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.

Eurasian dictators are now playing America like a cheap fiddle

As Turkey's incursion into northern Syria blatantly uses ISIS as a pretext to primarily attack the Kurds instead, it's increasingly clear that Ankara is blackmailing Washington: since we don't forgive your unwillingness to extradite Fetullah Gulen (the cleric blamed for masterminding the July 15 putsch), if you still want us in NATO and not fall outright into Russia's orbit, we can't have you nitpick how we press our legitimate security interests in Syria, especially vis-à-vis the Kurds.

That sounds like just the kind of cynical deal Erdogan would have concluded (admittedly roughly) with Putin when they met at the Kremlin August 9. The common denominator is unmistakable: play the US like a cheap fiddle, using Washington's fear of loss of influence in the region and broader peacemaking credibility worldwide, to bamboozle it into doing Ankara's and Moscow's respective authoritarian biddings.

So Obama is looking more like the naive fool in the region, almost like the "JV team" he once derided ISIS as: just as the Russians have extracted from him the price of non-interference with their brutal bombings of the opposition, so the Turks have now extracted the price of plausible deniability when it comes to betraying Syrian Kurdish aspirations.

It all works just fine for the dictators: they get to whack the malcontents they want to whack - provided they've agreed on how to divvy up the hit jobs - and they can count on the good ole US of A to bear the humanitarian burden of cleaning up the mess, even as they can still keep just enough facade of being a "partner" of America to wash their own bloodied hands when the dirty work is finished.

It's hardly a wonder the Iranians have been so fired up against US naval patrols lately: the Shia jihadists smell the stench of a weakness borne of a deep sense of confusion over just what in the world the US mission has become. And of course it's the same with the Chinese: Beijing's aggressively uncompromising arrogance towards its smaller neighbors these days isn't ultimately about China's evolving relationship with them - it's about proving their association with Uncle Sam is the root of their insecurity.

If this trend persists, before long America's remaining undemocratic allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, have to wonder just why on earth they're still deferring to Washington's preferences and prejudices. And even democracies with firm sense of national interest and unflinching autonomy - think India - will draw closer to the US for purely utilitarian reasons, not humanitarian ones.

Shame, just a shame...America has become the timid sheriff who relies on the local gangster bosses to keep their neighborhoods relatively orderly (or simply from becoming even more chaotic)...if not even the toothless judge in a mob-ruled society whose verdicts are valued only for the moral certification they give the oligarchs.

Abandoning Syrian regime change, Turkey takes its own bite of Syria

Having given up overthrowing Assad, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has wasted no time seizing what territorial leverage he still can in Syria with a powerful incursion to retake the ISIS border stronghold of Jarabulus.

Jarabulus is a vantage point on the upper Euphrates in its descent from the Anatolian highlands towards Mesopotamia, and the operation is appropriately dubbed "Euphrates Shield": by securing the river in this border sector, the Turkish and Turkish-supported Syrian rebel forces which comprise the expedition will be in a position to threaten further Kurdish territorial gains against ISIS - under the convenient pretext of fighting ISIS.

This is Turkey's response to the recent capture from ISIS of Manbij, further south in northeastern Aleppo province, by the Kurdish YPG militia-dominated, US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). As the coalition effort to clear ISIS from the north of the province intensifies, Ankara is jockeying for a slice of the action, with the imperative of preventing the SDF from linking up the main Syrian Kurdish federation, predominantly along the Turkish border east of the Euphrates, with the small Kurdish enclave in the far northwest corner of Aleppo province (also bordering Turkey).

Strangely, this is the effective proxy war between the Pentagon and the CIA: the former supports the Kurdish-Arab rebel SDF while the latter backs the "moderate" rebel coalition of Arab groups such as Free Syrian Army (FSA) and Ahrar al-Sham alongside Turkic-speaking outfits like the Sultan Murad Brigade and Nour al-Din al-Zinki.

For the time being, US airpower and probably special forces are participating in the Turkish anti-ISIS campaign around Jarabulus, meaning that Langley has one-upped the Pentagon into at least partly appeasing Ankara. President Obama himself has doubtless concluded that if he wants Turkey to remain in NATO (i.e. not drift fully into Russia's orbit), he must make at least this token concession of legitimate national interest to Mr. Erdogan. It remains to be seen, though, just how he'll balance the two - the Turks versus the Kurds - as both want a role in liberating northern Aleppo province and thereby shaping its post-ISIS future.

The other wild card obviously is the Assad regime. While unsurprisingly protesting the Turkish incursion, Damascus can't do much about it: it needs to play off Turkey against the Kurds to maximize its own position at the bargaining table against the rebels. While Assad wouldn't welcome a longer Turkish presence in Syria any more than he'd recognize the Kurdish federation, he perfectly understands it's a reasonable price to pay for Erdogan's assent to keep his rump of the core of western Syria intact.

Syrian conflict shifts, but Axis of Fatima has essentially won

Iran's abrupt eviction of the Russian air contingent at its Hamadan air base barely a week after the announcement of the groundbreaking collaboration by the Axis of Fatima is now being disclosed by Tehran as merely the end of a one-time usage, at its own behest, of the vital facility.

Apparently, the bombers were originally called in at the joint request of the Syrian regime and its Iranian benefactors both to conduct actual heavy strikes and, even more to the point, to make a strong show of force against the insurgents led by the jihadists of Al Nusra Front in the decisive standoff at Aleppo.

Having achieved a great physical and psychological impact which must have played a role in Turkey's about-face regarding Assad, however, Russia got a little giddy: its media went overboard trumpeting the new, uniquely privileged use of Iranian runways as evidence that the nation's great power status had dramatically been elevated. Such American-style hubris - which Putin himself apparently failed to rein in - had to be severely reprimanded.

While it's been pointed out that Iran's historic suspicions of Russia played a role in a rising popular backlash against the bomber deployment, the Shiite Islamic regime clearly had a much more immediate consideration: keeping itself in the driver's seat of the Syrian conflict, which it can never concede to an extra-regional Christian power, given that it's always posed it as a holy war (indeed, its own jihad) against the Salafists who would murder all the adherents of Ali.

That's in keeping with Iran's long-term ambition to spread Shiism across the Middle East to challenge the millennial Sunni supremacy: no hint whatsoever of subservience or vassalage to a non-Muslim power could be tolerated.

Despite the embarrassing spat, both Iran and Russia have gotten what they want in Erdogan's reversal over Assad's potential role in a Syrian transition, which came just in the nick of time on Saturday, August 20. This diminishes the political and diplomatic price they'd otherwise pay with such a public falling-out (however limited).

In the two weeks prior to Turkey's concession, with the government siege of Aleppo having been breached by jihadists spearheaded by the former Al Nusra Front, Russian and Syrian warplanes ruthlessly escalated their bombardment of the rebel-held eastern part of the city, ultimately exacting such a heavy direct and indirect civilian toll - including the now-infamous injury of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh and the death of his brother - that probably tens of thousands of additional residents have vacated it.

In this context, Damascus and Tehran saw fit to call in an even heavier array of Russian firepower in the form of Tupolev Tu-22M3 strategic bombers and advanced Sukhoi Su-35 fighter-bombers based out of Iran: their immediate mission was to take advantage of the shorter distance to Syria to pound both rebel and ISIS supply lines, thus pressuring the former's positions at Aleppo and blunting any opportunistic thrusts by the latter to take advantage of reshuffled regime manpower.

As of a week ago, when Russia announced its new bomber deployment in Iran, this first task had effectively been accomplished: the reinforced pro-regime troops were on the offensive to gradually wrest back the corridor they had lost to Al Nusra in southwestern Aleppo in the first week of August, if still unable to consolidate major gains. More significantly, with the existing tactical Russian and regime airstrikes now blasting the eastern rebel sector's support infrastructure to rubble, there'd soon be a lot less Aleppo left for the rebel-jihadist alliance to save - and even less so once enough additional civilians cleared out to run for their lives to make an all-out saturation bombardment by the Iranian-based Tu-22's feasible. With the threat of such fully-loaded Tuploevs flying such a shorter distance to rain wholesale destruction on both the east of the city and the urban jihadist positions in the southwest, Turkey could see the writing on the wall.

At that point, Tehran must have decided to throw Ankara a juicy bone: agree to Assad's role in a transitional government, and we'll cut the Russian heavyweights out of the region with a sharp rebuke to the Orthodox Christian superpower. Such a proposal would have been music to Mr. Erdogan's Islamist ears - and just the kind of deal which conveniently suits Turkish Sunni Islamists and the Shia fundamentalist regime of Iran alike.

With the Russians having been put in their place by Iran to Turkey's satisfaction, the continuing fight at Aleppo is itself becoming subsumed in a broader dance of triangular Turkish-Iranian-Syrian diplomacy. As Assad's forces tentatively retake portions of the jihadist corridor that purported to relieve the government siege of the rebel east (and even partially blockade the regime-held west itself), the Turks have stepped up their activity further east: with the priority of preventing a Kurdish statelet in northern Syria, they're far less keen on Al Nusra victory at Aleppo, giving the Axis of Fatima a much-needed breather in its central struggle to keep Assad viable.

Instead, Ankara's Syrian intervention is now squarely aimed at the Kurds: its shelling of ISIS around the recently US-backed Kurd-liberated town of Manbij is clearly laced with a threat to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), whose People's Protection Units (YPG) militia so happened to be hit as well: you better behave or we won't mind making you collateral damage in our legitimate fight against Daesh.

This comes as the YPG has elsewhere liquidated the pro-regime resistance pocket of Hasakah: Assad's outpost there in the far northeast, which never really stood a chance, at least gave him the opportunity to demonstrate to Erdogan that his own opposition to Kurdish autonomy is consistent with Turkey's policy of maintaining Syrian territorial integrity for its own Kurdish problem's sake.

The YPG's links to the infamous Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is still waging a low-intensity guerrilla war against Ankara across the Turkish border from northeastern Syria, guarantees that Erdogan will continue to use a stepped-up campaign against ISIS mainly to contain the emergent Northern Syrian Federation modeled on the longstanding Kurdish autonomous federations which have existed in northern Iraq since the 1990s. As before, Turkish-backed "moderate" rebels will do Ankara's bidding: still implacably opposed to Assad, they'll now have to settle for serving Erdogan by putting an acceptable Syrian - but not Kurdish - face on his influence in the Kurdish-ISIS contested zone vis-à-vis Damascus.

Going forward, these developments point to a major fluid shift in the Syrian conflict: as Assad's core position is stabilized, the question now turns to just how the vast tracts of the country he doesn't control will be divvied up - and that of course includes the fate of both ISIS and the Kurds. While Turkey and Iran - with their new rapprochement that's followed and possibly already exceeded the Turkish thaw with Russia - would appear to be the decisive actors, Moscow retains significant leverage and will seek to maximize its efficacy.

Though the specifics will have to play out over the course of more years yet, the Axis of Fatima has essentially won. Moscow and Tehran have for practical purposes secured their foothold on the Levantine Mediterranean coast: in this objective, which the former has taken care to prevent the latter from expanding, they are increasingly untouchable. Meanwhile, the US-NATO-Sunni coalition's once maximalist goal of regime change and regional hegemony through a pipeline from the Persian Gulf to Europe through Syria and Turkey (thus circumventing Russia) has been thwarted: even if Russia can't make Assad whole, it can easily live with his strategically critical rump because it will have snatched a much bigger prize, namely Turkey, from Washington's clutch.

As Turkey finally blinks, Russia pulls bombers from Iran

Barely a week after launching its first airstrikes from Iran, Russia has pulled its bombers from the base.

This is probably because Turkey has apparently blinked at long last, if only partially: Assad, says prime minister Binali Yıldırım, can indeed play a role in a political transition, even though he can't have any part in Syria's long-term political rearrangement. For a regime that's staked its entire foreign policy credibility on getting rid of the hated dictator in Damascus, this marks a major admission of defeat:

“He has the blood of 500,000 people on his hands,” Yıldırım has said, referring to al-Assad. “Will Syria be able to carry this burden? Today both the U.S. and Russia see that in the long run it is not possible. But for a transition [government], it is possible to sit and talk. It is obvious that, whether we like it or not, al-Assad is an actor.”

Just the day earlier, the Turkish foreign minister was still insisting that Ankara hadn't changed its hardline stance on Assad's fate:

Foreign Minister Cavusoglu also claimed that Turkey does not support Assad staying in power for a short period such as six months, which was claimed in the past. "Assad must go immediately."

Quite an embarrassment, one must say: it shows just how monumentally humiliating it is for Turkey to concede the scale of the debacle of its whole Syrian misadventure and miscalculation.

That debacle can yet be salvaged: Turkey can effectively lock down the insurgents' existing lines at Aleppo and also secure the jihadist stronghold of Idlib province. To do so, however, it must somehow convince the remaining Syrian revolutionary resistance and whatever moderate Islamist opposition groups would listen that at this point, their only alternative to talking with Assad on the latter's own terms is complete destruction in the cauldron of Aleppo, however long this might take or how costly they make it for the regime and its Iranian-sponsored allies.

In the prior two and a half weeks since the Al Nusra-led rebels broke the Syrian government siege of Aleppo, the Axis of Fatima unsurprisingly retaliated by reducing the rebel sector of Aleppo to rubble; both Russian and Syrian regime warplanes systematically targeted pro-rebel civilian infrastructure in the eastern part of the city to accelerate the exodus of noncombatants and isolate the jihadists and remaining diehard revolutionaries, paving the way for them to eventually be annihilated with saturation strikes by the heavy bombers Moscow deployed to Iran.

Bluntly, Ankara simply ran out of cards. A rebel victory at Aleppo now wouldn't be one it can leverage politically, because neither it nor the US can openly throw their lot behind Al Qaeda and Taliban-style jihadists that want an Islamic emirate. But even worse for Turkey, with Assad's troops now battling the Kurds in northeastern Syria and Assad's air force buzzing pro-Kurdish US jets, Damascus is presenting Mr. Erdogan with a choice: either help us end the Aleppo stalemate or we won't mind ceding autonomy to the Kurds that you so fear and despise.

In fact, all indications are that Putin's much-anticipated meeting with Erdogan back on August 9 has been fruitful: Russo-Turkish relations are so good now that some speculate that the US has already removed its 90 nuclear warheads from Incirlik Air Base, and at least one leaked report has even said that Ankara might actually give Russian warplanes access to that longtime regional stronghold.

By bombing and attacking Kurdish peshmerga, Assad too is trying to ingratiate himself with Erdogan and win some rapport with his erstwhile nemesis that the Americans are still clearly less willing to earn. That's on top of intensive shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Tehran: their foreign ministers have met twice in the wake of the Putin-Erdogan summit, as if taking their cues from the Russo-Turkish détente (which is probably effectively the case).

The Axis of Fatima is now on the verge of scoring a massive diplomatic coup: wresting once-secular Turkey from the grip of Saudi and Gulf oil money-fueled Wahhabism that has for so long used a shady alliance with the US defense-intelligence establishment to further its anti-Western, anti-secular, and quite frankly anti-democratic aims in the region with heavy Western support. One must wonder how the deep state inside the Beltway will lash out to compensate for the loss.

They have Hillary Clinton as their preferred war candidate, for sure. But the CIA and Pentagon are losing their proxy war against Fatima now - and they're running out of time to somehow reverse Obama's strategic passivity that has put Putin in the driver's seat.

With Turkish-backed rebels lining up ever more obviously (if still implicitly) with reactivated regime troops and airpower in the north and northeast of Syria to contain Kurdish advances, the potentially explosive situation of a proxy war between the US and Turkey isn't even out of the question anymore. Doubtless this is Assad's way of reasserting sovereignty on his own territory at a time when the whole US-led regime change project is coming apart at the seams, and he's conveniently putting out feelers for teaming up with a vindictive Erdogan who's ever more openly defying the American and Saudi overlords who have been blackmailing and bribing him for years.

The more that Russia and Iran (and eventually Iraq too) cozy up to Turkey, and the more Ankara reciprocates, the more likely that an Assad-Erdogan rapprochement decisively shuts out US and Saudi designs on the Levant once and for all. The Axis of Fatima will then have taken its rival US-led alliance to the cleaners.

25 years later: post-Soviet Russia's lesson for democracy

The August 19-21, 1991 coup in which communist hardliners seized the Kremlin from Mikhail Gorbachev in a desperate attempt to prevent the USSR from disintegrating into its constituent republics is remembered quite differently in Russia as it is in the West - a sharply contrasted historic memory that perfectly reflects the diametric divergence of political worldviews and even values between East and West as the post-Cold War era has given way to the post-post-Cold War era.

As expected, American media is recalling the end of the great rival superpower that the Soviet Union had been by highlighting contemporary Putinist Russia's attempt to resurrect it; meanwhile official Russian media is lambasting the West for grossly oversimplifying the 1991 putsch as a tyrannical attempt to reimpose totalitarian rule on a freedom-yearning populace, which rightly rejected it in the most unequivocal manner.

Neither end of the spectrum finds it particularly convenient to acknowledge the central fact of the events of a quarter century ago, though both would almost certainly have to agree: that it was Russia that ended the Soviet Union.

After the fall of its satellite eastern bloc in the revolutions of 1989, the USSR found itself with little choice but to decentralize and federalize its own constituent republics. It was this loosening of centralized Soviet rule from the Kremlin that propelled Boris Yeltsin to power in 1990-91 as the undisputed leader of a new power structure within the individual member republics which no longer really answered to the traditional Soviet hierarchy spanning all of them (even as it nominally remained part of it). As elected head of the new federated Russian socialist republic, in summer 1991 Yeltsin moved rapidly to mop up what little remained of real Soviet governing authority emanating from the Kremlin. In all but name, this was a rebirth of Russian nationalism: it was hardly a coincidence, too, that Yeltsin was by then an openly devout Orthodox Christian, cultivating close ties with a resurgent Russian Orthodox Church.

The August 19 plotters may have been incompetent and badly out of touch with the sheer bankruptcy of communism at that juncture in history, but they were sincere in their greatest fear, however exaggerated it turned out to be: that unless Soviet power was reestablished over the republics, the USSR would descend into the kind of ethnic warfare across its constituents' boundaries of the kind that was then engulfing Yugoslavia. Thus when they struck, the hardliners knew exactly what they were attempting to preempt: sectarian nationalist strife. What they didn't count on, however, was that the main nationalist opposition to their scheme would come from none other than the dominant member of the union: Russia itself.

That's because the former Soviet Union wasn't exactly the former Yugoslavia: historically, tensions between Russians and Ukrainians, to take the two core Slavic ethnicities, were far less acrimonious overall than that between their equivalent pair, the Serbs and Croatians, in the Balkan region. On top of this, whereas Titoist strongman Slobodan Milosevic badly needed a new source of legitimacy as communism crumbled in the late 1980s and thus found it in posing as the protector of Serb minorities, Yeltsin rode to power on that very wave of proto-democratization of the Soviet republics that was unleashed by the mass liberalization of the east European satellite region of 1989. And although Milosevicesque jingoists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky also appeared on the freer Russian political scene of 1990-91, it was these very sectarian elements that the communist hardliners were seeking to rein in.

Thus the coup's dramatic meltdown on August 21 was a natural byproduct of a Russian neo-nationalism which wasn't expansionist, but indeed anti-imperial: a perfect confluence of factors ensured that such a reawakening of pre-communist political identity would be progressive and not reactionary in nature. As Yeltsin rallied for Russia's freedom atop the iconic tank in front of Moscow's Duma building, he and his predominantly Russian supporters found themselves in effect rallying for the independence of their far smaller and weaker fellow republics, as well.

The Russian Orthodox Church, too, stepped up to the plate at a crucial moment: Patriarch Alexei II's radio broadcast in which the former KBG collaborator warned Soviet security forces that firing on unarmed demonstrators constituted a grave sin before God, coupled with the threat of retaliatory airstrikes against the Kremlin itself by dissenting Soviet officers, decisively tipped the scales of violent coercion against the putschists. And Yeltsin himself, by then a devout practicing Orthodox Christian, took special care to secure Church blessing for his resistance effort.

Without Russia turning against it, the Soviet Union could have ended far more violently - that it was in fact Russia's own role which was central to the death of the old order and the emergence of a new one, all with relatively little bloodshed, is beyond dispute.

What's fundamentally shifted during the 21st-century Putin era, however, is the broad understanding and perception of just what kind of reborn and reawakened Russia actually arose from the Soviet ashes 25 years ago.

In the immediate aftermath of the coup's collapse exactly a quarter of a century ago today, there was little doubt to most observers both within and outside the Soviet Union that an unequivocally free, democratic, Westernized and free-market new liberal Russian society was a sure thing. And yet underneath this bubbly surface, all was not well.

The fall of its satellite empire in eastern Europe and mushrooming of ethnic separatism among its own republics had already in 1990-91 triggered a reactionary Russian jingoism in the heart of the waning USSR that was at once a threat to its internal peace and stability in that twilight period of communist rule. Ostensibly this was precisely what the ill-fated August 19 junta was trying to contain, but in fact its repression of all expressions of autonomy from the Soviet center - i.e. including Russia's own - was most enthusiastically supported by these same right-wing Russian nationalists, and this association has never been broken in the intervening decades: the August 19 coup's failure is widely (if even by no means universally) mourned by the Putinist brand of Russian political identity to the present day (as well as its more extreme offshoots and variants).

What's intriguingly significant, though, is how quickly and dramatically the Russian parliamentary coalition that propelled Yeltsin to power in 1991-92 turned against the first post-Soviet Russian presidency: the showdown between the Kremlin and Duma of October 1993, which ended with a bloody siege of the parliament building, wasn't merely a result of the Yeltsin administration's badly bungled "shock therapy" program to get the Russian economy on a prosperous free-market footing; it was on a deeper level a reflection of just how provisional the lawmakers' alliance with the new chief executive was to begin with. Many of them, it turned out, wanted to do away with the old Soviet system merely so they could essentially privatize formerly state assets into their own pockets; in this they closely mirrored their ex-apparatchik counterparts in Ukraine and Belarus, whose own lukewarm support for independence in 1991 was sealed by assurances from the leaders of their newly autonomous republics that they could keep running their existing socialist factories and farms (i.e. effectively privatizing them by making themselves oligarchs). Instead Yeltsin, under heavy US and Western pressure to fully privatize to true entrepreneurs, not just cosmetically privatize by turning communists into capitalists, had to put the red managers out to dry.

In hindsight, Russia was fortunate that Yeltsin cracked down so hard, even undemocratically, on the resurgence of hard socialism that accompanied the resultant backlash: its post-Soviet economy hasn't been stellar, but it could easily have been even worse - neighboring Ukraine and Belarus, the former which has de-Sovietized more slowly than Russia, the latter which arguably hasn't even done so at all, are all the evidence one needs.

And that's the great paradox of post-Soviet Russia: from the virtual get-go, pure democracy failed. The West may point the finger all it wants at Putin, but the fact is that Putin simply capitalized on a new kind of centralized authoritarianism that was established in the Kremlin by his predecessor and his oligarch henchmen. They had their day in the 1990s - their critical role in history was to prevent the return of communism - but that day had run its course when the ex-KGB case officer rose to power in 1999-2000.

Today, the West and Russian liberals alike lament that such a bright Russian democratic spring in 1990-91 was apparently strangled by the dark scepter of reactionary ethnic and religious jingoism - and that this same disaster may be unfolding worldwide.

In fact, one could just as well argue that the democratic dream - that is to say, the most parochial and narrow Western liberal conception of it - died a long time ago. Not even democracy itself can be advanced or preserved through democratic means all or perhaps even most of the time. That was true for Russia in 1993, a full decade before the US put the same principle into practice in Iraq.

A few days ago, Mikhail Gorbachev himself recalled having given the US this tidbit of wisdom:

“I told the Americans: you are trying to impose your democracy on the people of different countries, spreading it around like coffee in bags, but we must give the people a chance to make their own choice.”

The fact that the Western hero who freed the slaves behind the Iron Curtain is saying this now, on what should have been the commemoration of the start of an unvarnished golden era of democratic freedom worldwide, is a testimony to how badly awry the whole project has gone.

Democracy itself is never the problem: it's the self-professing democrats who exercise it that determine its success or failure. If there's any lesson that post-Soviet Russian history should impress on us 25 years on, it's that democracy is merely a means to an end - and if that end gets garbled or lost in the execution, it becomes as practically fit for the ash heap of history as any other political system. Freedom is never free, and if its entrusted guardians don't pay their special, even extraordinary dues, we're all in serious trouble.

Axis of Fatima laying political and diplomatic groundwork for victory

This blog's observation eleven days ago that the Syrian conflict is becoming a clear binary choice between Assad's brutal secular regime and Sunni extremists in the central battleground of Aleppo is being verified by diplomatic, political, and military developments on the ground which are emerging into the open.

Even Western media now admits the obvious: the battle of Aleppo has essentially become a sectarian showdown between Sunni and Shia jihadists from all across the region. That's really, really bad news for US policy: not only does it mean we no longer have a viable dog in this fight, but if anything, we're now coming under increasing pressure to join the Russian and Syrian regime air campaign against the Salafists led by the former Al Nusra Front (i.e. Al Qaeda in Syria), whose embrace of suicide attacks and fanaticism more generally has given them a glaring edge in battlefield effectiveness against Damascus relative to the remaining secular opposition fighters (i.e. Free Syrian Army or FSA).

Thus Putin, Assad, Iran and its proxies - the Axis of Fatima - now have exactly the war they want. Al Qaeda's dominant presence on the front lines of Aleppo puts their real opponents - Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and ultimately the US - in a political logjam: if they're serious about fighting extremism and terrorism, it's hard to put on a good face about deliberately avoiding targeting forces that are openly fighting for Shia, Alawite, and Christian genocide.

For starters, Washington is now out of the equation as a serious military-strategic player concerning Aleppo: after all, we're as existentially opposed to the proto-Talibanization of Syria as we are to the continued rule of Assad. The futility of our policy of regime change is now obvious for the entire world to see: those very factions most credible as alternatives to Assad aren't merely getting our cold shoulder, but must even be considered for our own bombs.

That leaves Turkey as the crucial swing factor: the way it recalibrates its relationship with the Syrian opposition - with all its moderate and extreme elements - will largely determine both the military and eventual political outcome of the battle for Aleppo. And of course, this will entirely be a function of Ankara's realigned internal politics in the wake of the July 15 putsch: how Mr. Erdogan rejuggles the balance of secularists and Islamists within his own government and military will have major bearing on the ultimate denouement of the armed stalemate across the border.

Already Turkey has made tentative (and still conflicting) gestures of dropping its implacable opposition to Assad's political survival; doubtless this is reflective of a highly fluid situation that's complicated greatly by the country's uncertain future both as a NATO member and as an aspiring EU one. As a prudent politician, Erdogan simply can't sacrifice wholesale secular interests for Islamist ones or vice versa - either at home or across the Syrian frontier; his even more pressing concern in any case would appear to be the Kurds.

That means Turkey will most likely use its influence to rein in the jihadist coalition at Aleppo from seeking a complete victory (one that's unlikely anyway) and instead direct them to collaborate with the remaining secular revolutionary opposition within the besieged rebel-held part of the city to relaunch the political transition process: at this juncture, probably the best Ankara could hope for is a freeze to the whole war that leaves Islamists with de facto control of virtually all of Idlib province, parts of the Aleppo countryside, and a limited enclave in Aleppo itself. Such a truce would also leave the original Syrian revolution intact politically to negotiate with Assad on behalf of the secular, moderate Islamist, and extreme Islamist opposition alike.That's where Turkish efforts and influence will face its test: the jihadists and probably even secular revolutionaries aren't likely to be swayed that military victory should be abandoned, but for some at least, that depends on how Assad himself behaves in this whole situation.

Russia for its part seems to already be pushing Damascus to open up to the political process again: its brief applications of ceasefires and bombing halts, with proposals for more extended lulls, point in that direction. Clearly, Putin wants to impress on Mr. Assad that the Syrian regime's key objective right now is political not military: namely, to secure a détente with Erdogan. Such an accord, especially if enforced on the Turkish side by an intensified crackdown on dissent against the presidency, would serve Damascus far more than retaking Aleppo. Given that both the regime and its Iranian-sponsored militia allies have reinforced the city's front lines by the thousands since their siege was punctured two weeks ago - on top of a re-intensified Russian air campaign - the present stalemate should be more than sustainable, giving a sufficient backdrop to an eventual restart of negotiations per the Geneva format.

That would be a major diplomatic coup for the Axis of Fatima: if a resumed Geneva enshrines Turkish acceptance of Assad's role in a political transition. To facilitate such an outcome, the Syrian regime has clearly increased its overtures to other major powers: both India and China have been responsive to a broader re-legitimization of the government in Damascus amongst the international community (one can smell Russian influence or even orchestration behind this, too).

As these political and diplomatic chips fall into place for the Axis of Fatima, the final wild card will be the US, Saudi, and wider Sunni Arab (especially Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC) response. They would seem to be the big losers in the event of Assad's survival and Putin's ascendancy in the Levant, but only if they fail to adapt to a new strategic reality. With both Turkey and the US no longer in the coalition to eliminate Assad, their own support for the effort is effectively neutered.

Even this, of course, doesn't rule out the unfortunate possibility that the jihadists or even revolutionaries at Aleppo may well be suicidal: so bent on revenge and destruction of the hated old order that they won't settle for even an appreciable role in shaping a new one. Sad to say, but should that come to pass, the kid gloves will have to come off.

Optimistically, all will be well in the end, if only because even the apparent losers will have no palatable alternatives. Quite bluntly, even if America's Sunni allies in the region lose faith altogether in Washington, their only alternative is the emerging Moscow-Beijing axis. And for all its authoritarianism - probably actually because of it - any Sino-Russian order would have far less interest in proxy warfare through "democratic" insurrections. Not least because the likes of Saudi Arabia have little use for Western liberalism themselves, such a switch would actually be quite natural.