A critical moment is approaching for the post-post-Cold War global order. In the coming weeks, how the new US presidential administration of Donald Trump handles the simultaneous strategic crises on the Korean peninsula, in eastern Europe, and the Middle East could well determine the shape of global geopolitics for years to come.
Nearly three weeks ago, when Trump stunned the world by launching retaliatory missile strikes against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the latter's purported reuse of banned chemical weapons, both euphoria and dismay accompanied the dramatic pronouncement by Washington that it was no longer hesitant to use its sheer military might against sovereign nation-states again, not merely terrorist and non-state militant extremist groups.
And today, proponents of a more aggressive US military posture towards unfriendly rogue regimes got what could turn out to be a major vindication of newfound American hawkishness in both objective military as well as subjective propaganda terms: an announcement by Russia that it has withdrawn nearly half its air wing from Syria that had been supporting the Assad regime's nearly six-year-long campaign against armed rebels aiming to topple him.
Were Syrian peace to be determined by the Syrian people in conjunction with the US and Russia as respective honest brokers for the opposition and the Damascus government, there would be much ground for optimism in this Russian pullback: Washington and Moscow, despite sharp differences both in Syria and elsewhere, have essentially mutually arrived at a point of swapping arms for diplomacy as the tool of choice for ending the conflict that has claimed up to half a million lives and displaced a mild-apocalyptic 10-plus million refugees. A peace deal struck now stands a fair chance of securing both the American interest of easing Assad out of power and the Russian interest of maintaining military access to the country, especially its critical sole Mediterranean naval base; whatever the eventual fate of Assad personally - a negotiable matter, for all its delicacy - the remnants of the Syrian state can now be preserved and eventually rebuilt by all legitimate native stakeholders under the watchful gaze of the UN Security Council.
But the grave lurking danger is that Russian disengagement from military operations on behalf of Assad in favor of intensified re-engagement in a political process may only expose the far more intractable underlying contradiction which has fueled the long Syrian war: the emergence of Shiite superpower Iran as a powerful and even potentially dominant regional player, with tentacles stretching from the Gaza strip to the steppes of central Afghanistan, from the highlands of eastern Turkey to the desert swathes of Houthi-held Yemen.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal currently under intense fresh scrutiny by the Trump administration could yet emerge as the great stumbling block to US-Iranian détente and, with it, peace in Syria and Iraq as well.
Central to the dilemma for Washington is that even with full Iranian compliance, as the Trump team has in fact just certified in a regular review, it simply doesn't comprehensively cover the entire scope of Tehran's suspected nuclear activities; even worse, neither does it roll back any know-how acquired to date by Iranian scientists and weapons developers. As such, the accord's promised eventual benefits to the Ayatollahs - sanctions relief and a greater opening to the global economy - are seemingly too great to concede for only partial denuclearization; and yet at the same time, it has drastically reduced American freedom of maneuver with respect to Iranian ambitions in the critical Syrian-Levantine sector where Tehran's powerful proxy Hezbollah has only further entrenched its pivotal military and political role at the expense of Washington's chief regional allies, Israel, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab states.
A confrontation of some kind is therefore all but inevitable, because the longer-term trend of creeping Shiite ascendancy led by a resurgent successor to ancient Persia is becoming unmistakably structural and chronic in its apparent nature; if ever there were a moment to forcefully reverse, halt, or even merely delay it, now would be it. And it can only be done with a severity backed up by real concrete ability and willingness to inflict pain and loss on Tehran's now almost four-decade-old theocratic regime - a recipe for a dangerous brinkmanship that nobody wants, but that nobody may be able to back down from without a dear domestic political price.
It has in fact emerged (via his son) that for President Trump, it was none other than the "disastrous" Iran nuclear deal - as its contours began to emerge in late spring 2015 - that compelled him more than any other single factor to run for the most powerful office. There can be little doubt, then, that he intends to stare down Ayatollah Khamenei to the bitter end if it came to it, with no intention of blinking first. The Iranian supreme leader for his part has staked too much of his historical credibility - not merely in-the-moment approval ratings - on ascribing substance to the chants of "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" which have remained such a hallmark and staple of his state's rallying principle even long after any personal animosity towards the West has largely disappeared among ordinary Iranians.
And so, actual conflict or avoidance thereof with Iran - and thereby the peace and stability of the greater Middle East - could all boil down to how astutely Trump and Khamenei first sense and then either collude or clash with the greater currents of both Islamic and world history. War is by no means inevitable between America and Iran; but neither is peace. Something far bigger - over and beyond Trump or Khamenei or even Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu themselves - may be coming into play here: a truly escalating crescendo to the end of the end times. A clash of civilizations with apocalyptic overtones: can America and Israel accept the prospect of an Iran which won't be cowed into stopping its march to eventually bring Jerusalem effectively under its mercy?
Perhaps, in the end, the vengeance of Fatima cannot be avoided...but only so that it ushers in the ever greater Providence of her prototype, Mary.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine
As Ukraine spirals downward towards another possible revolution, Donald Trump appears trapped on this most critical front of the comprehensive East-West standoff between the US-led global alliance system and Vladimir Putin's Russian-led Eurasian authoritarian axis.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Russia's entry into North Korean crisis means general East-West accord is imperative
As the North Korean nuclear crisis slowly but surely escalates to a soft boil, China has officially asked Russia for help in cooling tensions between the US and the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un before red lines are crossed by either side. Coming less than a week after new US president Donald Trump seemingly enlisted Chinese communist general secretary Xi Jinping in a quasi-alliance to eliminate the North's accelerating weapons program, it sets up an apparent contradiction at the heart of US-China relations in the strategic security realm - a reaffirmation of the Sino-Russian Eurasian axis which stands in direct defiance of Washington's apparent newfangled threat of unilateral coercion against rogue states like North Korea and Syria. All this in spite of continued US-China integration in the economic realm that both sides cheerfully blessed in Trump's recent summit with Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
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