Meeting with Italian premier Matteo Renzi at the White House yesterday, president Obama grudgingly indirectly acknowledged the futility of confronting Russia, calling it a "large country" with "major military capabilities" that should be "part of the solution and not the problem" to the world's gravest geopolitical and security crises which since 2014 have dramatically put it at odds with the West.
Revealing a stark realism that's very difficult for US interventionists - whether liberal or conservative - to swallow, the outgoing 44th president has also framed the kind of discussion pertaining to Russia that not only will be one likely focus of tonight's final 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but effectively stated the proper overarching American attitude and approach to Putin's Kremlin regardless of who replaces him on January 20.
This in itself is something of a victory for Moscow: the kind of simple concession of reality that the world's other nuclear superpower has been aggressively trying to extract from what has often come off as a delusional, self-aggrandized West hopelessly puffed up with its own sense of moral superiority and strategic supremacy. As such, a glimmer of light is finally appearing at the end of a tunnel that's been growing darker and darker in recent weeks, as US-Russia relations have nosedived to their worst level arguably since the most dangerous junctures of the Cold War.
Obama has decisively called out - yet again - those in American policy circles who are driven by a dangerous combination of simultaneously overstating Russian malicious intent towards the West while understating Russian determination and capability to thwart Western efforts to blackmail it into more compliant behavior. That doesn't in itself open a door to new cooperation with Moscow, but it shuts the doors to escalating brinkmanship that will cost the US and its Western allies far more dearly than they've let on.
The fundamentally divergent Russian worldview - that non-Western societies simply can't pull off transitions to Western-style or even Western-oriented liberal democracies - is becoming harder and harder to dismiss out of hand. When it really comes down to it, the most pro-Western elements and factions of strife-torn Islamic nations invariably always appear to be the weakest on the ground: if they have so much popular support and effective governing ability, why is it that they appear incapable of beating either the reactionary forces of the old regime or the arch-reactionary forces of unleashed jihadist fundamentalism - let alone both - even with massive injections of financial and material assistance from their deep-pocketed Western sponsors? Could it be possible instead that their mouths are just much bigger than their muscles?
The US and the West more generally are finding out the hard way that no revolutionary or democratic movement incapable of securing the levers of hard coercive state power - i.e. of violently eliminating their adversaries on the battlefield - can ultimately claim to be a legitimate popular representative movement, either. Certainly if the American colonists had folded on the fields of Bunker Hill or Saratoga, or if the Parisian insurrectionists had cowed before the musket fire of the Bastille garrison, nobody would ever remember or celebrate the glorious triumphs of US democracy or French republicanism. Democrats must whip tyrants in the business of killing before they can whip them in the business of ruling.
And that's what Putin's Russia - and more passively its ally, Xi Jinping's China - really stands for. Even democracy is ultimately all about governance. And governance is always ultimately about one thing and one thing only: monopolization of violence. To govern effectively is first and foremost to wield the sword with greater reach and scope than anyone else - and only then is there even the realistic prospect that the exercise of power can be more equitably redistributed between all factions and interest groups.
By putting the civic aspects of democracy - elections, courts, media, and other civil institutions - ahead of the absolute unchallenged authority to punish any and all rebels against the newly created order with consistent coercive impact across the board, the US and Western project of liberalizing the Middle East has blown up in smoke. Even the pending recapture of Mosul from ISIS will not fundamentally remove the structural political crisis in Iraq that call to question its long-term viability (as with Syria) as a unitary state.
That doesn't mean the Russian project in Syria will be any more successful...it just acknowledges that at least the Russians see the folly of putting the cart before the horse.
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