100,000 (from 250,000-300,000 currently) - while being surrounded by increasingly diehard resistance that can only be characterized by deepening radical Islamicization, anyway.

But in fact, even the best-case scenario of a new rebel-jihadist breach of the reimposed siege probably wouldn't be much more auspicious for whatever's left of the original Syrian spring. Such a victory will be the product of such a brutal pitched battle that it can only further solidify the jihadist extremist element of the resistance as the heart and soul of the whole cause. In that case, Messrs. Assad and Putin might even cynically allow the ruins of eastern Aleppo to become the premier magnet for Sunni terrorist and militant groups in the whole region, so as to dig in for the binary struggle between secular dictatorship and reactionary theocracy that they've always claimed the West must make; it would help Ayatollah Khamenei, as well, for Aleppo to serve the same purpose for Iran's new "Shia liberation army" drafted from the entire region that a bombed-out Beirut played for Lebanese Hezbollah (and its Iranian sponsors) three decades ago.

For the Axis of Fatima, crushing the Sunni extremists and terrorists would be really nice; but swaying the rest of the world that they're on the frontlines of blocking a global descent into medieval barbarism would be even better. The future looks sunny either way: between themselves and their most ferocious enemies, they have all but strangled the Syrian revolution stillborn and, with it, snuffed out the dying breath of the vaunted Arab spring. That great political wind which seemed to blow so hopefully in the liberal West's direction has at last settled on a new course of a colossal struggle for the fate of Islam in the third millennium.

Obama's real mistake in Syria: not renouncing regime change

The unfolding humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe in the Syrian city of Aleppo has given Barack Obama the occasion to reflect publicly on his fateful choice not to more deeply involve America in the destructive five-and-a-half-year civil war that has killed up to half a million people, displaced over 10 million others (internally and externally), and even spread its destabilizing effects to another continent (Europe).

But Obama seems to have been so consumed by the question of what would have happened had he intervened with direct military action in Syria that he's overlooked the bigger question: having renounced military coercion against the Syrian regime, why didn't he simply renounce regime change altogether?

The fact of the matter is, the Syrian conflict has dragged on only because Washington, even now, still supports the rebellion to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Through its Gulf Arab and Turkish allies, the US has funded and armed the insurgents who otherwise would have run out of money and materiel a long time ago. The whole covert war waged by the CIA alone has consumed billions of dollars since 2011 - an effort akin to the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Quite a pity that it's all gone to an ultimately losing effort.

It's not that Obama wasn't aware that it would very likely be a losing effort. He had held his fire in 2013 partly because he already knew that if he threatened Assad, the Iranians would immediately pull out of the then still largely secret nuclear deal deliberations, and partly because even then he was fearful of how Putin might react. In hindsight, that was the moment when he should have dropped the whole policy of regime change altogether: if the US wasn't going to lead the operation itself, it could only hope that its own regional allies would be able to out-escalate Assad's allies, but Obama was already aware of Moscow's and Tehran's bottom lines, so it's somewhat baffling why he still retained a diplomatic stance that depended on them not doing the utmost (in the end) to shore up their client state in Damascus.

Of course, hindsight is always 20-20, and Obama saw other factors at the time which were more favorable to staying the course of backing the revolution's primary goal. Neither Russia nor even Iran, he thought, wanted an indefinite quagmire in Syria, and he was convinced that US support for the rebels could sustain just such a stalemate. This belief persisted even after ISIS blew the whole region up in mid-2014 and created a new urgency to get the Syrian conflict over and done with.

It turns out, though, that Obama just never gave himself that bit of extra wiggle room that a more prudent or attentive realpolitik power broker would have: instead of conceding political and diplomatic ground to lock in military gains, the US-backed rebellion in 2014 and 2015 only became more uncompromising in its demand that Assad leave immediately to face a dishonorable exile at best or a war crimes tribunal at worst. This not only made it more likely that Assad would unleash even more havoc on the opposition and suck in even more brazen Iranian and Russian support, but it also closed off the best chance for a political settlement favorable to Washington, its regional allies, and the democratic West: a removal of Assad himself without the destruction of his regime.

With Assad's back against the wall in the spring of 2015, it would have been prudent to work with Putin to secure a political transition that would end with the Baathist paramount leadership's abdication under the condition of immunity from forced exile or prosecution for war crimes. The aim would have been to perform a "brain transplant" of the regime so that its mind could be altered while leaving its body intact, thereby allowing collaboration between loyalist and opposition elements to kickstart the creation of a more democratic order under a new constitution. Much further bloodshed could have been averted if the Obama administration pressed its utmost leverage on the opposition to enter into this process without regard for Assad's or his inner circle's personal fate; absent such a change of heart and strategy by the opposition, it can only have become an increasingly desperate all-or-nothing contest for the survival of the entire Syrian state, not merely Mr. Assad, and this ensured a descent into deeper and more savage violence - to ultimately pull in the Russians on top of the Iranians in support of the regime.

Instead, as we approach the anniversary of the Russian intervention in Syria, Obama and his top policymakers are smarting from having been effectively cornered into renouncing regime change because the rebels can only realistically bargain for much less - probably little more than their mere political survival at this point. Had they seized their position of strength in early 2015 to settle for something less than they aspired to but well within their hard military capability to secure, Assad would plausibly have become a mere private citizen surrounded by his heavily armed Alawite clan and perhaps a broader Alawite enclave on the Mediterranean coast under special UN protection, wondering whether his dubious future prospects in the country make it better for him to just emigrate to Iran or Russia.

The outgoing US president will have much to think about in the coming years, but eventually he'll recognize that on Syria, in the first place, he should have paid much closer attention to the crisis to be able to more proactively drive the opposition's negotiating strategy and tactics; then perhaps he would have had the "aha" moment he now concedes may have appeared to a Churchill or even an Eisenhower.

It's Hillary's judgment that's getting bombed to oblivion in Syria

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Hillary Clinton was caught on video nearly fainting as she hurried to leave the 9/11 Memorial two weekends ago; not only was it the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, it was also the fourth anniversary of her darkest moment as Secretary of State - the storming of the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.

It's Hillary's whole foreign policy of "regime change" to eliminate secular dictators in the Middle East - which she aggressively pushed at the State Department in 2011 and 2012 - that's now being bombed to oblivion by the air forces of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his superpower patron, Vladimir Putin, in the besieged ruins of Aleppo, the Syrian city that's become the focal point of that country's five-and-a-half-year civil war.

Hillary undertook her stance against Mideast autocrats - indeed, autocrats everywhere - for declared humanitarian reasons, and for this alone she shouldn't be judged; what should always have been carefully assessed, however, is her own judgment as to how best to effect the kind of change and liberalization which her own political values and principles prioritized. You can have the highest ideals and loftiest plans to reach them in the whole world and then some, but in the end you'll be evaluated on how capably you actually executed your policies to deliver the intended results.

In this light, the further Syria polarizes between Assad's brutal regime on the one hand and the equally brutal Islamic extremists of the Al Qaeda and ISIS variety on the other, the more complete a failure Hillary's tenure as America's top diplomat is exposed to be; at the very least, it casts a dark pall over the entire basis of her campaign, which is that her experience alone qualifies her for the top job, as if experience alone equals prudence.

It gets considerably worse, of course, if you throw in her email scandal into the mix: just how much of her implicit support for Islamic extremists (so long as they were also for "regime change") was influenced by the millions poured into her "nonprofit" foundation by deep-pocketed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni clerics?

Whether she realizes it or not, Hillary's past decisions in the Middle East are now coming home to roost. The best she can hope for, in fact, is to gracefully completely flip-flop by renouncing her whole agenda of eliminating dictatorships she doesn't like without weighing the potential consequence of unleashing even worse regional and global instability.

Instead, you have to wonder if she'll be brain-dead enough - or so much in thrall to Saudi oil money and neocon bureaucrats at Langley and the Pentagon - that even now she'll propose we bomb Syria and risk a shooting war with nuclear superpower Russia.

Syria is the price America must pay for underestimating Russian power

Breaking what was quickly becoming a deafening silence on the whole issue in light of its recent dramatic turn for the worse, Obama openly admits that the Syrian civil war "haunts" him as he prepares to wrap up his eight-year presidency.

With no end to the five-and-a-half-year conflict in sight, even as fatalities approach up to half a million, such an acknowledgement from a leader known for reservation and lack of hyperbole underscores just what a disaster Syria has become for US foreign policy.

Obviously, Obama's immediate interest is to defend his own decision-making against the storm of criticism that's sure to intensify in his final months in office; this indicates that with Kerry's diplomacy having failed, he's essentially checking out of the Syrian crisis altogether.

Kerry's latest proposal that both Russia and Syria ground their warplanes in the wake of the ceasefire's collapse was nothing short of ludicrous desperation: his plea's spectacular failure has forced the poor Pentagon chiefs to yet again clarify to Congress that such a US-imposed no-fly zone amounts to a declaration of war against both Assad and Putin. A war that was already off the table against Syria alone back in 2013, and which has become sheer fantasy since Russia's intervention a year ago.

The Obama administration is now confronted with its most obvious shortcoming of the entire Syrian morass: namely, that while it's stopped pursuing regime change in Damascus, it simply can't renounce it either.

America's halfhearted commitment to this maximalist goal - removing Assad - was already plainly exposed by Obama's backtrack on the "red line" of chemical weapons use three years ago, which initially opened the door to Russia's upending of the US role in Syria. Thereafter, Washington fanned the flames of the Syrian insurgency with monetary and arms assistance via its Gulf and Turkish allies, in the ultimately accurate calculation that this would out-escalate the intensified Iranian and Hezbollah support for the Syrian regime. But everyone in Washington from Obama on down severely underestimated Putin's Russia: not only Moscow's resolve to retain its strategic outpost on the eastern Mediterranean, but even more so the raw power it would bring to bear (pun intended) to do so.

So Syria is the price America must pay to learn this lesson - except don't hold your breath that we'll actually learn it. Unless Trump first upsets Hillary and then effectively fires the entire defense-intelligence Beltway brass, we can only fall back to more halfhearted (even quarter-hearted) measures to try to achieve even more outlandish goals (i.e. booting Russia out of Ukraine); we will suffer ever more humiliating defeats that make Russia and Putin specifically look even bigger.

US now reduced to pretending it's not losing badly in Syria

As the Syrian ceasefire rapidly dissolves into little more than a diplomatic facade, a cornered Barack Obama has resorted to reminding the world that there simply isn't a plausible military solution to the Syrian conflict, as if merely pleading with the Russians, Iranians, and Syrian regime about how long and tough the fighting ahead will be can deter them now, despite having failed to do so in the past.

The problem is, this is the same Obama who confidently proclaimed a year ago that the Russians were stumbling into a quagmire like the US fiasco in Iraq by entering the already protracted Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad. As it is, a year later the situation is anything but a quagmire from Moscow's perspective.

The Kremlin has achieved its primary goal: militarily stabilizing the core areas of the Assad regime in western Syria, including the capital of Damascus in the southwest, the major cities of Homs and Hama in the west-central region, and the entire Mediterranean coast to include the largest port, Latakia in the northwest, as well as the important Russian naval installation at Tartus further south. Between these key urban areas, their interconnecting supply routes and substantial surrounding control buffers, the pro-regime coalition has essentially secured nearly two-thirds of the remaining Syrian population.

Should the shattered commercial center of Aleppo in the far north fall as well, this will jump to about three-quarters; it is recognized by all parties to the conflict that an Assad victory in Aleppo - a distinct possibility in the coming weeks - will be a potentially lethal blow to the non-ISIS insurgency trying to force him to abdicate.

With a contiguous stretch of territory from Aleppo all the way down to Damascus, the regime will have locked down the lion's share of "useful Syria" - the best farmland, the traditional centers of industry and commerce, and most especially all access to the sea. Even though ISIS will still physically control much of Syria's oil and gas reserves in the desert hinterland, whilst the rebels will retain their enclave in northwestern Idlib province and part of neighboring Aleppo province, the extent of this military victory will be such that Assad will no longer be under pressure to enact a political transition that incorporates the Syrian opposition.

At that point, the combination of military and political advantage at the disposal of the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers will be formidable: the government-held sector will be wealthier and more populous than the rebel, Kurdish, and ISIS sectors put together. It will further be aided by the fact that each of these three rival statelets will be hostile to one another, perhaps even more so than any will be to Damascus; tensions between the Kurds and the non-ISIS rebels will prove especially useful for Assad to stoke to "divide and rule" the northwestern and north-central region near the Turkish frontier.

Realistically, unless the new goal of Assad's enemies becomes outright partition, the war will essentially be over - the Russia-Iran-Syrian regime alliance will have won, the US-Turkey-Saudi-Syrian opposition coalition will have lost. Fighting will continue, but the political contest which the whole war was all about will have been decided. ISIS meanwhile will have become practically a sideshow.

Indeed, this militarily driven political conclusion to the Syrian conflict may be much closer than Obama thinks or admits. If he's still betting on a diplomatic peace process, even he should realize by now that it will largely be on Assad's, Putin's, and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's terms - in other words, practically impossible. But if there's anything his administration has demonstrated when it comes to foreign policy, it's that when all else fails, hope alone apparently becomes the fallback strategy.

So the US is now reduced to pretending that it's not losing - quite badly, to be honest - in Syria. And it will probably be all the worse precisely because its official hopeful statements are set to become ever more divorced from harsh realities on the ground.

It's all over: Syria just sent a fat F*CK YOU to America

The Syrian ceasefire isn't dead yet! So says the US and Russia - more accurately, so Washington is literally begging Moscow to agree with it that it hasn't just been punched in the face by the Syrian government with a big fat F*CK YOU written all over it...

The Syrian regime is now openly attacking US regional interests: having convinced its people that the US-led airstrike which killed nearly 100 of their brave soldiers over the weekend was a deliberate provocation - if not by the Obama administration, then at least by the CIA and/or Pentagon as part of covert Washington's long-running clandestine war for "regime change" - the Assad government is ruthlessly making it known that it wants to stick it to the hated Zionist entity before the entire international community.

What better way to do it than to destroy a UN aid convoy just as the UN General Assembly is convening its annual conclave in New York, with Syria and the refugee crisis the main topics?

Notwithstanding the standard denials from Damascus, it's absolutely obvious that the attack on the column of UN humanitarian assistance trucks near the besieged cauldron of Aleppo - and apparently a stationary support installation as well - was carefully premeditated to have the maximum destructive effect on the already defunct US-Russia ceasefire of September 12. This merciless multiple-wave bombardment of noncombatants, to pointedly include those who came to the rescue of those mauled by the first strike, has been a hallmark of the Syrian air force's most enraged outbursts for the past five years; it leaves no trace of doubt that this was a personal message Mr. Assad was sending to Obama and Kerry.

"WE'VE HAD IT with your refusal to renounce your FUTILE policy of regime change...we're now entitled to more of our own "accidents" against your imperialist interests and proxies on our own sovereign soil...F*CK YOU...YOU ZIONIST PIGS...COME AND GET US NOW! WE ARE READY TO MURDER YOU AND ANY OF YOUR FRIENDS!"

So how will Obama respond? More accurately, how will he try to shove his own head in the sand now as the Syrian fire reignites and burns out of control?

If at any time hope alone has been a foreign policy, that describes the American situation in Syria right now.

It's all over, folks...September 20, 2016 will be remembered as the day the US cop got its rear end kicked out of the hood that is the contemporary Middle East.

It's all downhill from here - in Syria, with Iran, in the China Seas, and last but not least in Ukraine and central and eastern Europe...

The Beltway defense-intelligence complex must have its revenge - somehow, somewhere - and very soon.

Because with Trump rising in the polls, the next regime change will be here in Washington.

Syrian ceasefire hangs by bare thread

Less than a week after it began, the Syrian ceasefire hangs by a bare thread.

Pro-regime airstrikes have resumed against rebel-held eastern Aleppo, a day after a US-led coalition raid apparently mistakenly killed scores of Syrian government troops. This against the backdrop of what the Russians claim to be preparations by the rebels for a new counterattack to break the government siege of Aleppo.

The US-led airstrike at remote eastern desert outpost Deir el-Zour on Saturday the 17th is highly problematic: even assuming that the target was thought to be an ISIS facility, it would have been an extremely rare (if not very first) instance of an American raid on the terror group in an area where its only opponent on the ground is the Syrian army. Just what in the world were American and coalition airmen effectively trying to help the Assad regime for?

As such, the incident will probably go down with the Syrian and Russian public as a deliberate provocation - a propaganda coup that Damascus and Moscow are both clearly pushing through their respective state media, so as to gain political cover to become even more inflexible regarding the nebulous sticking points of the ceasefire on their end, namely the delivery of humanitarian aid to east Aleppo. And today's resumption of airstrikes against the besieged rebel enclave is an indication that they're ready to take the kid gloves off.

Having already apologized for the botched raid, the US is now protesting that it in fact notified the Russians in advance about it; while this indicates a lack of coordination between the Russian command in Syria and the regime's local units which were hit, it's sure to give Moscow a pretext to demand that Washington restrict the Western coalition's air activity in the general area of Deir el-Zour (until such time as the joint operations center against ISIS and Al Nusra is established, if at all).

The Axis of Fatima - the Moscow-Tehran-Damascus nexus - was in a clear position of military strength when it acceded to the September 9 accord between John Kerry and Sergey Lavrov; Damascus at least may now have decided that it's time to repay the Deir el-Zour incident by reminding the rebels and their US and Saudi backers just how inferior their bargaining position is in the main Aleppo theater.

Since both sides have reportedly been breaking the truce here and there for days already, the Syrian regime can now resume "barrel bomb" attacks on eastern Aleppo while still appearing reasonably committed to a general "cessation of hostilities" - after all, no rational party can take so much provocation lying down, however otherwise it remains open to peaceful resolution. That makes it more likely that the rebels will respond in kind, and before long a new cycle of escalation will bring a nasty end to the ceasefire altogether. As of this moment, it will be a miracle if anything remains of the truce at all in another week's time.

Obama and Kerry can now plead all they want with Putin and Lavrov that one unfortunate incident doesn't tip the balance of onus for full implementation of the truce against the US; more realistically, events this past weekend will constrict Washington's freedom of action on the Syrian issue even more in relation to its desired end goal of a pro-Western democracy.

Syrian ceasefire may only delay a crushing US defeat by Russia

Despite a five-day lull in most of the fighting in Syria on account of the latest US-Russia ceasefire deal, a large-scale resumption of the conflict looks increasingly likely to break out as early as next week, notwithstanding the mutual interest of Washington and Moscow to continue with further incremental truces (i.e. 48-72 hours).

That's because the fundamental underlying disagreement looks increasingly impossible to resolve: the US simply won't impose costs on the so-called "moderate rebels" for not breaking cleanly with the former Al Nusra Front, and until it proves it will, there's absolutely no reason for Russia to ease the Assad regime's stranglehold on Aleppo by allowing humanitarian supplies to reach the besieged rebel eastern sector of the key city which is the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war.

Indeed, Moscow and Damascus now have every pretext to strengthen, not loosen, their encirclement of Aleppo: should they finally lose patience with American and Saudi foot-dragging over the "moderate rebel" impasse, they must be in a strong position to rapidly re-escalate their aerial bombardment of the civilian support infrastructure of eastern Aleppo in such a way that the 300,000 anti-government residents there can readily be forced into a "surrender-or-starve" choice.

This was, after all, the dire prospect that the entire anti-Assad insurgency and, even more to the point, its US and regional Sunni backers, found themselves facing when they desperately tried to secure a truce last week - and ultimately did so only at the price of agreeing to severe Russian and Syrian demands to completely cut off Al Nusra, which they're now clearly loathe to follow through on.

As a consequence, it now appears increasingly likely that all the ceasefire will end up doing is delaying the US-backed opposition's inevitable final rout from Aleppo by an additional two to four weeks. Putin and Assad can't sit on their thumbs forever. They know exactly what they're looking for, which with each passing day becomes more and more remote a prospect: that Al Nusra and its closest extremist affiliates will finally get booted out of the joint operational command center of the umbrella Islamist militant coalition called Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which has dominated the anti-Assad insurgency in northern Syria since its formation in early 2015.

In other words, what should now be taking place is a full-scale purge of the most powerful rebel coalition's best commanders and intelligence operatives - because they're members of Al Nusra. But quite the contrary, it appears that other key Sunni fundamentalist factions which comprise the Army of Conquest (notably the proto-Taliban Ahrar al-Sham) have put their own feet down in support of Al Nusra - they have expressly refused to join the ceasefire at all. In doing so, they've made it practically impossible to meaningfully distinguish a "moderate" rebel group from an "extremist" one: not only are these jihadist bedfellows of Al Nusra effectively a clandestine liaison between the suicidal fanatics and the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA), but it's so obvious to just about anyone observing the conflict in northern Syria that even among the secular remnants of the original Arab spring and Syrian revolution, Al Nusra itself has gained tremendous popularity and legitimacy.

All this makes it quite clear that both "moderate" and "extremist" rebels still hope to maintain maximum ambiguity as to what distinction can be drawn between them on the battlefield - and by extension, that they still want to use the truce to strengthen themselves so as to become capable of breaking the regime's siege of Aleppo yet again.

When the US agreed to crack down on the insurgency's links to Al Nusra a week ago, it did so knowing that arm-twisting its proxies into compliance would be difficult to impossible - yet for Kerry and ultimately Obama, even this was far better than an unchecked Russo-Syrian onslaught that could well have obliterated much of the remainder of eastern Aleppo by now, unleashing another few tens of thousands of refugees.

Now, just a week later, and barely five days into the actual cessation of hostilities, the clock is already ticking down - fast. The US has reportedly threatened Russia that it will pull out of the agreement to jointly bomb Al Nusra (and ISIS for that matter) if humanitarian aid to Aleppo remains blocked as of early next week; this is obviously a media ploy to make it sound as though Moscow and Damascus are the parties blocking the path to resolving the Syrian conflict.

But in fact, it's obvious why the Russians are now making such hay about Washington deliberately withholding the actual terms of the Kerry-Lavrov agreement of September 9 from the rest of the world, not least the UN: disclosing these would unmistakably show that over the past week, it's actually been the US which has completely failed to keep its promise to extirpate from the Syrian opposition its CIA and Pentagon-brokered Al Nusra links.

And so here we are - Moscow and Washington once again reduced to making veiled (and soon not-so-veiled) threats or ultimatums against each other.

Except it's Putin's Kremlin whose guns are actually loaded to back up its diplomatic pressure, while Obama in the White House remains - as ever - essentially clueless as to the sheer futility of leaving policy implementation and details to his entrenched Beltway bureaucracy, which appears more set than ever on its course of suicidal stumbling into the claws of the Russian bear.

Will latest Syrian ceasefire work?

The US and Russia have struck a new truce after another round of marathon diplomacy between Secretary of State John Kerry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Effective September 12, Assad will stop bombing rebel-held areas while Washington will join Moscow's air campaign against Al Nusra Front as well as ISIS.

For the US, a deal was very badly and urgently needed for the second time in little more than half a year, as its rebel proxies were again on the verge of complete defeat in and around the strategically crucial city of Aleppo, which over the course of 2016 has become the focal point of the entire five-and-a-half-year conflict. Though this latest cessation of hostilities arguably buys time once more for the stubborn insurgency against Assad to recover and gather strength for the next round of fighting, one can easily see why the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers could use a breather, as well.

Putin and Assad will seek to use the truce to lock down their renewed encirclement of rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which has just been reimposed in recent days after a month-long breach by Al Nusra and its allies.  Given how dangerously exhausting the back-and-forth fighting around the city has been in the last two months for his badly overextended army, Assad has good reason to bring his expenditures of blood and treasure down to a bare minimum, while securing as much political cover as possible for his hard-fought, then forfeited, and then finally recovered territorial gains. By finally joining forces with Russia against Al Nusra, the US has signaled that it has overruled rebel aspirations to militarily wrest the city from the regime, as such an effort has become utterly dependent on Al Nusra and its extremist affiliates.

Instead, the remaining secular and "moderate" Islamist opposition must now dissociate completely from the fanatical jihadists whose battlefield prowess has made them increasingly popular with their own constituents. This could be a major stumbling block to renewed peace negotiations at Geneva. However, it's one thing to admire Al Nusra diehards because they give pro-regime forces such hell; it's something else altogether to actually join them. Both Moscow and Washington must be hoping that their alliance against Al Nusra, even if hazy on the specifics, will at least force on all Sunni jihadists a choice of whether to throw in their lot with an implacable aspiring emirate (or even caliphate) or instead take a gamble on a political process that restricts their leverage against the Syrian regime.

It's precisely this loss of precious leverage - given how prominent Al Nusra has become to the whole anti-Assad insurgency - that was clearly the biggest objection raised by those elements in the Washington bureaucracy, that is to say the CIA and the residual neocon holdouts of the State and Defense Departments, against any deal with the Kremlin whatsoever. On the surface, the very fact that this agreement actually pulled through at all is an initial indication of their crushing defeat.

More realistically, though, since Kerry deliberated intensively and for hours on end with the agreement's US governmental stakeholders - read: the neocon bureaucrats - before giving Lavrov the final go-ahead, these sore losers grilled him mercilessly to try to tweak the implementation of the new truce yet again against the Russians. In fact this is definitely why it took so long: one can easily imagine the vicious back-and-forth wrangling between poor Kerry and CIA director John Brennan as well as Defense Secretary Ash Carter, both of whom essentially consider Putin, not ISIS, as the true existential threat to America.

In the end, Kerry would have had to lay down the law: "Look guys, this is our last chance...if we don't get this deal tonight, the Syrian revolution will be exterminated...how many times do I have to repeat that we are NOT going to escalate a proxy war against the Kremlin?? We don't even have the Turks to help us do that anymore! I cannot offer Mr. Lavrov anything that the Russians will soon find out to be our duplicity or trickery...we cut off Al Nusra NOW and FOREVER, and live with the consequences of that...because the only alternatives are far worse...that is final!"

So will the latest Syrian ceasefire work? The answer probably rests on one thing and perhaps only one thing: Will Obama finally be able to rein in his deep-state apparatus?

Or perhaps Syria will actually work out in his last months in office, but that embittered apparatus will instead strike in Ukraine. The last thing anyone can expect is for it to take a humiliating blow lying down...someone, somewhere, must pay for this gut-wrenching Syrian fiasco in blood.

Lame-duck Obama may now be at Putin's mercy

Now that it seems all but certain that Obama will be unable to reach a grand accord with Putin, the window for a peaceful settlement of the crises in both Ukraine and Syria is steadily closing, opening up a small but growing possibility that both will explode in his final months in office.

By refusing to stand up to the deep state of the Beltway, which is furiously smarting from setbacks against Russia in the proxy wars of Ukraine and Syria, Obama may be sealing the fate of his legacy, at least in the short to medium term: instead of cutting its losses, the US is setting a firm course to lose even more hard-power influence in Europe and the Middle East.

In the coming days and weeks, as it becomes clear that Assad won't step down even as part of a political transition, his most implacable enemies - the CIA and the Saudis - will seriously consider launching a brand-new covert escalation of proxy warfare against Damascus and its allies Tehran and Moscow.

The problem? They've lost Turkey, since Erdogan has all but settled for his own sphere of influence in northern Syria at the Kurds' expense in return for backing off overthrowing Assad. And unless he can be convinced to risk an all-out war with Russian and Assad-backed Kurdish militants, he won't be swayed back into the regime-change-at-all-costs camp.

This puts Langley and Riyadh in a quandary: concede defeat, and their longstanding power-broking nexus in the region would suffer a seemingly fatal reputational blow with both allies and enemies; yet if they escalate with neither full buy-in from the Obama administration nor the critical cooperation of Ankara, they could bring an even worse reversal to overall American and Saudi interests than a mere loss of credibility. Unfortunately for Obama, he loses either way.

That's because the only sensible way forward at this point is to follow Turkey and get fully behind a deal with Russia: not only would it ensure the success of the main US objective of defeating ISIS, but it would give both the US and Saudi Arabia a similar opening to Turkey's to shape facts on the ground in that vast chunk of Syrian real estate that Assad has given up militarily recapturing.

Instead, caving to the sore losers inside the Beltway and their friends in Riyadh, the lame-duck president is reducing what little leverage America has left over the Syrian peace process to virtually nothing. This increases the chance that even he will finally get suckered into an ill-advised eleventh-hour military intervention against Assad, making a bad outcome for the US even worse. For one thing, such an act will give Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus a green light to mercilessly exterminate the remnants of the Syrian revolution from the face of the earth.

The inconvenient truth is that Mr. Assad enjoys far more support among the Syrian population than any one secular or Islamist opposition faction individually, and will thus retain enormous clout even in a future democratized and possibly federalized system. And because the long civil war has largely purged regime-dominated regions of dissent, even as it has also solidified Assad's standing as the most credible protector of its Christian, Druze, Shiite, and Alawite minorities, the Baath dictator probably has even more potential electoral support now than at any previous point of the conflict, when, before the Russian intervention, he  perhaps would have acceded to Western demands to step down provided he be allowed to run for the presidency under a new constitution - which of course the CIA and its regional Sunni proxies have never considered an acceptable endgame.

Alas, if there's anything Obama should have learned by now about foreign policy, it's that unless he himself exercises decisive initiative on the world stage and as commander-in-chief, sooner or later he'll find himself dancing to someone else's tune. When he failed to enforce his infamous "red line" on Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013, i.e. by following through on what was essentially a pledge to appease his own defense-intelligence establishment, he effectively allowed himself to be corralled into the present quandary by Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs instead. Yet now, having refused to wholeheartedly embrace the Russo-Iranian program for Syria, he's left himself vulnerable to being yanked violently back the other way by the Beltway apparatus.

This same dynamic is no less true of Ukraine - a crisis which from the get-go has been intricately intertwined with the one in the Middle East.

There can now be little doubt that the unusually aggressive US effort to topple the democratically elected pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 - even despite its slide into police-state repression - was a direct consequence of the Washington establishment's desire for revenge against Moscow for one-upping it on the Syrian chemical weapons issue, which had thrown US-Saudi designs in the Levant haywire. When this new intervention, which offended Russian interests far more directly, predictably backfired, too, Obama was caught off guard yet again: it was as though he sleepwalked right into the bear's claws because he let the neocon war party operate his defense and foreign policy apparatus on virtual autopilot with regards to the ex-Soviet space.

Unsurprisingly, given how little stomach the American public has for expending blood or even treasure on places they can't even find on a map, Ukraine like Syria became another halfhearted interventionist quagmire for the White House in 2014, as the Kremlin punished American insolence in its frontyard by annexing Crimea and then taking a bite of eastern Ukraine proper.

The two Minsk accords - the first in September 2014 and the second in February 2015 - have thus far held a tenuous overall truce despite chronic spikes of violence between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region, on top of the occasional flareup of tensions around Crimea and over ethnic Russian strongholds like Odessa and the neighboring Russian-Moldovan enclave of Transnistria. But this uneasy draw may now be drawing to a close.

Having thoroughly - though hardly surprisingly - disappointed its Western sponsors with its essentially unreformed corrupt patronage system, the "pro-Europe" post-Maidan government in Kiev is standing on its last legs of legitimacy with both its own people and its foreign backers. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has now unilaterally essentially withdrawn from Minsk II by demanding that Russia relinquish control of the Donbas border even before any political concession is made with regards to the separatists' autonomy in a new federation. This follows a sharp increase in daily violence along the Ukrainian-separatist front lines that has held up all summer.

Yet more activity involving "ceasefires" or "truces" and international "monitors" is being reported with every passing week, and although Russia and Ukraine have thankfully moved back from the brink yet again after the latter's alleged sabotage incursion into Crimea last month, the overarching geopolitical situation which underpins the localized violence has only worsened, especially from Kiev's perspective.

The way things are going, by 2018 or 2019 at the latest, without an implementation of Minsk II, the breakaway Donbas People's Republic (DPR) will de facto have either set up a completely independent full-fledged government recognized by the Kremlin, or worse, Moscow will have finally said "to hell with you" to Kiev and annexed the region outright.

Poroshenko and Putin alike both see that the West's resolve in upholding its sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict is fraying at the seams, despite yet another renewal this summer; the true storm cloud which is gathering over the former, however, is that the clock is ticking on his powerful Western and American political support.

Should Donald Trump win the US presidency, it would embolden already-surging populists in France, Germany, and Italy in their 2017 and 2018 elections - and this on top of Brexit. Like Trump, these continental European neo-nationalists in particular are strongly opposed to the whole confrontation with Moscow, and in fact the Kremlin has for years cultivated ties with them to blunt Anglo-American leverage over the EU that's largely behind the anti-Russian tilt of the bloc.

The danger for Obama, then, is that if and when Trump appears to gain such traction over Hillary Clinton between now and November 8 that the bombastic billionaire's non-enmity towards or even admiration of Putin suddenly goes mainstream in America, Washington will be dealing with a badly cornered Ukrainian client and ally. Poroshenko won't be the problem: as an oligarch with political authority as well, he has far too much to lose making hay of a deteriorating situation vis-à-vis Moscow, and judging by his recent statements, has already come to terms with far weaker Western support in the near future. The problem rather will be the embattled Ukrainian leader's own increasingly restive right flank: a Putinist tilt on either side of the Atlantic could drive these nationalists (including fringe neo-fascists) into such a tizzy that they'll make it utterly impossible for Kiev to work with Moscow on Minsk II from a position of weakness; indeed, it's probably for this very reason that Poroshenko has already preempted them by shifting rightwards on Minsk II and demanded full Ukrainian sovereignty be returned unconditionally at the outset.

We can only speculate just how far Kiev will push the envelope, and in fact even the possibility of such a dire accommodation of Russian interests by a newly confrontation-weary Washington may be farfetched or premature; but again for Obama, the underlying tension and contradiction here is deeply rooted and solidly structured, giving him far less leeway or wiggle room to find any common ground or bridge to the opposing side than his idealistic view of how the world should work has steeled him for.

But alternately, it could well be Obama himself who, feeling hemmed in by the alleged Trump-Putin nexus so darkly promulgated by the Democratic party establishment, sees fit to double down on a new uncompromising stance on Ukraine: since the US isn't even party to Minsk II anyway, all this would take is an intransigent insistence from the White House that its French and German allies go along with Kiev's new hard line regarding the Russia-Donbas frontier.

And that's when all hell could break loose. Once certain that the West's treachery on Minsk II has been given the final certification from Obama personally, Putin will then have no reason to remain in an arrangement so utterly twisted to harm Russian security. Being ever careful, the ex-KGB spook won't be one to escalate beyond the necessary precautions, and in fact will exhaust all back channels to dial down the elevated tensions inevitably triggered by a Minsk meltdown; but at such a juncture, it's Barack Obama who will be strictly at the mercy of Providence.

Should the spark of some armed incident ignite, the outgoing 44th president of history's exceptional free and democratic society will be trapped into a fateful decision whether or not to enforce yet another awful "red line" well outside the bounds of vital American interests. Only this time, having been burned by everything that's transpired since the last "red line" retreat gave his archrival an opening to challenge American credibility in the first place, Obama will be doubly trapped into actually pulling the trigger for a change: inasmuch as he believes that American credibility is a vital national interest, and inasmuch as that credibility is tied to his own legacy as an effective leader of the free world, he may have no recourse but to charge head-on into the Russian ambush.

We can only hope and pray that even if Obama truly allows himself to be dragged into such an unmitigated disaster, that the effective powers-that-be over him will be governed by far sounder realpolitik and common strategic sense, so as to be on every lookout to give him (if not his successor) the easiest and quickest way out. Perhaps it will take a tragedy, but Putin won't miss such an opportunity to endear himself with the American elite and the American people alike.

Why Hillary will be softer on Putin than Trump

For all her tough talk of confronting Russian aggression and her dark insinuations about a Putin-Trump nexus, even a quick assessment leads to the unmistakable conclusion that Hillary Clinton will tend to go it easier on the Kremlin - far easier, probably - than Donald Trump.

As her husband bashed the elder Bush for "coddling tyrants from Baghdad to Beijing", yet was soon acting as if he were completely bought and paid for by the Chinese communist regime, we're likely to see just as quick and complete a reversal from Hillary with respect to Moscow - because the only alternative outcome is World War III, and obviously she's not suicidal.

Leaving aside the fact that Hillary's history of deal and influence-peddling for Kremlin-linked Russian oligarchs has been well documented by Clinton Cash and other exposés of the "pay-to-play" Clinton Foundation, it's easy to see why, despite all outward appearances, Putin might actually prefer America's first female president to its first purely private-citizen one.

First and foremost, Mrs. Clinton's primary foreign-policy focus will be her progressive socioeconomic agenda, not the age-old geopolitical contest between great powers. In this respect she will probably exceed even Obama, whose relative indifference to realpolitik over the last seven and a half years has already been a key factor in Washington's creeping strategic decline in the key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia - in the face of accelerating Russian, Iranian, and Chinese expansionism, respectively.

To wit, Secretary Hillary's aggressive pursuit of regime change in Libya in 2011 and her earlier support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a first-term Senator were as much predicated on her antipathy towards brutal dictators from a humanitarian perspective as they were on any sound strategic sense (which in hindsight was clearly lacking on both sides of the aisle). It helped in those particular cases, of course, that America attacked a largely defenseless adversary - just as her husband did Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, also for an ostensibly humanitarian motive.

Against adversaries that can actually impose real costs on American intervention, however, there's little reason to believe Hillary will have any more stomach for risk of loss than either Obama or Bill for that matter - and in fact good grounds to think she'll have even less.

That's because authoritarian regimes have gotten ever shrewder at incremental concessions, especially with regards to the standard Western concerns of human rights and civil liberties. This means a Hillary Clinton administration will have its hands full responding to all manner of "reform" and "liberalization" peddled by dictatorships as proof of their goodness - through the considerable influence channels they've acquired abroad, including in the US itself.

We can already see this kind of dynamic in play with Iran. The Islamic fundamentalist regime has so blatantly resorted to extorting hard cash in exchange for releasing American prisoners - even considering that this has transpired in the context of the gradual easing of sanctions on it - that it's only logical to expect it to adopt similar ploys with regards to its own native dissidents, thousands of whom are still rotting in its jails. Tellingly, this has all taken place amidst an ever weaker American resolve - if any is left at all - to check Tehran from acquiring regional hegemony over the coming decade or so. And that's Iran - orders of magnitude weaker in the face of American power than either China or Russia.

Cynically, one might even speculate that much of the intensifying repression of authoritarian regimes all over the world is based neither on irrational fear nor on arrogant overconfidence, but more mundanely simply to stack up bargaining chips that can be used later to extract concessions from a reliably gullible West.

And as a liberal, feminist woman, Hillary is likely to be far more inclined to grant such concessions than the blowhard, take-no-prisoners macho-chauvinist Mr. Trump. After all, that's essentially what she's running on.

Putin takes Obama to school in China (captioned photo series)

At the G20 in Hangzhou, China, the following snapshots of an initially icy but ultimately nuanced exchange between the leader of the free world and that of the emergent authoritarian axis may go down as the essence of Obama's global geopolitical legacy. (The captions are my own interpretation of what transpired as Putin took Obama to school - not just on the immediate matter at hand of the Syrian crisis, but more generally the unchanging norms of global realpolitik.)

Barack: Look at you, you pathetic little Russkie twerp...remember I can kick your a** on the basketball court if this really has to get nasty...let me remind you that I'm still the president of the world's only superpower...don't think for a moment that your pint-sized gas station posing as a proper G20 economy (now that I've kicked you out of the G8) can actually challenge our dominance of Europe or the Middle East, let alone both! For the last time - tell Assad he has to get his own and his entire extended family's behinds the hell out of Syria, or there will be consequences!
Vladimir: Er, are you feeling okay, dear Barack? We're here to try to meet in the middle on restarting the peace process, remember? We don't need threats now, do we?

Barack: Okay, let's cut the bullcr*p, Vlad. We had a deal that you were going to pause that son-of-a-bitch eye doctor's barrel bombing of women and children in Aleppo and elsewhere first...and only then can we plausibly work together again on the negotiations between our minions that last flopped a little while back...we've bent over backwards to concede to your blackmail on joining your vendetta against so-called "terrorists"...you understand as well as we do that the CIA has always labeled and unlabeled "terrorists" however it pleases, so we have no qualms about that...but for heaven's sake, don't you realize how big a fool you're making of me? Gimme a f***ing break for Chrissake! I'm not asking for Bashar's head on a platter anymore, but you gotta take him down at least a peg or two or you're making my office a joke!
John K: (Mm-hmm...mm-hmm...)

Vladimir: Whoa, whoa there, Barack my bro! Don't get so riled up! I told you almost two months ago we'd be having this discussion before long...yet you didn't take my advice to fire your whole CIA section advising on Syrian policy - and here I am amusing myself as to how they've trashed your whole administration in the sh*tter! I'm your best friend now - don't you ever doubt that!

Let me refresh your memory a bit, since you've had too much time on the golf course over the summer to digest how your utterly clueless spooks flushed you down the toilet...

I had a deal with my old pal Recep in Ankara way back in early July, as soon as our coalition totally surrounded Aleppo for the first time, that we were willing to cut the Turks 90 percent of the slack they wanted with the Kurds in northern Syria, as long as they were okay with the secular revolutionary opposition joining a transitional government with Mr. Assad still its figurehead...the Turks were really happy with this arrangement, and it allowed us to propose to both them and yourself that it was time to finally join forces against the real terrorists - you know, those goons who murdered nearly 3,000 Americans 15 years ago?

But conveniently, no sooner had we struck a tentative alliance with the Pentagon against Al Nusra than we noticed something strange but familiar: the jihadists started shuffling positions, equipment, and even uniforms all over Idlib and Aleppo provinces, in such a deliberate and blatant attempt to obscure who was who that your CIA and DOD could reasonably complain they couldn't agree with us just who was a Nusra-linked terrorist and who was a "moderate." Sorry bro, but they didn't fool us: we knew then and there that your Langley boys were trying to snooker us bigtime...we didn't bite...but your spooks did at least buy a crucial window for the terrorists to mingle enough with the approved "moderates" that we simply couldn't hit many of them for long enough that they could assemble a massive counterattack to break our siege of Aleppo.

In the meantime, though, some of your crazier deep-state operatives instigated that embarrassing putsch against Recep...they knew their new strategy of deception would ultimately rely on a more pliant Turkey which wouldn't cooperate with us...they failed miserably - we knew from the get-go that Recep was in danger from the CIA as soon as he publicly began to turn towards us and the Syrian regime, so we tipped him off just as your CIA plants were finalizing preparations for their strike. But I doubt you and Recep chatted about that here in Hangzhou...you were too busy pleading with him to release those July 15 traitors before they spill out more beans about Langley's miserably failed dirty insurrection - which of course we have every interest of keeping secret once our Turkish intelligence partners pass them on to us.

I must say - your CIA has done such an excellent job for us that it's become a running joke in the Kremlin and FSB that we'll one day erect a plaque for it to commemorate how it handed Syria and the Levant to Russia on a gold platter! You see, only because of the CIA has old Recep now wrought just the havoc with the Kurds in northern Syria that we agreed to let him indulge in - with your own support! Nothing like a bitch you have to keep happy because you can't lose her, is there?

So there you have it...good ole CIA couldn't keep its sticky fingers out of sovereign national interests...had to keep the 70-year gravy train going in spite of all common sense...tsk, tsk!

Anyway, as you know now, later this month I'm going to host both Erdogan and Assad at the Kremlin, if they'll both but be reasonable and sane...and perhaps we'll finally get this bloody freakin' war on a sensible path to conclusion...I'm not counting on it though...not only is your imperial intelligence and defense bureaucracy thirsty for revenge, but I've pretty much given up hope that you'll finally stand up to that sorry bunch of clowns.

But hey, just between you and I, Barack...absolutely no hard feelings! None! Like I said, I'm your best friend! I still absolutely need your help and even your initiative...no Syrian peace will be legitimate without American approval and even sponsorship...I need your credibility to be preserved so I can leverage it for my own efforts! (Smiling sarcastically) Please, between you and I...let's put a happy face on this whole situation!

And I apologize in advance: if Bashar's men and the Iranians still have their act together, that siege of Aleppo which they've tenatively reestablished might actually last and lead to surrender this time...it won't look good for you, but remember these things I've told you to both remind and educate you...if you forget again from too much golf in a few weeks, I'll be glad to rehash this lesson - updated of course - over the phone with you.

Barack: Okay thanks Vlad...you know I probably got only 50 to 70 percent of what you shared, tentatively at that...but thanks for cutting me some slack when I need it most. We're no closer to substantive agreement on policy, but yet again we've avoided the worst. I can't say I trust you yet, but all you've told me has opened my eyes to your fine grasp of the intricacies of this crisis in Syria which is needed for its eventual resolution. I see you understand and empathize that I don't want to leave the bigs in January with this fire still burning...I look forward to more of your interesting insight as to how to put it out...and in the meantime, I'm more clear than ever that what we're ultimately dealing with here is a fundamental lack of trust between us, between our nations and cultures...you could well be right on many things with regards to Syria and specifically Mr. Assad...but I take it you understand why I must stress I can't yet trust that your judgment isn't merely politically pragmatic, but ethically right too - and that's what I've always firmly believed to be the only true pragmatism.
Vladimir: You're most graciously welcome...we can eventually overcome our trust gap...let's begin by acknowledging it more honestly and openly, yet seeing that we're still not remotely enemies...it never hurts to cling to what we both know to be true without equivocation...oh, and good luck with everything in your final months.

Path to peace in Syria finally emerging - through partition

In the week and a half since Turkey's intervention in northern Syria, more evidence of a secret Putin-Erdogan accord to eventually draw down the five-year-old conflict into a mutually acceptable stalemate has steadily emerged. While the specifics must play out over a period of weeks or even months, the general contours of such a deal are already becoming clear. The path to peace in Syria is finally emerging - through a de facto partition of the country into no less than three statelets (regime, rebel, and Kurd, with ISIS a fourth wild card).

Assad will be allowed to survive - no question about that anymore. By "survive" it means he will be allowed to keep Damascus and other major urban centers in the west of the country, not yet including Aleppo in the far north, since that contested metropolis will continue to be the focal point of the diplomatic jockeying over the shattered country by the intervening powers. The city has effectively fallen back under regime siege in recent days aback intense airstrikes.

In the past week, starting with the key Damascus suburb of Daraya, a string of additional urban rebel holdouts along the country's main Damascus-Homs corridor have capitulated to the regime's starvation sieges: as before, the insurgent fighters and their families who wish to fight on are relocating to rebel-held Idlib province in the northwest. The total population being transferred seems to be in excess of 100,000 - a very significant portion of the hostile resistance that hasn't yet given up in core regime areas.

Damascus and Homs are now close to being fully and irrevocably secured, with even their long-restive outskirts and satellite towns cleared of rebels. The speed and suddenness with which these regime consolidations are taking place indicates Turkey's new concession of Assad's role in a political transition process. Since they were already on the verge of liquidation, these residual pockets were abandoned for good by Ankara, which two weeks ago finally buckled on its uncompromising stance that Assad must resign immediately.

In lieu of toppling the Baath regime on its home turf, Turkey is now stuffing many of its remaining eggs in the basket of solidifying the Sunni jihadistan of Idlib province: it apparently secured the unusual concession from Assad of allowing the deported fighters to retain their weapons, which will no doubt reinforce the militant ranks in their new positions in Idlib or on the still-raging front lines around Aleppo, further north and east.

So both the regime and the rebels are transferring military assets to the northwestern theater to double down on their contest for territory in Aleppo province, with Aleppo city itself still the central prize. To relieve intensifying regime pressure on the slim lifeline into insurgent-held eastern Aleppo, a new large formation of rebels and jihadists yesterday launched an offensive to cut off the vulnerable government supply road leading up to Aleppo from Hama, prompting a regime counteroffensive as well.

At this stage in the game, the key question is what degree of regional strategic capital Erdogan is willing to expend to prevent the fall of Aleppo to Assad. Turkish influence in any future Syrian polity now depends in large part on how strong a position its proxies in the northwest are able to consolidate vis-à-vis the Damascus regime; ideally, if Aleppo can be held, Ankara will wield a veto over the Baath regime it still detests because it will enjoy the political front of the surviving secular revolutionary opposition hanging on in the eastern districts.

More realistically, though, Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have every intention to expel the rebel holdouts from eastern Aleppo just as they have successfully surrendered-or-starved other pockets of resistance to date - even though this effort will be an order of magnitude greater.

To do so, they must firmly secure the sole supply route from Hama up to Aleppo, which is now threatened by the rebel-jihadist counterthrusts from Idlib province southwards into Hama province. Even with this attack contained or thwarted, precious manpower and resources will have been diverted from elsewhere by the regime to secure this sector, leaving less available to reestablish the siege ring around Aleppo.

Nonetheless, Aleppo's re-encirclement and eventual fall to a surrender-or-starve siege may be just a matter of time - if Erdogan would but be realistic about what the low-hanging and attainable fruit for Turkey really are at this point in Syria. He knows beyond any shred of doubt that it's the Sunni jihadists, not the secular revolutionaries, who are key to the opposition's leverage against Damascus; he also realizes that should the Axis of Fatima really feel endangered in its goal of ultimately strangling eastern Aleppo, Tehran will simply consent to base Russian heavy bombers on its territory again, so they can quickly finish the job of depopulating the rebel sector of all noncombatants, thereby leaving nothing left for the jihadists to "liberate." So, for the very limited actual benefit of nominal secular leadership of the opposition's transition team in talks with Assad (itself already probably little more than a wishful sham), no way would Erdogan want to pour out the blood and guts of his most valuable Syrian proxies. Sure, Assad and the Iranians must pay dearly for their final victory at Aleppo, and that's why Al Nusra and its allies in the Army of Conquest who together punctured the government's initial siege in July, and indeed the beleaguered rebels in Aleppo itself, must fight on until defeat is finally truly inevitable; but Ankara has done the proper calculations and when it comes down to it, won't go for broke on account of what will end up being little more than a symbolic pile of rubble that could soon turn into a mass graveyard for the cream of its surrogate army (courtesy of becoming a training and target practice ground for the Russian and Syrian air forces).

Rather, Turkey's hopes in Syria - indeed, the regional Sunni powers' collective hopes - now rest on locking down the statelet of Idlib province and possibly opening another "moderate rebel" statelet along the border strip previously held by ISIS. If Kurdish sources are to be believed, the second part should be a piece of cake: already the Turkish operation around Jarabulus has cleared ISIS out from a 400-square mile zone with minimal losses as the latter appears to have largely withdrawn without a fight.

Ideally, eventually the Turkish-backed rebels can shove aside both ISIS and the Kurds in Aleppo province and link up a corridor with the Idlib statelet north of the city - which along with its environs will likely have fallen to the regime by then.

At that point, all four statelets will be relatively set and each will have been largely secured with a core of extremely difficult-to-conquer loyalist sectors. The Assad regime will have "won" its war by settling for the limited objective of securing the main cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and Latakia, the bulk of their surrounding governorates, and the main interconnecting roads and supply routes; it will have retained complete control of the Mediterranean coastline. The Kurds meanwhile will be all but untouchable in their distant "Rojava" federation in the north and northeastern highlands along the southeastern Turkish frontier, with a good slice of the eastern desert to boot. The rebel-jihadist, Al Nusra-led alliance - effectively the Saudi-Gulf-Turkish protectorate in Syria - will have a Sunni Sharia-run mini-state with Idlib its capital but also much territory in Aleppo province (though not the city and its immediate surroundings) and a small but strategically significant piece of Hama province as well. And finally, though severely truncated by the Kurds and Al Nusra-led rebels (as opposed to symbolically pinpricked by the regime), ISIS will still have most of the Syrian flank of its dwindling caliphate.

Interestingly, despite being considerably weaker than any of the other three mini-states and almost certain to have no place in peace negotiations that would involve those three, ISIS could still be a key strategic factor in what will have devolved into the final dismemberment of Syria into multiple sovereign entities in all but name. ISIS may yet survive if for no reason other than that the regime, the rebels, and the Kurds alike are each loath to give the other two a cheap strategic boost by bearing the cost of eliminating it. By the same token, however, ISIS may also reap the benefits of having three, not two (let alone just one) stronger enemies whose official policies will still invariably be its complete destruction, especially since the international community is likely to maintain far beyond its actual credibility an official fiction that Syria hasn't in fact permanently disintegrated - and concomitantly the half-truth that ISIS is the one common enemy of all legitimate Syrians.

So even ISIS, whose true degree of genuine suicidal spirit we'll eventually find out, might actually have a role in Syria's peace after all - that is, a peace through partition. Some might even argue that we've already been inexorably heading that way for a while.

What's behind Russia's backlash against the West

Whether it's Hillary or Trump in the White House come January 20, Russia promises to be the top geopolitical challenge for America in 2017. Its quest for security in the post-post-Cold War world is fundamentally at odds with the American vision for how the world should be and how its people should live.

On the central front of this new East-West confrontation, Moscow is beefing up its military presence around Ukraine to bolster and maintain its strategic "escalation dominance" over its smaller but vital neighbor in the two-and-a-half-year crisis that has effectively established Kiev as the linchpin of US and NATO efforts (however halfhearted) to contain Russian expansionism.

The redeployment of one particular unit near the Ukrainian frontier is telling:

In the Rostov region, which is already packed with Russian military bases, contract servicemen of the 33rd Motor Rifle Brigade have returned from Maikop in the Caucasus. Russia is speedily throwing down modular housing for a third planned division in this region, situated on Ukraine’s southeastern border, and likely incorporating the 33rd Brigade. The unit will materialize in late 2017 and resume the legacy of the 150th Idritsk-Berlin Division from World War II. That bit of historical trivia is not inconsequential, because it was the 150th that raised the flag over the Reichstag in 1945. The symbolism of establishing such a unit with such a prominent legacy of defeating fascism on Ukraine’s flank is doubtfully a coincidence.

Indeed, outside the former Soviet Union, places like Rostov and Maikop are typically known only in relation to the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) against Nazi Germany, appeals and allusions to which are likely to only intensify in the coming months and years. While Putin isn't betting the barn that nationalism is truly back in vogue, he's taking precautions that would be expected of any responsible Russian leader with regards to such an intimately linked neighbor as Ukraine, and the ghosts and shadows of the epic conflict of over seven decades ago are unavoidable - so best make good use of them.

This latest "Great Game" - to use Rudyard Kipling's original term for the strategic competition over the vast Eurasian landmass - which pits the land superpower Russia against an Anglophone naval superpower and its proxies, is at the same time both identical and different compared to its antecedents: the Russo-British rivalry over Central, South, and Northeast Asia in the last quarter of the 19th century, and then the global US-Soviet Cold War which consumed most of the second half of the 20th.

Unlike in the last century under communism, Russia is now a semi-market economy beholden to the Anglo-American global financial architecture; in fact, for all its recent oil-fueled struggles - which have seen per capita GDP plunge with the ruble to as little as under US $6,000 in the past year - Putinist Russia is more deeply integrated into this worldwide financial and commercial system than either the USSR or the Czarist empire ever were. And largely as a consequence, contemporary Russia is politically freer, even with a dominant Putin at its head, than it ever was under the bureaucratic-despotic regimes of the imperial or communist eras. Diversity of thought and opinion remain vibrant even among the majority of its population that appears generally pliant towards if not supportive of the existing order.

But Russia will not relinquish its Russianness - it's the vigorous defense of the parameters and boundaries of this "Russianness" that are driving its present slide into repression. Liberal and progressive viewpoints are being squelched, not as an end in itself, but in the interests of sociopolitical cohesion in the Russian historical tradition. Probably the single most representative issue in this regard is the policy towards LGBTQ citizens: they're being shoved back into the closet, where they can engage in whatever mutually consenting activity they please, so long as they don't promote it in the open as the desired norm for the younger and next generation. For a conservative society trying to reinstate a traditionalist, collective monotheistic identity after a costly experience of totalitarian atheism followed by a rocky failure to Westernize, such repression is entirely expected and legitimate. Rather, the whole Western liberal clamor over "equal rights" for "alternative lifestyles" can't be considered purely humanitarian and apolitical, because its unabashed purpose is to make any and every value system equally valid and moral, thereby rendering none of them suitable as a unifying social principle. In this sense, the very notion of "independent civil society" is indeed little more than a proxy for wholesale Westernization and in fact Americanization. And at this juncture in her history, Russia is unequivocally rejecting such cultural colonization; she may change her mind about it someday, but that's up to her own state and her own people in harmonious and symbiotic action with each other, not one segment of the people in opposition to the state.

This is at the root of Russia's multidirectional play for Eurasian security, with Ukraine at its epicenter. Until the West and specifically the US understands and empathizes with Russia's self-perception as a civilization-state, it won't resolve its contradictions with Moscow and in fact is likely to worsen the present confrontation that's already increasingly dubbed a new Cold War.

The mainstream liberal media in the West, but especially here in America, will continue to focus primarily on the unscrupulous methods and outright deceptions employed by the Kremlin and its surrogates to fight a "hybrid war" against Western interests - to now include direct meddling in our own elections, as it's already done so for years in Western Europe. Unfortunately, much like the Western obsession with Islamic terrorism, the cumulative effect of this will be to paint an irredeemably dark picture of a dark society that hates freedom and is therefore an existential threat to Western civilization itself; where in reality Russia, again much like Islamic radicals, is simply employing asymmetric strategies and tactics against a vastly more powerful global American empire.

That empire has been in apparent retreat not because of any particular Russian strength or resurgence, but because of Washington's own blunders and miscalculations - all of which are ultimately rooted in a false moralizing that essentially prevents it from even acknowledging that it's trying to run an empire at all. While this has lately made a good field day for Kremlin propaganda like this editorial, for sure, nobody should be fooled: America's problems with Russia today are a product of its own excess and carelessness, of a mismatch between perceived vital interests and actual vital interests. In other words, Russia's backlash against the West today is as much and possibly more the product of our own ideological inflexibility and political dysfunction as they are of its own defects - principally political but ultimately cultural. As always, it takes two to tango.