It's time for Russia to crush the Syrian revolution once and for all

Russia has escalated its air campaign in Syria by launching airstrikes from Iran for the first time since the start of its intervention to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad nearly 11 months ago. The development comes as a stalemate in Aleppo is being spun - almost ludicrously, but not at all unexpectedly - by mainstream US media, as in this New York Times article, as an acknowledgment by Moscow that its campaign is failing.

Quite the contrary, knowing Putin's treatment of the stubborn urban guerrillas of Chechnya, this could instead be the Kremlin's last diplomatic push before unleashing the full brunt of its heavy strategic bombers - the ones now starting their attack runs from Iran - on the rebel holdouts of eastern Aleppo as well as any tentative supply lines keeping their resistance alive. Having lost patience and tolerance, Messrs. Putin and Assad have decided that it's about time to just wipe the remnants of the Syrian revolution off the face of the earth.

In this light, it's actually Moscow which has presented Washington with an ultimatum: either join us to bomb the terrorist groups which are now quite openly the only effective force preventing a successful starvation siege of the city by pro-government forces, or we'll have to defeat them ourselves - by razing to the ground those neighborhoods they're seeking to "liberate."

With reports leaking out that Russia and the US are yet again close to collaborating against ISIS and Al Nusra Front (now renamed Conquest of Syria Front or Jabhat Fatah al-Sham), as well as intense negotiations between Russia and the West more generally on opening humanitarian corridors from the besieged erstwhile commercial center, the optics are in place for Putin to reasonably tell the world that he did just about everything he could to prevent a bloodbath in the pivotal battle of the five-and-a-half-year Syrian civil war. Should the US and its Sunni Arab proxies still refuse to make concessions here, the die could well be cast: rebel-held Aleppo will have to be flattened to the ground.

In fact, one must wonder just which outcome the Russians would actually prefer - that is, whether they'd rather do away with Al Nusra and its kindred Salafist militant groups that are defined by their violent intolerance of Shias and Alawites, or whether it'd be better to liquidate the remnants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and similar secular nationalist resistance holed up in Aleppo's ruins. Knowing full well that even with a decisive victory at Aleppo, Assad's forces are almost certainly too weak to retake and hold jihadist-dominated Idlib province and perhaps even sectors of Aleppo province itself, the Kremlin realizes that it must deal prudently with Turkey and even Saudi Arabia regarding prospective local Sunni autonomy in those parts of the country least hospitable to the Baath regime and its Shia allies. Since Al Nusra has now moved from de facto to virtually de jure leadership of the constellation of Salafist groups which comprise the bulk of effective non-ISIS opposition to Assad, although it would be great for Putin to enlist American airpower to do his bidding against them, if Mr. Obama yet again refuses (as he almost certainly will) to stick it to the deep-state power brokers at Langley and the Pentagon that still want to preserve the tottering American hegemony in the region, it makes more sense for Russia to eliminate whatever "moderate" opposition remains on the battlefield (primarily in Aleppo itself) and thereby remove from the bargaining table any diehard Syrian revolutionaries who for so long have conveniently relied on the jihadists (without appearing to) to sustain their vendetta against Damascus.

It's high time to start punishing those parties to the conflict whose intransigent defiance of hard realities on the ground is prolonging the defunct cause of Syrian regime change well beyond its plausible lifespan - and prolonging both ISIS and global terrorism in the process. By stonewalling the legitimate common fight against what's effectively still Al Qaeda in Syria, the neocon imperialist war faction has extended the unwarranted hope among the opposition that Washington can yet still force Assad's abdication. This costly delusion must now be dispelled: it's time for Russia to show the world that Assad's existence is indeed the only thing preventing the rise of a virulent neo-Wahhabist emirate in non-ISIS opposition areas that's completely antithetical to the original liberal aims of the Arab spring, and in fact whose differences with ISIS itself are more of style and degree than of underlying substance.

That spring is now long dead, and but for the career imperialists in the Beltway and their effective stooges in the Arab world, even US policy would have adjusted to it accordingly a while ago. Yet instead, it's this very American inflexibility and hubris, coupled with the revolution's corruption to the passions of vengeance, which will all but ensure the nastiest of defeats at the hands of Russia and the Axis of Fatima.

The Syrian revolution deserves to be crushed once and for all - its graveyard should be a leveled eastern Aleppo. The brutal jihadists are far more representative of popular Sunni sentiment in so-called US allies than are any politically unviable secular or merely lukewarmly Islamist factions: it's about time they and their Turkish, Saudi, and other Gulf Sunni sponsors are outed in the open as being just fine with a new Syria that's anything but a model liberal democracy based on Western values - just so long as Assad's gone.

Russia under Putin can deal with that - easily. In time, even we won't be able to still pretend that it's not, at best, a binary choice between secular dictators and religious ones - if it's not an outright worse one between autocrats and terrorists.

Aleppo stalemate could lead to legitmization of jihadists

At the moment, a brief respite in the heaviest of the Aleppo fighting could be an indication of an accord between Putin and Erdogan (who have just met to reset Russo-Turkish relations) to deescalate the Syrian crisis and gradually restart the UN-sponsored peace process.

The stalemate in Syria's second city and commercial hub could lead to a new, unprecedented legitimization of jihadists in the long-term resolution of the conflict - a development that probably wouldn't be as terrible as the West is naturally inclined to fear.

The fact is, groups like the rebranded Al Nusra Front (now called Conquest of Syria Front) have dominated the insurgency in Idlib, Latakia, and Aleppo provinces in Syria for so long that they've become political as well as military fixtures in much of the region - or perhaps more accurately, their continued battlefield prowess is directly a function of their political acumen. Somewhat reminiscent of how the Shia militant faction Hezbollah became ensconced in parts of Lebanon over the course of that country's long civil war in the 1980s, the Sunni jihadists have likewise implanted themselves in a sizeable chunk of territory in the Syrian northwest (primarily Idlib province) not merely through force of arms, but day-to-day governance and administration that has earned them the respect, in some cases even the endearment, of local communities.

Without such a substantial geographic support base, it's impossible for these militants to launch the kind of large attacks that last week broke through the Assad regime's encirclement of Aleppo.

These non-ISIS Islamic militants also offer a much-needed counterpoint to the wanton violence and destruction of their erstwhile allies against Damascus: while in many cases no less committed to Sharia rule and strict interpretations of the Quran, they've been far more measured and targeted in their application of violence. Their intolerance of Shias, Alawites, Christians, moderate Sunnis, and more generally the secularized world at large seems not to be an end in itself, as often appears to be the case with the pathological killers of Daesh: rather, it's treated as a necessary component in the strategy of consolidating power in the core areas of Salafist control in the context of an ongoing brutal war of annihilation.

In that light, Al Nusra's break with Al Qaeda two weeks ago shows the flexibility and adaptivity of the jihadists in achieving their aims. The implementation of Islamic rule in the areas it dominates is a hard "fact on the ground" that has far more real value to Syria's Islamic revolution than any generalized "solidarity" with Islamic militancy worldwide. Should the Sunni fundamentalists who have spearheaded the struggle against Assad since 2013 continue to shift gears to a hybrid military-political track, it could pave the way for a broad recognition of the Salafist role in a new, federated and multifaceted Syrian political landscape.

That could prove a harder pill to swallow for Assad and for Washington than it would be for Putin or Erdogan; but if Moscow and Ankara become the principal proponents for locking down the current stalemate in Aleppo - as the centerpiece of a broader equilibrium in Syria as a whole - it becomes far easier to see a situation in which those who can live with a partial victory would gladly settle for a partial defeat to secure it.

Either way, the jihadists would serve their own cause well to become progressively more moderate in their short-term demands and objectives; their overarching aim now should be to win seats and influence at the negotiating table, and their military activity should be aligned to that end. Every civil war's resolution ultimately boils down to a question of peacetime governance - so much so that its military aspect is really just a lagging reflection of the underlying political dilemma. If the Salafists want any degree of lasting legacy to show for their sacrifices, they would do well to recognize the implausibility of imposing Sharia beyond their favorable demographic sectors; just as, by the same token, if Mr. Assad wants to present to the world a binary choice between a secular police state and a Sunni jihadistan, he must concede that the latter will have to hold at least some credible piece of real estate.

Syrian conflict becoming a clearer binary choice at Aleppo

Yesterday, August 6, the Syrian rebels at least tentatively broke through a three-week-old siege of Aleppo. Considering the seemingly desperate straits that the whole anti-Assad insurgency had fallen into in the preceding weeks, the victory was a huge propaganda coup, as pro-rebel media pounced on opposition rejoicing in the beleaguered east of the city.

Per today's updates, it's still to be seen whether this breakthrough will translate into a sustainable supply corridor being opened up to the rebel-held enclave; some aid has apparently gone through already, but clearly not enough to significantly tip the scales against the regime:

But little has changed for the besieged residents of rebel-held eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, who have been enduring acute shortages of food and medicine, as the fighting remains too fierce for aid to be delivered, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and humanitarian workers operating in the area say.

Perhaps more significantly, at least some remaining residents in opposition sectors are treating the rebel advance as an opportunity to flee, not hold out longer:

An official from Syrian Civil Defense, a voluntary search-and-rescue group also known as the White Helmets, confirmed that this was the case, adding that many residents wanted to leave eastern Aleppo once a secure road out was opened.

That's likely because the rebel victory has already come at a political cost: it has solidified Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra Front as the central fighting force in the entire effort against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies in the north of the country. At the rate things are going, the terrorist group of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri will before long effectively run the opposition government, ensuring that it will be an international pariah. Many, probably most Aleppoans, don't want to die for such implacable extremists.

That's despite the fact that about ten days ago, Al Nusra Front had rebranded itself as Fatah al-Sham (Conquest of Syria) Front, severing its official ties with parent group Al Qaeda in an apparent move to exempt itself from proposed joint US-Russian airstrikes on ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria. In the immediate wake of the schism, the whole motley collection of jihadist outfits throughout Idlib and western Aleppo provinces seemed to quickly coalesce around the new Fatah al-Sham to launch a new combined offensive effort to relieve their besieged allies in the east of Aleppo city - though this joint force still operated, as before, under the Islamist umbrella banner of the "Army of Conquest."

Nobody should have any illusions as to what this really means: with a minor tactical, largely cosmetic organizational adjustment, Al Qaeda in Syria has effectively removed the target sign for US airpower hanging on its back, and has thereby taken virtual command of the anti-Assad insurgency - comprised as it predominantly is of other militant Islamist groups which have long colluded with it, but not overtly so as to remain in Washington's good graces themselves.

While it's long been known that the lines between moderate Islamist militants and their more extreme jihadist cousins like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham are blurry, Washington, with its intransigence in pursuing regime change against Assad since 2011, has for years misled the American and Western public into thinking that the Syrian civil war isn't in fact essentially a binary choice between a ruthless secular dictatorship and a violent reactionary theocracy.

In fact, this was the widely unacknowledged reason that three years ago this month, Barack Obama's infamous "red line" against Damascus on the use of chemical weapons proved to be a monumental bluff: as soon as Washington actually started drawing up war plans against Assad, it became crystal-clear to the deep state of the CIA and Pentagon that they were essentially being drafted to become Al Qaeda's air force in Syria. Realizing the political unacceptability of such a military intervention, Obama conveniently punted the decision to use force to a notoriously gridlocked Congress.

In lieu of direct action, the Obama administration opted for a halfhearted and ultimately fruitless program to train and equip a rebel proxy force to fight both Assad and, from early 2014, the rising threat of a particularly virulent Al Nusra offshoot, Islamic State (ISIS). More significantly, it stepped up lethal and non-lethal aid alike through various back channels in its regional Sunni allies to any number of vetted rebel outfits - in the full knowledge that this materiel could end up in the hands of extremists who just so happened to be better at killing pro-Assad personnel. This enabled the CIA and Pentagon to perpetuate the myth that there was still a credible non-jihadist alternative to the Assad regime: whether on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. In fact, the vaunted Free Syrian Army (FSA) was by then past its operational prime: without the infusion of fanatical jihadist blood into the insurgency's ranks throughout 2013-14, it's probable that the Iranian and Hezbollah-bolstered Assad regime would have been able to grind it into the dust with ruthless attrition.

Further, as ISIS became a more prominent regional threat, especially in Iraq, the US then ratcheted up the pressure through its Sunni allies, especially Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to force a decisive conclusion to the Syrian civil war by securing, at long last, Assad's ouster. In early 2015, the newly formed Army of Conquest effectively combined the Islamist resistance forces of northwestern Syria into a single loose constellation, allowing the rebels to make such threatening advances on the regime's traditional strongholds in coastal Latakia province that Assad had to concede additional territory to ISIS and at the same time subcontract such a large chunk of his fighting to Hezbollah and other Iranian-sponsored Shia militias that Damascus was effectively reduced to a satrap of Tehran (a condition unacceptable to the Baath government and one of the main reasons it lobbied Putin for Moscow's intervention).

At this juncture, Washington was drawing up its coup de grâce: a no-fly zone in northern Syria that would ground Assad's air force and ensure a speedy insurgent takeover of the remainder of Idlib province and even much of Latakia province (the prize being the port of Latakia itself). Needless to say, this is where American leaders and policymakers underestimated so badly the extent of Russia's determination to not let its sole naval access point in the eastern Mediterranean fall to a Sunni fundamentalist Western proxy.

Through all these developments, the Syrian conflict had steadily morphed from a democratic revolution to a radical Islamic insurrection. Such a plain fact was lost on no one, but from the get-go it has presented the world's sole superpower with a vexing dilemma: it couldn't countenance any future for Syria with Assad in the picture in any way, shape, or form; yet as the war dragged on, the strongest impetus for eliminating the Baath regime came increasingly from forces who were no less hostile to Western liberal democratic values. The Obama administration walked a tightrope: it absolutely needed the battlefield pressure that extremists like Al Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham were applying on Damascus, yet it had to minimize their ultimate political role in Syria's transition. As the fight for Aleppo intensifies to a crescendo, it becomes clear that this practically impossible balancing act has always depended to a large extent on the ultimate fate of that city in particular.

Without control of a major urban center, the Syrian opposition has little credible leverage in the political settlement sponsored by the UN at Geneva: it thus follows that not only must it retain control of its sector of Aleppo, but it must also keep itself as free of radical jihadist influence as possible. The embattled remnants of the Syrian revolution - still defiantly clinging to a vision of the country free of both Assad and Islamic extremism - have essentially staked all their bets on riding out the long storm engulfing the country's second city and longtime commercial hub.

For this reason, rebel forces in and around Aleppo city have been disproportionately of the secular revolutionary variety - FSA and similar outfits - for much longer than most anywhere else in Syria. Even the local Islamist units are fiercely opposed not merely to ISIS, but have battled Al Nusra and its affiliates as well.

The latest developments in Aleppo could therefore be at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Syrian opposition: the return of Al Qaeda and its kindred Salafist spirits - even under a new local name - means that acknowledged terrorist bands are playing a key, even central, role in shaping the outcome of the most critical battle of the war. That could throw a monkey wrench into the opposition's hopes for a united front at the Geneva talks.

The immediate situation is that the battle appears far from over: the independent Russian strategic news service Southfront reports that the jihadists haven't truly secured the supply route they've claimed to open, as they must first clear varied pockets of regime regulars and pro-regime militias in their immediate vicinity. Given Russo-Syrian airpower, it may be difficult to utilize the corridor even if they do.

Moving further on out from here, even if the jihadists prevail and genuinely lift the siege, one must wonder how kindly they and their sympathizers (who have probably grown exponentially within Aleppo city in the last couple of weeks) will take to being undercut by the politically favored yet militarily toothless secular elements of the opposition during peace negotiations under watchful US sponsorship.

Obama doubtless hopes that even if US aims in Syria are subjected to the desires of radicals who are cut from the same cloth as those that murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11 - not to mention those whose head-chopping and child-molesting exploits have earned a name for themselves - that yet somehow the world and the American public can still be led to believe that the five-and-a-half year Syrian civil war could end in a democratic third way.

The US left Afghanistan over a quarter-century ago because it was assumed that just because our friends in Kabul wore Western suits and ties and had the right "free-market capitalist" inclinations, then it didn't matter that so many heavily armed warlords who actually ruled the vast countryside were such irreconcilable antitheses to the very notions of secularism and liberalism. In the years since, you'd think our richly checkered experiences of nation-building in the Islamic world would've instilled the hard lesson at Langley, the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and so on that maybe, just maybe, certain countries simply can't stay in one piece except through coercion - and that the only alternative to the centralized coercion of a single strongman is the fragmented coercion of multiple strongmen.

But as always, the worst heresy inside the Beltway is any hint of belief that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. Long after the rest of the world - including the American people themselves - have shed their last illusions about the unchanging realities of human nature, one day even our own ruling class might not merely get it, too, but actually admit it.

Russian-dominated Eurasia is coming, war or not

What a difference an altered global balance of power makes.

With Hillary Clinton having wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination, there's little doubt that her campaign is effectively posing her as Pax Americana's last, great hope. And who is the existential enemy to vanquish? Surprise, surprise!

Russia scholar Stephen Cohen blows the lid on what he deems to be a neo-McCarthyism pertaining to the new Russia-US cold war - a true paradigm shift in that it comes not from the right, but from the left. "Red-baiting" has been supplanted by "Putin-baiting", or perhaps just plain "Russia-baiting" - and Donald Trump is the prize catch.

This could end up being the supreme irony of the twilight of the lame-duck Obama administration, one that can leave a permanent mark on his historic record: entering office as a man of peace and disarmament, as he leaves he will have been dragged into an unwinnable and downright preposterous confrontation with the sole adversary that can easily and rapidly kill tens of millions of Americans.

In recent weeks, the Washington establishment of which Hillary is the representative in the 2016 race has steadily reached panic mode with respect to its faltering gambit for supremacy against the Kremlin - and of course, it's lashed out.

Though the US will never admit it, it appears that the botched coup against Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan of July 15 was, if not aided and abetted by covert elements of the US military and intelligence bureaucracy, then at least tolerated by the Washington "deep state" as being in line with US interests: how very convenient to be rid of Erdogan just as he was suddenly (and alarmingly) cozying up to Putin again!

This explains the harshness of Ankara's backlash: even as Obama was busy imploring Erdogan that Washington (and pro-Western Turkish exiles) had nothing to do with the putsch, the latter's own intelligence apparatus was unveiling foolproof evidence that some US military personnel stationed in Turkey as part of NATO not only had some foreknowledge of the plot by renegade Turkish officers, but didn't do anything to warn the regime.

Innocently, of course, you can argue that this was a case of American negligence or, to be more noble and altruistic, a prudent refusal to interfere in an internal Turkish affair (yeah, right - as if Washington can be counted on to not meddle in other people's sovereign matters). But when you couple this with leaked reports that it was Russian intelligence which tipped Erdogan off just before a team of heavily armed commandos backed by air and armored assets stormed his vacation resort, then an unmistakable conclusion has to be reached: America is no friend, but Russia is a lifesaver.

If you place the whole Turkish fiasco in context of what came just before it and what has transpired afterwards, it's clear that it's thrown haywire the Washington deep state's whole strategy to contain and roll back Moscow's recent strategic gains in both Europe and the Middle East.

The shock of Brexit back on June 23-24 handed Putin a geopolitical victory of tremendous significance, if even primarily in the realm of public perception: a tangible split between US and European foreign policy (including joint security policy). Moscow had initially feared the ramifications of the UK's "leave" vote on its heavily British-linked finances, but when the smoke had cleared as the world's central banker cartel calmed the waters of investor nerves, this proved negligible, leaving the Kremlin with an unadulterated strategic win: the West's own electorate was now in open revolt against the US imperial project of forcing liberal democratization upon an unwilling Islamic world - specifically, against the collateral damage of unwanted Muslim refugee flows that this had caused.

The wider ripple effect in western Eurasia was swift and gave Russia quite a windfall: that very weekend after Brexit, Mr. Erdogan, having realized that his effective blackmailing of the EU on the refugee crisis had failed, telephoned Putin an apology for the downing of the Russian fighter-bomber over the Syrian border in November, which had severed their bilateral ties by putting Turkey firmly (though provisionally) in the Western camp. Turkey was then rewarded for this rapprochement with an ISIS bombing of Istanbul airport - carried out by Turkic-speaking citizens of former Soviet republics (including one of the Russian Federation itself). We can surmise that Russo-Turkish détente and cooperation (including intelligence cooperation) mushroomed immediately and drastically in the wake of this incident.

From those events in the last week of June, the situation unfolded even more tellingly. In early July, Ankara began making not-so-secret overtures to its arch-nemesis, Bashar al-Assad's despised Syrian regime in Damascus. This ratcheted up the pressure on anti-regime rebels in northwestern Syria, who had long funneled fighters and weaponry into that front through the porous Turkish border with US and Turkish support; it also threw a monkey wrench in US plans against ISIS in the country, which depended on the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast whose activity had long alarmed Turkey, whose still-simmering Kurdish insurgency in the southeast made it imperative to restrict Kurdish militancy beyond the mountainous Syrian (not to mention Iraqi) frontier.

Now that Putin had become Erdogan's champion against Kurdish autonomy in Syria - and had extracted the price of his Turkish counterpart's relaxation of hostility towards Assad - the US was cornered. Its anti-ISIS air campaign from Incirlik Air Force Base in southern Turkey continued and intensified with Turkish support, but the endgame had suddenly soured: even the Turks had now given up on ousting Assad, and seemed content to watch Kurds die taking ISIS territory in the knowledge that they could be expediently undercut in negotiations later.

This dramatically tightened the noose around the entire US effort in Syria, which even after the setbacks foisted on it by Putin's intervention last winter had not really given up somehow getting Mr. Assad to step down, and had thus deliberately shunned cooperation with Russia. And unless Washington now changed tack on Moscow's policy in Syria, it risked undermining its position in the political process at the cessation of hostilities, which would render even its most resounding military successes against ISIS and Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra hollow victories. Seeing the writing on the wall, in the first week of July Obama clearly resolved to finally start working with Putin on the Syrian crisis.

Knowing that its president would be negotiating with the Kremlin on such a central strategic front largely on the latter's terms, the Washington deep state sought to ramp up American leverage: it goaded Obama to use the July 8-9 NATO Warsaw summit as a platform to project with fanfare an unprecedented US military deployment on Russia's very frontiers - the Baltics - as well as host Russian archrival Poland. Surely such a show of American firepower on his own front door would wisen Putin up to the dangers of not playing along with US plans in the Middle East - even now; it would leave him - and by extension Erdogan - little choice but to start doing (and still do) America's bidding in Syria, after all.

Only sadly for the CIA and DOD, that's exactly the kind of frightened overreaction that an old KGB spook has a trained nose for. While Putin must have been dismayed that such hopeful proposals being floated for a joint US-Russia command center against ISIS and Al Nusra in Jordan would be dashed to pieces by the usual neocon suspects at Langley and the Pentagon (in league with residual holdouts at Foggy Bottom), it helps his cause immensely that such high-level American incoherence or even confusion is becoming harder and harder to hide: meeting with Secretary of State Kerry in Moscow less than two weeks ago, he gave an unmistakable impression that Washington is at last coming round to treating Russia as an equal partner in resolving the Syrian conflict and fighting terrorism; that Kerry's actual proposal still had regime change as a precondition for joint military action was so completely contrary to the spirit of the dialogue that it effectively paints the top US diplomat (and by extension, Obama himself) as the affable velvet glove covering the sinister iron fist of the neocons. Thus is the Obama administration coming off as one that sincerely desires peace, and that at this point almost as sincerely seeks Russian cooperation and trust in achieving it, yet remains in thrall to the executive bureaucracy - military and civilian alike - that's slower than anyone else to question its own imperial prerogatives.

Against this backdrop, the Turkish putsch has opened up a potentially lethal crack in the whole edifice of American credibility in the Middle East and quite possibly western Eurasia more generally. Deep down, Obama almost certainly knows that his global legacy hinges on a genuine and sustainable rapprochement with Putin; yet he's far too thinly supported and isolated in that position to act boldly on such a conviction. That's doubly so because it puts him in cahoots with Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton!

But time may be running out. With each passing week, the situation on the ground in Syria and Ukraine - and more generally western Eurasia - worsens not improves for Washington's tattered and rusted liberal imperial crusade. By such a provocation as stationing troops on the Russian border for the first time ever, our unrepentant war party is only sealing the Russian populace's patriotic embrace of their powerful and charismatic leader. By our own expert admission, even with this kind of tripwire to supposedly deter Russian aggression, Moscow retains enormous escalation dominance.

Neither will it help that such countries as Poland and the Baltics are themselves among the most anti-liberal members of the EU who in fact have the deepest misgivings about the more progressive aspects of Western postmodernism that the American empire aggressively promotes, namely sexual permissiveness and open borders.

The die may be cast on a Russian-dominated Europe and Middle East, and not even Obama's cool-headed reason and temperament might block its realization. War or not, Russia finds herself increasingly united under a beloved leader and pitted up against an increasingly fractured Western and American imperium that mistrusts its own subjects. Neither Moscow nor Putin himself asked for such a long and pitiful string of US blunders which have conspired to put it back in the position of a traditional great power predisposed to strategic hegemony in continental Eurasia; but as events run their natural and irrevocable course, considering the self-imposed straitjackets that the administrators within the Beltway operate under, no other outcome becomes plausible.

Obama's legacy hinges on Putin deal

Exactly half a year until his departure from the White House, Barack Obama's legacy appears to hinge on his new quest for a rapprochement with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

With growing indications that Obama personally wants a détente with the Kremlin to reverse the descent into a new cold war, even as NATO forces prepare to stare down their Russian counterparts on Russia's own frontier for the very first time, the stakes are running high on a turn of events that could well determine the new global order in the 21st century.

How Obama and Putin spar and deal on Syria, ISIS, Ukraine, and nuclear security between now and January 20, 2017, will set the tone for how the liberal democratic Western world and the conservative autocratic East will seek to coexist for possibly the next generation.

For starters, the very fact that Obama is even considering such an ambitious diplomatic push is a concession of the urgency for a positive breakthrough between the big powers: it's an acknowledgement in itself that his presidency will have left the world a worse place than it found it should Russian and American forces find themselves trained directly on each other in a new stalemate on NATO's eastern frontiers as Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump takes the oath of office.

Such a troubling bequeathal to either successor is highly unpalatable to Obama. On the one hand, the hawkish Hillary - the neocon interventionist war party's unabashed favorite in November - is likely to ramp up US military pressure on Russia so much in the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, and of course Syria, that it could well prompt preemptive Russian strikes, with even the use of tactical nuclear weapons not entirely out of the question.

On the other hand, populist-nationalist insurgent Donald Trump - who has just overruled his own Republican party establishment's stance of arming Ukraine against Russian separatists - stands to capitalize from a huge propaganda victory at the expense of not merely Obama, Hillary, and the Democrats, but of the entire US and Western political class, should he be the one to pull off a historic reconciliation with the strongman for whom he has all but gushed out with personal veneration.

That leaves the cool-headed but, to his opponents and critics, aloof and abrasive, 44th US president with a brief window of opportunity as he approaches the twilight of his eight-year tenure: to hesitate now would be a final abdication of historic, providentially assigned responsibility as the one-time chosen messiah of the free world. He can sit back and watch as liberal democracy walks ever more blindly into the jaws of an aggressive and angry revanchist despotism from the East that it has no hope of overpowering; or worse yet, allow that very anti-liberalism to infect even the West itself by ironically appropriating for itself the anti-interventionist - read: antiwar - mantle. The only alternative is to strike out boldly - possibly virtually alone - to seize the narrow middle way while it's still just open.

It has gradually dawned on Obama that the entirety and totality of his foreign policy - that is to say, his eventual place in world history - boils down to how he finally comes to terms with the one man who has a comparable arsenal of weapons of mass destruction at his fingertips as himself. If there's one lesson that the idealist community organizer has learned from the cutthroat KGB man, it's that politics ultimately boils down to naked hard power.

Yes, first in the desert sands of Libya, then more dramatically on the balmy shores of Crimea and wooded plains of Donetsk province, but finally and conclusively in the devastated rubble of the towns and cities of Syria, the revelation of a primeval reality - eloquently described long ago by such varied luminaries from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli - has at last broken out as plainly and unreservedly as the noonday sun.

Democracy - yes, even the great liberal ideal of democracy - must always remember and come back to its fundamental practical concern in this imperfect world before the arrival of that nirvana of everlasting peace: namely, a more perfect capacity for and exercise of actual power.

Turkish putsch seals Putin's Syrian checkmate

So Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not only survived a putsch, but it increasingly appears that even if he didn't actually stage it, he was so well prepared for it that he pretty much knew how it would play out. He set a trap for his enemies and they took the bait. Unless he's assassinated now, he will almost certainly emerge stronger than ever. That's bad news for the West and the US - and yet another coup for Putin.

It's no coincidence that the botched military uprising took place as unmistakable signs were emerging of Ankara's realignment with Russia in what would amount to an unprecedented reorientation away from NATO, the EU, and the US. Knowing Mr. Erdogan, it's actually more plausible that he's playing both sides - getting chummy again with fellow strongman Vladimir certainly boosts his leverage with Washington and Brussels. But Turkey's beleaguered liberal secularists have good reason to suspect that his move into Moscow's orbit is genuine. And there's little doubt that this dramatic shift has accelerated the Obama administration's own rather stunning convergence with the Kremlin's views on ISIS and the Syrian civil war in just the past two weeks.

It all boils down to the Kurdish question. With his policy of overthrowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad reduced to shambles last winter by Russia's remarkably successful air campaign on behalf of Damascus, Erdogan has ever since been trying to contain the fallout of his whole Syrian misadventure within Turkey's own borders, namely the spillover of a reignited Kurdish separatist insurgency in the remote, mountainous southeast.

That has not only left him at Putin's mercy in the critical northwestern sector of the Syrian front, where Kurdish fighters continue to act as Assad's de facto allies in squeezing the hodgepodge of jihadist outfits, many of which rely on Turkish support, but it has also widened the gulf between him and the US concerning the central role of Kurds in the ground campaign against ISIS in the north-central and northeastern parts of Syria, the latter being home to the caliphate's effective capital, Raqqa.

So it was just a matter of time before Erdogan would seize on a way out of his geopolitical morass; it helped that Putin was also prepared to make limited but significant concessions.

The months since the Kremlin's surprising withdrawal of its main aerial force from Syria in March have convinced Putin that Assad's regime remains too weak to sustainably reoccupy much of the country beyond its major urban areas and transport networks, even in key sectors of the heavily pro-regime western provinces. With little interest in supporting a longer war of attrition, Moscow wants to cut a deal that leaves Mr. Assad in de facto charge of a reduced Syrian polity, whatever de jure recognition he is accorded to rule the entire country within the old Sykes-Picot boundaries.

That leaves Erdogan with a clear tradeoff: if he simply drops his demand for regime change in Damascus, he maximizes his position in a negotiated settlement to the Syrian conflict - to possibly include Turkish peacekeepers in northern Syria in a UN-sponsored arrangement to transition the especially troubled areas to some kind of federated autonomy that precludes both jihadist extremists and Baath reprisals. If Erdogan can't eliminate Assad outright, the next best thing is to lock down his reduction as firmly as possible - even if it's primarily de facto and not de jure.

That's especially so because the Kurdish issue, while far from slipping out of Ankara's control, has made it absolutely imperative for the international situation to stabilize such that Erdogan can focus on consolidating centralized power at home.

In that light, last Friday's putsch is something of a coup-de-grace for the US and Western strategy of containing Russian expansion in the Mideast: it all but ensures an accelerated collusion between Moscow and Ankara to end the war to overthrow Assad, leaving the dictator and his brutal regime in place but still full of holes. Kurdish de-facto autonomy and the Kurdish role against ISIS in Syria will be bargained with, but only in conjunction with securing Turkish sovereignty - i.e. tightening Erdogan's grip. Turkish Islamism with its clear anti-Western, anti-secular bent will enjoy a stronger position than ever: while it may seize the opportunity to squeeze hated liberal democratic values even further, more likely it will leverage its new position to continue pressuring the EU for fairer treatment, i.e. less cultural prejudice.

All this will be music to Putin's ears. The more that Europe's fate is dictated by the neo-fundamentalist dictators on its eastern fringe - namely Erdogan and himself - the less sway that a hyper-secular Washington holds over western and central European capitals. That suits the Kremlin's grand strategy quite nicely.

Turkey hit for reconciling with Russia and Israel

The ISIS suicide attack on Istanbul's international airport seems to be a quick reprisal against Turkey for its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan's apology to Vladimir Putin for last fall's downing of a Russian warplane on the Syrian border - on top of its renormalization of ties with Israel.

Of course, this isn't the first time ISIS has hit Turkey: last October an ISIS suicide bombing killed about 100 demonstrators for peace in Syria as they marched in Ankara on the eve of Mr. Erdogan's reelection; but the high-profile nature of the strike on Ataturk International Airport bears an unmistakable scent of jihadist retaliation for his perceived treason against Islam.

If so, however, it could mark a significant new turning of the tide against ISIS: should Moscow and Ankara now begin to align their strategies regarding the rogue state, it would remove one of the biggest obstacles to international cooperation in the Mideast that allowed it to grow into a major territorial entity in Syria during 2013-14 in the first place (from whence it spread to Iraq).

While horrific and unlikely to be the last such attack by ISIS on Turkish civilians, the Istanbul bombing gives Turkey and Russia a golden opportunity to start over with respect to Syria: the Kremlin now has every reason to return Mr. Erdogan's overture and strengthen his hand against Islamist hardliners who may sympathize with the anti-Russian message ISIS is trying to convey (even if they must publicly condemn the act itself).

Should he prove sincere in seeking reconciliation and willing to risk both fundamentalist ire and actual terrorist attack at home, Mr. Erdogan's twin rapprochements with Putin and Netanyahu could go down as one of the greatest strokes of statecraft by any Islamic leader in modern times. Crucially, it would indicate that he now sees more or less eye to eye with his counterpart in the Kremlin, after a string of setbacks exposed the sheer fragility and isolation of his more inflexible position in the first 7-8 months after Russia began its military intervention on behalf of Bashar Assad's regime in Damascus last September 30.

That is to say, Turkey's priority is now to salvage what it can from its Syrian misadventure, namely some degree of influence in ending the conflict and securing its southern border's heavily Kurdish sectors from spillover instability on account of renegade Syrian Kurdish groups colluding with its own separatist Kurds, Given its leverage with the militant and jihadist groups still fighting Assad in Syria's northwest, especially Aleppo province, Ankara can fairly easily secure these vital objectives - and it can't do anything that's at odds with pro-Kurdish Washington, anyway.

Now that Turkey's rebuilding its bridges to Moscow and Jerusalem, as well, it's repositioning itself as a pillar of regional stability - perhaps to such an extent that it'll even become apparent that that stability broke down so badly in the first place largely because it turned insular and sectarian.