Russia has already emerged as the big winner in the final year of the closing Obama era, which will officially end as of January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th US president.
Since the shocking election nearly two months ago, US liberals and centrist Establishment figures on both sides of the aisle have been aghast that Vladimir Putin's klepto-petrostate has apparently emerged as a peer competitor again, able to challenge and even thwart US interests for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a far cry from Obama's dismissal of Moscow as merely a regional power back in 2014, when it annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine at the outset of the current standoff with the West.
In fact, Russia's indeed merely a regional power - today no less than three years ago. But it just so happens to be simultaneously situated in every single part of the world that truly matters geopolitically: Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Far East, and the Americas. No wonder, then, that merely being a regional player in the Kremlin's case still seems to accord it with such seemingly global clout.
This is, from start to end, a function of plain geography: Russia's very essence is land, land, and then more land. Endless landmass from sunrise to sunset: even after losing a third of its territory, primarily on its southern and western flanks, from the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow boasts sovereignty over 11 of 24 global time zones; as the sun sets on St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the far west, it still rises over the Chukchi peninsula in the far eastern tip of the Siberian Arctic.
It goes without saying that this alone dictates the imperative for one of the world's most formidable military forces and most extensive security apparatuses. For Russia is no isolated continental mass like Australia or subsidiary northern expanse like Canada (to the US); on every side she pushed outwards towards more temperate and hospitable climates or warmer and deeper access to the sea, she encountered firmly established rival powers which were typically aggressive militarist empires in their own right - and in the case of Eastern foes like China and the Ottoman and Persian empires, far older and more experienced ones, at that.
So in hindsight, Russia's hiatus from the world stage in the 1990s was an anomalous blip: as soon as the center reasserted itself, it was only a matter of time that Moscow would be back at the apex of the global power structure as a broker whose wishes must be heeded, whether or not they were benign or honest.
The Syrian crisis, which has singularly catapulted Putin's resurgent nationalist Russia back into the exclusive elite with the US and a rising China, has also demonstrated conclusively that this didn't require two ingredients which no previous Russophone imperium ever relied on for strategic expansion, either: a dynamic economy or a first-class navy. Since the Kremlin launched its Levantine adventure in late 2015, the world has also relearned that the warfare-driven Russian economy utterly lacks civilian or consumerist innovative capacity even as its land-centered military utterly underwhelms in naval power projection (as the embarrassing flop of the expeditionary deployment of its sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, so glaringly revealed).
After all, that's the double-edged sword if you happen to be Russia: the minute you pursue these luxury characteristics which befit a far more maritime-tailored and open socioeconomic order, the minute you betray your own essence. It's hardly a coincidence that both maritime or naval expansion and greater exposure to international financial flows tend to be associated with the fall of Moscow's empires, not their rise or heyday: the Russian state's inherent strength as a centrally command-and-controlled continental economy - its longstanding place as the world's regional power par excellence, if you will - has as its flip side an unusually strong aversion to laissez-faire finance and commerce which is the domain of decentralized seafaring states.
To put it in other words: What makes Russia such a formidable regional power - so much so that it appears to be a global power - is also what makes it impossible for even the most ambitious Czar to match the Anglo-American supremacy on the three-quarters of the world's surface which is water and not land. In the new Trump era, this stands to remain Pax Americana's saving grace against a Sino-Russian Eurasian axis (should it even come to pass, considering Trump's clear attempt to pry Moscow out of Beijing's orbit).
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
The West is being blindsided by the true threat of Russia
The Economist ran a feature this week called "Putinism", with the following ominous graphic, which is a very good indicator of what the Western "mainstream" thinks of not just the Russian strongman, but of Russia as a whole.
Unfortunately, at a time when the credibility of Western capitalism itself is under the greatest strain in living memory - when The Economist's local tender, the British pound, is itself plunging towards virtual parity with the dollar (even as the Russian ruble firms up with oil prices) - this kind of reporting on Putin's Russia only reinforces the deep ethnocentrism and ideological skew that the Anglo-American elite is ever more on the defensive about. It really goes to show how the big bankers and media bosses of London and New York are the ones who feel perhaps even more under siege these days than Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin.
The inherent subtext of this kind of Putin-bashing (and Russia-bashing, to be quite honest) is as questionable as it is blatant: Western "free market democracy" is the only valid system, and Russia must still copy it to the hilt or be left behind in the dark ages.
Only this time, the joke could really be on the Western ruling class and not its Russian equivalent. The public can't be fooled as easily anymore by the stranglehold of "mainstream" corporate-controlled media. If Putin's Russia were so weak and cowardly whereas the West were still so strong both materially and morally, just why is Moscow on a regional rampage in both Europe and the Middle East at the expense of NATO and the US?
This isn't at all to suggest that Russia isn't in fact weak and vulnerable: it clearly is. Only apparently not as much as the feckless and disoriented West.
From Putin on down, the Russian elite and people alike seem to enjoy the most enduring strength of any country: unity. Sure, this is largely a function of ruthless repression of dissent, but even the West can't deny that this itself is only possible because of a huge apparatus of support for Putinism that's staffed by millions of ordinary Russian citizens who apparently share their leader's hardline views.
Even as The Economist and other mouthpieces of the transatlantic plutocracy have increasingly lamented the spectacular failures of their social-engineering schemes of non-Western societies since the end of the Cold War, they still speak as though somehow this hasn't damaged the validity of the very notion that the world should and must become a carbon copy of the liberal-universalist West. And even less do they seem to recognize that it's precisely this arrogant defensiveness that's exposed them to a groundswell of revolt even by their own purportedly "free" subjects.
No, Russia's not a society in decline: the West is. The low birthrate in Russia - which has already long since leveled off - is not a failure of Russian values but evidence of Western decadence. The country's sexual promiscuity, high abortion rate, and so on are of primarily Western import - not a poor reflection of traditional Russian spirituality and morality. It is precisely these family-destroying forces which act and spread in the name of "liberation" that Putinism is rightly trying to roll back and smash, whether across the vast Russian empire itself or in its muscular interventionism in the Muslim world.
It is Russia, not the West, which has belatedly found - largely through its much-reviled Chechen counterinsurgency - a kind of correct balanced approach to the conundrum of fundamentalist Islam that Western liberal triumphalism will never willfully embrace: a loose federalism which gives "Sharia-ism" sufficient space for limited localized expression, overseen by local but loyal vassals of undeniably and unabashedly Islamist strain.
The West cannot fathom such a compromise: if you're not "with us", you're "against us" - read: either you fully copy our model of "free markets" and "civil society", which in practice mean gender-relational anarchy and consumerist-materialist dissipation and nihilism, or you're worthy of extermination like Saddam and Qaddafi.
That of course doesn't prevent the West from making its bed with radical head-chopping jihadists where it sees fit: as the Syrian conflict conclusively proves, Western elites have no qualms aiding and abetting LGBT roof-hurlers (Al Qaeda-linked terrorists) against LGBT protectors (the Assad regime) so long as it furthers their true designs of weakening the real competition for global supremacy - Russia and its emergent authoritarian axis of China, Iran, and now increasingly Turkey and the rest of the West-disillusioned Arab-Islamic world.
To conclude, the West is correct that Putinism is a repudiation of its own hypocrisies and shortfalls in living up to its own stated integrity and consistency of morality. It's wrong and shortsighted, however, to simply dismiss Russia as not standing for anything more substantive of its own accord, even if not particularly positive: Russia is setting itself up once more as the West's Vengeance from Above, the Eastern Assyria or Babylon raised up to chastise - by fire - the hopelessly wayward Whore of the Western Jerusalem.
This could well be just the kick in the rear the West needs to get its act together again. Better yet, we in the West can always hope and pray that this Babylon will itself be swallowed up by Persia: a far more enlightened and benign absolutism than we're inclined to think even possible, which inspires even ourselves to pay closer heed to our own fidelity to genuine progress and progressivism. (No speculation will be proffered here as to Russia's actual evolving partnership and quasi-alliance with Iran.)
Unfortunately, at a time when the credibility of Western capitalism itself is under the greatest strain in living memory - when The Economist's local tender, the British pound, is itself plunging towards virtual parity with the dollar (even as the Russian ruble firms up with oil prices) - this kind of reporting on Putin's Russia only reinforces the deep ethnocentrism and ideological skew that the Anglo-American elite is ever more on the defensive about. It really goes to show how the big bankers and media bosses of London and New York are the ones who feel perhaps even more under siege these days than Putin and his inner circle in the Kremlin.
The inherent subtext of this kind of Putin-bashing (and Russia-bashing, to be quite honest) is as questionable as it is blatant: Western "free market democracy" is the only valid system, and Russia must still copy it to the hilt or be left behind in the dark ages.
Only this time, the joke could really be on the Western ruling class and not its Russian equivalent. The public can't be fooled as easily anymore by the stranglehold of "mainstream" corporate-controlled media. If Putin's Russia were so weak and cowardly whereas the West were still so strong both materially and morally, just why is Moscow on a regional rampage in both Europe and the Middle East at the expense of NATO and the US?
This isn't at all to suggest that Russia isn't in fact weak and vulnerable: it clearly is. Only apparently not as much as the feckless and disoriented West.
From Putin on down, the Russian elite and people alike seem to enjoy the most enduring strength of any country: unity. Sure, this is largely a function of ruthless repression of dissent, but even the West can't deny that this itself is only possible because of a huge apparatus of support for Putinism that's staffed by millions of ordinary Russian citizens who apparently share their leader's hardline views.
Even as The Economist and other mouthpieces of the transatlantic plutocracy have increasingly lamented the spectacular failures of their social-engineering schemes of non-Western societies since the end of the Cold War, they still speak as though somehow this hasn't damaged the validity of the very notion that the world should and must become a carbon copy of the liberal-universalist West. And even less do they seem to recognize that it's precisely this arrogant defensiveness that's exposed them to a groundswell of revolt even by their own purportedly "free" subjects.
No, Russia's not a society in decline: the West is. The low birthrate in Russia - which has already long since leveled off - is not a failure of Russian values but evidence of Western decadence. The country's sexual promiscuity, high abortion rate, and so on are of primarily Western import - not a poor reflection of traditional Russian spirituality and morality. It is precisely these family-destroying forces which act and spread in the name of "liberation" that Putinism is rightly trying to roll back and smash, whether across the vast Russian empire itself or in its muscular interventionism in the Muslim world.
It is Russia, not the West, which has belatedly found - largely through its much-reviled Chechen counterinsurgency - a kind of correct balanced approach to the conundrum of fundamentalist Islam that Western liberal triumphalism will never willfully embrace: a loose federalism which gives "Sharia-ism" sufficient space for limited localized expression, overseen by local but loyal vassals of undeniably and unabashedly Islamist strain.
The West cannot fathom such a compromise: if you're not "with us", you're "against us" - read: either you fully copy our model of "free markets" and "civil society", which in practice mean gender-relational anarchy and consumerist-materialist dissipation and nihilism, or you're worthy of extermination like Saddam and Qaddafi.
That of course doesn't prevent the West from making its bed with radical head-chopping jihadists where it sees fit: as the Syrian conflict conclusively proves, Western elites have no qualms aiding and abetting LGBT roof-hurlers (Al Qaeda-linked terrorists) against LGBT protectors (the Assad regime) so long as it furthers their true designs of weakening the real competition for global supremacy - Russia and its emergent authoritarian axis of China, Iran, and now increasingly Turkey and the rest of the West-disillusioned Arab-Islamic world.
To conclude, the West is correct that Putinism is a repudiation of its own hypocrisies and shortfalls in living up to its own stated integrity and consistency of morality. It's wrong and shortsighted, however, to simply dismiss Russia as not standing for anything more substantive of its own accord, even if not particularly positive: Russia is setting itself up once more as the West's Vengeance from Above, the Eastern Assyria or Babylon raised up to chastise - by fire - the hopelessly wayward Whore of the Western Jerusalem.
This could well be just the kick in the rear the West needs to get its act together again. Better yet, we in the West can always hope and pray that this Babylon will itself be swallowed up by Persia: a far more enlightened and benign absolutism than we're inclined to think even possible, which inspires even ourselves to pay closer heed to our own fidelity to genuine progress and progressivism. (No speculation will be proffered here as to Russia's actual evolving partnership and quasi-alliance with Iran.)
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Russia and Turkey divvying up Syria apace, but will Saudis and Americans play along?
Putin and Erdogan are ever more obviously carving up Syria into respective Russian and Turkish zones of security dominance; the question now becomes just how they'll proceed to eventually stabilize what remains a highly tense and volatile situation.
From Russia's perspective, the divided city of Aleppo will be key: its shrinking and besieged eastern sector, even if eventually cleared of the former Al Nusra Front and affiliated radical jihadists, will still be under threat by such militants who will have been reconcentrated in adjoining Idlib province. Moscow would thus love to see Ankara exert its influence and leverage over virtually the entire spectrum of rebel factions in the Aleppo theater to reshuffle the strength and alignment of these groups such that they'll settle for a frozen front both in the city itself and in the surrounding countryside, thus securing the government-held western districts of the former in what would be a Jerusalem or Berlin-style partition arrangement.
Since Erdogan has already offered some token agreement to Putin on the importance of separating Al Nusra from "moderate" opposition groups still under the nominal banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - precisely the pledge that the US has chronically failed to deliver on - it follows that his interest is to negotiate the withdrawal of extremists from Aleppo city so that they can be replaced by more Russian-palatable FSA. These units would then quit their dream of conquering the government-held western districts, thereby securing said frozen front for Assad which the dictator in Damascus can plausibly accept as the restarting point for the diplomatic peace process.
Mr. Erdogan should realize that this partial victory is the best he can hope for with regards to Aleppo: any more aiding and abetting of the hardcore jihadists in their drive to conquer the whole city is likely to ultimately backfire, i.e. meet such determined Russian-backed Syrian regime resistance that it will only further squeeze the rebel eastern pocket in the city proper while expanding the buffer zone of the government siege ring. If he's serious about his new rapprochement and collaboration with Putin, he should know with crystal clarity that this is where the Kremlin draws the red line: the immediate radical jihadist (i.e. Nusra and allies) threat to Aleppo must be removed permanently, else Russia will eventually switch allegiance to the Kurds, realigning with Damascus to unleash the YPG peshmerga against what's certain to be an escalated Turkish incursion against ISIS via Operation Euphrates Shield.
Stripped of its Nusra allies, the FSA will pose little threat to conquer Aleppo, and indeed its very presence in the city will be at the mercy of Assad's forces which control all supply routes into and out of it; though Assad would probably personally want to exact some measure of vengeance on them, he'd have no qualms about tolerating them for the sake of a more relaxed Aleppo sector that would free up precious manpower and resources for operations against Nusra and ISIS further afield. This uneasy coexistence founded upon Russo-Turkish security understanding will then be the basis for what can finally be a meaningful local power transition process with enforceable teeth on both sides; if a federated self-rule arrangement can be worked out for the remaining rebels of eastern Aleppo, it could be a template for the rest of the country.
Of course, all this could still be wishful thinking. While it makes sense for Putin and Erdogan to treat Aleppo as a demarcation line, it remains to be seen just how much leverage they truly exercise over their Syrian clients - especially in the latter's case. One way or another, it's the Russo-Iranian-Syrian regime-Hezbollah coalition - the Axis of Fatima - that has scored a major strategic victory which seemed all but impossible with Assad on the rocks not even a year and a half ago. The real wild card could now be whether the remaining "free" Syrian opposition - under the umbrella of the FSA - can truly be wrested away by its Turkish sponsors from the broader coalition of the Saudi-dominated Syrian High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which probably has if anything only further hardened its stance of full regime change against Damascus.
Ankara of course has the strategic and logistical advantages over Riyadh should the two find themselves at loggerheads on the matter of compromise on Assad's fate: specifically, if Erdogan finds himself wrangling with hawkish young crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. And optimistically, with the latter's war in Yemen going badly off the rails as well, the inexperienced 31-year-old hothead will finally be cornered to back down by his older relatives, who have long been smarting from his becoming de facto head of state in lieu of a senile octogenarian father. Sensibly, it's time to finally concede that the region-wide proxy war against Iran has failed - period.
But finally, that leads us back to Washington: since a factional power struggle is sure to only intensify as Saudi foreign and security policy under prince Salman continues to crumble, the ultimate trump cards in determining Riyadh's orientation in the whole region are held by the deep state of the defense, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the Beltway - the so-called "blob" of the DC policy elite. As the blob becomes ever more assured of a Hillary Clinton victory two weeks from today, it's clamoring ever more loudly to finally go all in on Syria by committing to a new course that can only escalate into an all-out regime change operation which it merely thinks is long overdue.
It's not that Washington has to be crazy enough to actually start a shooting war with Damascus which it knows will depend on nuclear peer Moscow basically bluffing about its vital interests in the Levant - not to mention nuclear-cajoled Tehran's: the mere fact that these lunatic proposals are still being given far less-than-lunatic treatment (let alone increasingly vociferous in their tone) betrays the depths of humiliation and rage now driving the American foreign and security policy establishment. They're the ones whose empire is crashing down like a house of cards right before their very eyes, on the watch of a lame-duck president who to them has simply thrown in the towel as opposed to very intensively determining that proposed direct American intervention can easily make things even worse.
That empire may have been purportedly based on superior morality and values, but it was always ultimately underpinned and validated only by superior application of military force and armed blackmail. The blob will starve to death without new organisms to swallow: to Washington, not going to war at this point must be even less tolerable than blundering into a losing (even suicidal) one, because at least in the second case it's actually putting its expensive tools and toys to use, whilst in the first it's merely condemning itself to obsolescence and irrelevance. You can't expect a gun and weapons nut to not prefer a stupid firefight to the ignominy of sitting on the fence. And even if you manage to constrain him, the very fact that he's still loading and cocking his wares as openly and brashly as ever sure doesn't give your dogs in the fight a reason to heed even your own requests to back down. If the next president - assume that's Hillary - is serious about peace, she'll have to silence and effectively dismember this monster once and for all: else it's damned if you do (plunge into a no-win war), damned if you don't (lose anyway because you won't kill the blob to secure a compromise with the enemy).
From Russia's perspective, the divided city of Aleppo will be key: its shrinking and besieged eastern sector, even if eventually cleared of the former Al Nusra Front and affiliated radical jihadists, will still be under threat by such militants who will have been reconcentrated in adjoining Idlib province. Moscow would thus love to see Ankara exert its influence and leverage over virtually the entire spectrum of rebel factions in the Aleppo theater to reshuffle the strength and alignment of these groups such that they'll settle for a frozen front both in the city itself and in the surrounding countryside, thus securing the government-held western districts of the former in what would be a Jerusalem or Berlin-style partition arrangement.
Since Erdogan has already offered some token agreement to Putin on the importance of separating Al Nusra from "moderate" opposition groups still under the nominal banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - precisely the pledge that the US has chronically failed to deliver on - it follows that his interest is to negotiate the withdrawal of extremists from Aleppo city so that they can be replaced by more Russian-palatable FSA. These units would then quit their dream of conquering the government-held western districts, thereby securing said frozen front for Assad which the dictator in Damascus can plausibly accept as the restarting point for the diplomatic peace process.
Mr. Erdogan should realize that this partial victory is the best he can hope for with regards to Aleppo: any more aiding and abetting of the hardcore jihadists in their drive to conquer the whole city is likely to ultimately backfire, i.e. meet such determined Russian-backed Syrian regime resistance that it will only further squeeze the rebel eastern pocket in the city proper while expanding the buffer zone of the government siege ring. If he's serious about his new rapprochement and collaboration with Putin, he should know with crystal clarity that this is where the Kremlin draws the red line: the immediate radical jihadist (i.e. Nusra and allies) threat to Aleppo must be removed permanently, else Russia will eventually switch allegiance to the Kurds, realigning with Damascus to unleash the YPG peshmerga against what's certain to be an escalated Turkish incursion against ISIS via Operation Euphrates Shield.
Stripped of its Nusra allies, the FSA will pose little threat to conquer Aleppo, and indeed its very presence in the city will be at the mercy of Assad's forces which control all supply routes into and out of it; though Assad would probably personally want to exact some measure of vengeance on them, he'd have no qualms about tolerating them for the sake of a more relaxed Aleppo sector that would free up precious manpower and resources for operations against Nusra and ISIS further afield. This uneasy coexistence founded upon Russo-Turkish security understanding will then be the basis for what can finally be a meaningful local power transition process with enforceable teeth on both sides; if a federated self-rule arrangement can be worked out for the remaining rebels of eastern Aleppo, it could be a template for the rest of the country.
Of course, all this could still be wishful thinking. While it makes sense for Putin and Erdogan to treat Aleppo as a demarcation line, it remains to be seen just how much leverage they truly exercise over their Syrian clients - especially in the latter's case. One way or another, it's the Russo-Iranian-Syrian regime-Hezbollah coalition - the Axis of Fatima - that has scored a major strategic victory which seemed all but impossible with Assad on the rocks not even a year and a half ago. The real wild card could now be whether the remaining "free" Syrian opposition - under the umbrella of the FSA - can truly be wrested away by its Turkish sponsors from the broader coalition of the Saudi-dominated Syrian High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which probably has if anything only further hardened its stance of full regime change against Damascus.
Ankara of course has the strategic and logistical advantages over Riyadh should the two find themselves at loggerheads on the matter of compromise on Assad's fate: specifically, if Erdogan finds himself wrangling with hawkish young crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. And optimistically, with the latter's war in Yemen going badly off the rails as well, the inexperienced 31-year-old hothead will finally be cornered to back down by his older relatives, who have long been smarting from his becoming de facto head of state in lieu of a senile octogenarian father. Sensibly, it's time to finally concede that the region-wide proxy war against Iran has failed - period.
But finally, that leads us back to Washington: since a factional power struggle is sure to only intensify as Saudi foreign and security policy under prince Salman continues to crumble, the ultimate trump cards in determining Riyadh's orientation in the whole region are held by the deep state of the defense, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the Beltway - the so-called "blob" of the DC policy elite. As the blob becomes ever more assured of a Hillary Clinton victory two weeks from today, it's clamoring ever more loudly to finally go all in on Syria by committing to a new course that can only escalate into an all-out regime change operation which it merely thinks is long overdue.
It's not that Washington has to be crazy enough to actually start a shooting war with Damascus which it knows will depend on nuclear peer Moscow basically bluffing about its vital interests in the Levant - not to mention nuclear-cajoled Tehran's: the mere fact that these lunatic proposals are still being given far less-than-lunatic treatment (let alone increasingly vociferous in their tone) betrays the depths of humiliation and rage now driving the American foreign and security policy establishment. They're the ones whose empire is crashing down like a house of cards right before their very eyes, on the watch of a lame-duck president who to them has simply thrown in the towel as opposed to very intensively determining that proposed direct American intervention can easily make things even worse.
That empire may have been purportedly based on superior morality and values, but it was always ultimately underpinned and validated only by superior application of military force and armed blackmail. The blob will starve to death without new organisms to swallow: to Washington, not going to war at this point must be even less tolerable than blundering into a losing (even suicidal) one, because at least in the second case it's actually putting its expensive tools and toys to use, whilst in the first it's merely condemning itself to obsolescence and irrelevance. You can't expect a gun and weapons nut to not prefer a stupid firefight to the ignominy of sitting on the fence. And even if you manage to constrain him, the very fact that he's still loading and cocking his wares as openly and brashly as ever sure doesn't give your dogs in the fight a reason to heed even your own requests to back down. If the next president - assume that's Hillary - is serious about peace, she'll have to silence and effectively dismember this monster once and for all: else it's damned if you do (plunge into a no-win war), damned if you don't (lose anyway because you won't kill the blob to secure a compromise with the enemy).
Thursday, October 20, 2016
Russia and Turkey now colluding to carve up Syria - at US expense
As the largest Russian naval deployment since the Cold War flaunts Western impotence by sailing provocatively past the North Sea and English Channel en route to Syria, the US-equipped Turkish air force has launched a barrage of airstrikes on US-backed Kurdish rebels in the northwest of that country - a clear warning to Washington not to use the Kurds as the spearhead of any assault to recapture ISIS capital Raqqa to the east.
What's striking about the apparent collusion between Putin and Erdogan is how effectively and completely it marginalizes the West and especially the US from the coming realignment both within Syria and more broadly in the region. While Washington and Western capitals continue to haggle and babble about diplomacy and human rights, it becomes ever clearer that they have no interest whatsoever in joining the only obvious potential solution to the long civil war which has spawned ISIS and unleashed a flood of refugees which has destabilized Europe itself: a de facto partition of the country into zones of security dominance.
Since Erdogan - still nominally a US ally and NATO member - speaks Putin's language rather than the West's, he wants hard physical power on the ground (and in the air) in Syria more than anything else at this point, even if that means bargaining with the Iranians and the Assad regime itself (under the table, of course). Publicly, he can point to his stepped-up support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) "moderate" rebels in northern Syria - advancing impressively against stiffening ISIS resistance in the two-month-old "Euphrates Shield" operation - as proof that he hasn't renounced his goal of eventually ousting Assad in Damascus; privately, he has all but conceded the failure of the Syrian revolution and is almost certainly already in indirect talks with Assad about how to trade the latter's recapture of Aleppo for a longer Turkish and Turkish-backed rebel presence further north and east at the expense of the Kurds (and by extension, their US sponsors).
The steadily progressing surrenders of moderate rebels and jihadists alike in residual resistance pockets around Damascus, Homs, and elsewhere in the firmly regime-secured southwest and south-central sectors - enabling them to redeploy to the insurgent-jihadist stronghold of northwestern Idlib province while resettling their families there too - point to a template that Moscow and Damascus are now beginning to try to apply to Aleppo. As the resistance pocket in the east of that crucial city is ever more tightly constricted, Putin and Assad have been increasing their windows of "humanitarian pauses" to their aerial bombardment in the past two days to facilitate a piecemeal withdrawal of the less diehard opposition to their eventual pacification, leaving little doubt that they're leveraging Erdogan's influence over some groups to speed it up.
Of course, even with the Turkish-backed militants gone, that still leaves plenty of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists and other hardcore Sunni fundamentalist affiliates for the next wave of assault, spearheaded by the Russian naval air group of Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to pound to a pulp with incendiaries, bunker-busters, and thermobaric missiles. With fewer residents left, though, they'll have fewer human shields in some sections of eastern Aleppo's ruined cityscape, reducing their potential strongholds even as it creates pockets of vulnerability for regime loyalist forces to prospectively exploit.
Ideally for Putin and Assad, they can get the whole Aleppo business over with by the US presidential election on November 8, but this is farfetched. Realistically - but even more cynically - they may see fit to time the ferocity of a renewed assault to correspond with the final 48 to 72 hours of the campaign for the White House. If this coincides with a stalled US-led effort to recapture Mosul as ISIS resistance stiffens against the predominantly Shiite Arab Iraqi national army (from the south) and Kurdish peshmerga (from the north), it would bode ill for what was supposed to be president Obama's outgoing foreign policy bright spot.
The Turks now hold the trump cards with respect to ISIS both in Syria and Iraq: in both countries, they enjoy more rapport with Sunni Arab fighters who must be the backbone of any eventual pacification of former caliphate territory than the US, whose Syrian ground coalition is dominated by Syrian Kurds while the Iraqi one is a partnership of Shia Arabs and Iraqi Kurds. In collusion with the Kremliln, Ankara now has a chance of making the most of a crisis that really blew up in its face starting about a year ago, when the Russian intervention in Syria reversed the fortunes of its regional power play in which it underhandedly employed ISIS as a foil against the Kurds and Iranians - with Saudi and Gulf Sunni Arab support.
And despite pro-Russian reports that Saudi Arabia and its subsidiary Gulf kingdoms have shifted their ISIS proxies from the Mosul region westward across the Syrian border, this is unlikely to have substantial sustained impact on the overall situation in the two fractured states: the Saudis surely can't relinquish their influence over one flank of ISIS simply to bolster the other - not when both are slowly but surely crumbling.
As it becomes clearer to even the Saudis that the Turks are securing their interests far more effectively by sticking their thumb in lame-duck Obama's nose, Riyadh too will be increasingly tempted to do likewise: turn to Putin, the new sheriff on the Mideast block, and invite him to broker better collective security arrangements with the other regional players. This of course will be largely contingent on just how badly the whole proxy war against Tehran continues to deteriorate, as even the Saudi-led Gulf campaign in Yemen stalls against the determined Houthi rebels, further exposing Riyadh as the big regional loser and weakening the hand of its hawkish young hothead, crown prince Muhammad bin Sultan, against his jealous older relatives.
The common denominator in all this will be as stark as it is undeniable: a sidelined US security role in a region it utterly dominated for about four decades. Whether Washington realizes it or not, its still substantial investments of military and diplomatic resources in the Middle East are ever more clearly serving the interests of "partners" which don't quite line up with its own interests anymore. The way things are going, a smaller US footprint could be the outcome even as the scourge of ISIS is finally removed. If that's not impetus for a fundamental rethink and reset of US policy, what is?
What's striking about the apparent collusion between Putin and Erdogan is how effectively and completely it marginalizes the West and especially the US from the coming realignment both within Syria and more broadly in the region. While Washington and Western capitals continue to haggle and babble about diplomacy and human rights, it becomes ever clearer that they have no interest whatsoever in joining the only obvious potential solution to the long civil war which has spawned ISIS and unleashed a flood of refugees which has destabilized Europe itself: a de facto partition of the country into zones of security dominance.
Since Erdogan - still nominally a US ally and NATO member - speaks Putin's language rather than the West's, he wants hard physical power on the ground (and in the air) in Syria more than anything else at this point, even if that means bargaining with the Iranians and the Assad regime itself (under the table, of course). Publicly, he can point to his stepped-up support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) "moderate" rebels in northern Syria - advancing impressively against stiffening ISIS resistance in the two-month-old "Euphrates Shield" operation - as proof that he hasn't renounced his goal of eventually ousting Assad in Damascus; privately, he has all but conceded the failure of the Syrian revolution and is almost certainly already in indirect talks with Assad about how to trade the latter's recapture of Aleppo for a longer Turkish and Turkish-backed rebel presence further north and east at the expense of the Kurds (and by extension, their US sponsors).
The steadily progressing surrenders of moderate rebels and jihadists alike in residual resistance pockets around Damascus, Homs, and elsewhere in the firmly regime-secured southwest and south-central sectors - enabling them to redeploy to the insurgent-jihadist stronghold of northwestern Idlib province while resettling their families there too - point to a template that Moscow and Damascus are now beginning to try to apply to Aleppo. As the resistance pocket in the east of that crucial city is ever more tightly constricted, Putin and Assad have been increasing their windows of "humanitarian pauses" to their aerial bombardment in the past two days to facilitate a piecemeal withdrawal of the less diehard opposition to their eventual pacification, leaving little doubt that they're leveraging Erdogan's influence over some groups to speed it up.
Of course, even with the Turkish-backed militants gone, that still leaves plenty of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists and other hardcore Sunni fundamentalist affiliates for the next wave of assault, spearheaded by the Russian naval air group of Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to pound to a pulp with incendiaries, bunker-busters, and thermobaric missiles. With fewer residents left, though, they'll have fewer human shields in some sections of eastern Aleppo's ruined cityscape, reducing their potential strongholds even as it creates pockets of vulnerability for regime loyalist forces to prospectively exploit.
Ideally for Putin and Assad, they can get the whole Aleppo business over with by the US presidential election on November 8, but this is farfetched. Realistically - but even more cynically - they may see fit to time the ferocity of a renewed assault to correspond with the final 48 to 72 hours of the campaign for the White House. If this coincides with a stalled US-led effort to recapture Mosul as ISIS resistance stiffens against the predominantly Shiite Arab Iraqi national army (from the south) and Kurdish peshmerga (from the north), it would bode ill for what was supposed to be president Obama's outgoing foreign policy bright spot.
The Turks now hold the trump cards with respect to ISIS both in Syria and Iraq: in both countries, they enjoy more rapport with Sunni Arab fighters who must be the backbone of any eventual pacification of former caliphate territory than the US, whose Syrian ground coalition is dominated by Syrian Kurds while the Iraqi one is a partnership of Shia Arabs and Iraqi Kurds. In collusion with the Kremliln, Ankara now has a chance of making the most of a crisis that really blew up in its face starting about a year ago, when the Russian intervention in Syria reversed the fortunes of its regional power play in which it underhandedly employed ISIS as a foil against the Kurds and Iranians - with Saudi and Gulf Sunni Arab support.
And despite pro-Russian reports that Saudi Arabia and its subsidiary Gulf kingdoms have shifted their ISIS proxies from the Mosul region westward across the Syrian border, this is unlikely to have substantial sustained impact on the overall situation in the two fractured states: the Saudis surely can't relinquish their influence over one flank of ISIS simply to bolster the other - not when both are slowly but surely crumbling.
As it becomes clearer to even the Saudis that the Turks are securing their interests far more effectively by sticking their thumb in lame-duck Obama's nose, Riyadh too will be increasingly tempted to do likewise: turn to Putin, the new sheriff on the Mideast block, and invite him to broker better collective security arrangements with the other regional players. This of course will be largely contingent on just how badly the whole proxy war against Tehran continues to deteriorate, as even the Saudi-led Gulf campaign in Yemen stalls against the determined Houthi rebels, further exposing Riyadh as the big regional loser and weakening the hand of its hawkish young hothead, crown prince Muhammad bin Sultan, against his jealous older relatives.
The common denominator in all this will be as stark as it is undeniable: a sidelined US security role in a region it utterly dominated for about four decades. Whether Washington realizes it or not, its still substantial investments of military and diplomatic resources in the Middle East are ever more clearly serving the interests of "partners" which don't quite line up with its own interests anymore. The way things are going, a smaller US footprint could be the outcome even as the scourge of ISIS is finally removed. If that's not impetus for a fundamental rethink and reset of US policy, what is?
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Obama finally acknowledges Russia as a great power - and what it stands for
Meeting with Italian premier Matteo Renzi at the White House yesterday, president Obama grudgingly indirectly acknowledged the futility of confronting Russia, calling it a "large country" with "major military capabilities" that should be "part of the solution and not the problem" to the world's gravest geopolitical and security crises which since 2014 have dramatically put it at odds with the West.
Revealing a stark realism that's very difficult for US interventionists - whether liberal or conservative - to swallow, the outgoing 44th president has also framed the kind of discussion pertaining to Russia that not only will be one likely focus of tonight's final 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but effectively stated the proper overarching American attitude and approach to Putin's Kremlin regardless of who replaces him on January 20.
This in itself is something of a victory for Moscow: the kind of simple concession of reality that the world's other nuclear superpower has been aggressively trying to extract from what has often come off as a delusional, self-aggrandized West hopelessly puffed up with its own sense of moral superiority and strategic supremacy. As such, a glimmer of light is finally appearing at the end of a tunnel that's been growing darker and darker in recent weeks, as US-Russia relations have nosedived to their worst level arguably since the most dangerous junctures of the Cold War.
Obama has decisively called out - yet again - those in American policy circles who are driven by a dangerous combination of simultaneously overstating Russian malicious intent towards the West while understating Russian determination and capability to thwart Western efforts to blackmail it into more compliant behavior. That doesn't in itself open a door to new cooperation with Moscow, but it shuts the doors to escalating brinkmanship that will cost the US and its Western allies far more dearly than they've let on.
The fundamentally divergent Russian worldview - that non-Western societies simply can't pull off transitions to Western-style or even Western-oriented liberal democracies - is becoming harder and harder to dismiss out of hand. When it really comes down to it, the most pro-Western elements and factions of strife-torn Islamic nations invariably always appear to be the weakest on the ground: if they have so much popular support and effective governing ability, why is it that they appear incapable of beating either the reactionary forces of the old regime or the arch-reactionary forces of unleashed jihadist fundamentalism - let alone both - even with massive injections of financial and material assistance from their deep-pocketed Western sponsors? Could it be possible instead that their mouths are just much bigger than their muscles?
The US and the West more generally are finding out the hard way that no revolutionary or democratic movement incapable of securing the levers of hard coercive state power - i.e. of violently eliminating their adversaries on the battlefield - can ultimately claim to be a legitimate popular representative movement, either. Certainly if the American colonists had folded on the fields of Bunker Hill or Saratoga, or if the Parisian insurrectionists had cowed before the musket fire of the Bastille garrison, nobody would ever remember or celebrate the glorious triumphs of US democracy or French republicanism. Democrats must whip tyrants in the business of killing before they can whip them in the business of ruling.
And that's what Putin's Russia - and more passively its ally, Xi Jinping's China - really stands for. Even democracy is ultimately all about governance. And governance is always ultimately about one thing and one thing only: monopolization of violence. To govern effectively is first and foremost to wield the sword with greater reach and scope than anyone else - and only then is there even the realistic prospect that the exercise of power can be more equitably redistributed between all factions and interest groups.
By putting the civic aspects of democracy - elections, courts, media, and other civil institutions - ahead of the absolute unchallenged authority to punish any and all rebels against the newly created order with consistent coercive impact across the board, the US and Western project of liberalizing the Middle East has blown up in smoke. Even the pending recapture of Mosul from ISIS will not fundamentally remove the structural political crisis in Iraq that call to question its long-term viability (as with Syria) as a unitary state.
That doesn't mean the Russian project in Syria will be any more successful...it just acknowledges that at least the Russians see the folly of putting the cart before the horse.
Revealing a stark realism that's very difficult for US interventionists - whether liberal or conservative - to swallow, the outgoing 44th president has also framed the kind of discussion pertaining to Russia that not only will be one likely focus of tonight's final 2016 presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but effectively stated the proper overarching American attitude and approach to Putin's Kremlin regardless of who replaces him on January 20.
This in itself is something of a victory for Moscow: the kind of simple concession of reality that the world's other nuclear superpower has been aggressively trying to extract from what has often come off as a delusional, self-aggrandized West hopelessly puffed up with its own sense of moral superiority and strategic supremacy. As such, a glimmer of light is finally appearing at the end of a tunnel that's been growing darker and darker in recent weeks, as US-Russia relations have nosedived to their worst level arguably since the most dangerous junctures of the Cold War.
Obama has decisively called out - yet again - those in American policy circles who are driven by a dangerous combination of simultaneously overstating Russian malicious intent towards the West while understating Russian determination and capability to thwart Western efforts to blackmail it into more compliant behavior. That doesn't in itself open a door to new cooperation with Moscow, but it shuts the doors to escalating brinkmanship that will cost the US and its Western allies far more dearly than they've let on.
The fundamentally divergent Russian worldview - that non-Western societies simply can't pull off transitions to Western-style or even Western-oriented liberal democracies - is becoming harder and harder to dismiss out of hand. When it really comes down to it, the most pro-Western elements and factions of strife-torn Islamic nations invariably always appear to be the weakest on the ground: if they have so much popular support and effective governing ability, why is it that they appear incapable of beating either the reactionary forces of the old regime or the arch-reactionary forces of unleashed jihadist fundamentalism - let alone both - even with massive injections of financial and material assistance from their deep-pocketed Western sponsors? Could it be possible instead that their mouths are just much bigger than their muscles?
The US and the West more generally are finding out the hard way that no revolutionary or democratic movement incapable of securing the levers of hard coercive state power - i.e. of violently eliminating their adversaries on the battlefield - can ultimately claim to be a legitimate popular representative movement, either. Certainly if the American colonists had folded on the fields of Bunker Hill or Saratoga, or if the Parisian insurrectionists had cowed before the musket fire of the Bastille garrison, nobody would ever remember or celebrate the glorious triumphs of US democracy or French republicanism. Democrats must whip tyrants in the business of killing before they can whip them in the business of ruling.
And that's what Putin's Russia - and more passively its ally, Xi Jinping's China - really stands for. Even democracy is ultimately all about governance. And governance is always ultimately about one thing and one thing only: monopolization of violence. To govern effectively is first and foremost to wield the sword with greater reach and scope than anyone else - and only then is there even the realistic prospect that the exercise of power can be more equitably redistributed between all factions and interest groups.
By putting the civic aspects of democracy - elections, courts, media, and other civil institutions - ahead of the absolute unchallenged authority to punish any and all rebels against the newly created order with consistent coercive impact across the board, the US and Western project of liberalizing the Middle East has blown up in smoke. Even the pending recapture of Mosul from ISIS will not fundamentally remove the structural political crisis in Iraq that call to question its long-term viability (as with Syria) as a unitary state.
That doesn't mean the Russian project in Syria will be any more successful...it just acknowledges that at least the Russians see the folly of putting the cart before the horse.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Axis of Fatima doubles down with Turkey as clueless West marginalizes itself
Having effectively called the Russian leader a war criminal for his actions in Syria, French president Francois Hollande has unsurprsingly been spurned by Vladimir Putin as the latter canceled an important trip to Paris that would have included crisis talks on both Syria and Ukraine.
Russian propaganda has already seized on French opposition criticism of Hollande's high moral grandstanding: just who does this clown think he is to accuse the one person who has confronted ISIS aggressively enough to finally overturn its secret support by so-called Western allies in the Middle East?
Less than a year ago, it was none other than Hollande who practically begged the Kremlin to help him retaliate against ISIS after a terrorist attack in Paris killed around 130 people. In response, Russia not only bombed the terrorist state's illicit oil trade so heavily that it was ultimately reduced to a trickle, but in the process humiliated Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan so thoroughly for secretly aiding and abetting ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria that the latter tried to corral NATO into an armed conflict with Moscow, shooting down a Russian warplane which momentarily strayed across the Turkish border from Syria in the hope that Russia would retaliate (and letting a local sponsored militia then kill one of the bailed-out pilots on the ground).
As a sign of Putin's unique gift as a geopolitical power player, the Kremlin has now turned the tables around completely: it's now Erdogan who has come around to Russia's way of thinking in Syria, even as feckless Western powers like France and Britain - who are all but exposing themselves as little more than lapdogs for an enraged and befuddled Washington - hit new heights of diplomatic stupidity and realpolitik deficiency with their blanket segregation of "humanitarian" concerns from the hard realities of proxy warfare to overthrow an unwanted dictator.
Now that Putin and Erdogan have sealed their rapprochement with the reinstatement of the much anticipated "Turk Stream" pipeline project, further collusion between Moscow and Ankara to stabilize the Syrian crisis is likely. For Putin, this turn is worth incalculably more than having his name rehabilitated with a puffed-up self-important pathetic joke of a US surrogate whose ego hopelessly outstrips his achievements.
Events since the breakdown of last month's US-Russia ceasefire agreement in Syria have probably convinced Turkey by now that the Americans have finally abandoned the original goal of regime change against Assad, and that even a likely Hillary Clinton victory next month is unlikely to change that. No amount of Washingtonian rhetoric can alter the sobering calculus that US military operations against the Syrian regime would be an effective declaration of war against not only Damascus, but Moscow and Tehran as well - a prospective adventure the Iranians have derided as "suicidal" for American interests in the region.
Having been convinced by Russia and Iran that US threats at this point amount to little more than hot air, Turkey has most likely reduced or cut off supplies and arms traversing its territory to jihadists and rebels fighting the Assad regime across its Syrian frontier; this would appear to be largely behind the Syrian government's gains in and around Aleppo since the renewal of hostilities in the final week of September, and also why a jihadist counteroffensive in Hama province which appeared so threatening around the same time late last month has been largely reversed.
Ankara now has little leverage against the Kremlin and the ayatollahs should the Axis of Fatima reignite the Kurdish issue in Syria's northern frontier region to punish it for still refusing to give up a proxy war to overthrow Assad. But Putin and Khamenei know what his bottom lines are and appear willing to concede them. That's quite a contrast with his phony friends in the West who are still pestering him over "human rights" for the traitors who tried to kill him in the July putsch, or who are still effectively blackmailing his government over its prospective EU membership contingent on proper handling of Syrian refugees.
It's clear that Mr. Erdogan wants an effective veto over both Kurdish and Iranian influence in both Syria and Iraq as ISIS is finally whittled back in the vast contiguous desert spanning the hinterland of the two countries. Putin's Turkish diplomacy has doubtless focused on these core interests of Ankara, and the revival of the pipeline deal indicates how masterfully he has satisfied his fellow strongman's prerogatives.
In Syria, Turkey clearly wants to extend its "Euphrates Shield" operation to push further southwards from the border buffer zone it has already established when it evicted ISIS about six weeks ago, before further Kurdish consolidation of the area. Ideally, Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) units will play a key role in the coming assault to liberate Raqqa - being fellow Sunni Arabs, they're most suitable to long-term occupation of this jihadist stronghold sector - but at present they're still too thin and weak in the area compared to the Kurdish YPG (peshmerga) militia-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which remains better positioned and heavily favored by its Pentagon sponsors to lead the campaign for the caliphate capital. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a tug-of-war might be raging between Erdogan's security-intelligence apparatus and its CIA counterparts as to if and how best to redeploy the FSA: the spooks at Langley probably don't want too many of them pulled out of anti-Assad front lines in western Syria too quickly to beef up Turkish-led operations against ISIS to the north and east, because that would betray a Turkish capitulation to Russia which would deeply embarrass the US.
Russia's sensible strategy with regards to the Turkish presence in Syria should be focused on delaying for as long as possible any powerful SDF operation on Raqqa: the longer this is put off, the more likely it becomes that Turkish proxies of the FSA and other "moderate" Syrian opposition get reshuffled from the fight against Assad to an alternate anti-ISIS front much deeper inland, to eventually play a large if not the leading role in Raqqa's liberation before a US-led Kurdish operation seizes the initiative from Moscow and Ankara. Neither Putin nor Erdogan should be particularly concerned about this latter possibility, in any case: because it would entail virtual ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen by Kurds, ISIS can be expected to put up a good fight; or if not, the Turks can reopen covert arms and supply channels to the caliphate to hold off the SDF (a move that would irk the US but smirk Russia).
Of course, the longer term problem of what happens to those parts of eastern Syria liberated from ISIS will remain: Will the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen get their own federation just as the Kurds have created theirs? Will they still be represented by Damascus internationally? For Moscow and Ankara, these are probably secondary concerns: the main consideration both now and in future is the simple matter of who will be responsible for the security of these distant locales not controllable from Damascus. If Russia throws its weight behind a long-term or even permanent Turkish peacekeeping presence in areas that the Turks clear of ISIS - under UN auspices, of course - the door could open to much-needed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni peacekeeping participation in the Syrian interior, as well. That sure won't go down well with Assad, but still won't be a particularly high price to pay for political survival and prospective international rehabilitation (at least with much of the non-Western world).
Recent developments in Iraq could already be a harbinger of what's coming in Syria in terms of cooperative Russo-Turkish conflict management. Last week, a row erupted between Turkey and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq over the former's extended deployment of a contingent of troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has clearly signaled that it wants Sunnis - be they Arabs, Kurds, or Turkmen - to take part in the liberation of the ISIS Iraqi capital of Mosul, which is being led by the heavily Shiite Iraqi government army. While Baghdad is understandably furious, its response is hampered by its double dependence on the US (for air power) and Iran (for local militia muscle on the ground), each with its own distinct interest in keeping Mosul mostly Sunni: the US, obviously, for the purposes of checking Iranian influence in northern Iraq; the Iranians to secure their primary strategic goal of an unbroken corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which is only attainable with Kurdish collusion and some grudging Turkish acceptance that Moscow is probably being asked to mediate.
Amidst all this strategic jockeying in the region by its major players, Western marginalization in Syria is becoming increasingly evident - and so is its potential negative spillover to the US and Western position in Iraq and the broader region more generally. If it were but more open to Russia's underlying viewpoint that Assad has a vital role to play in Syria's eventual stabilization, Washington would have enjoyed much greater flexibility to bargain away its regime change program for a much faster resolution of the ISIS problem. Russia and Iran would have gladly acquiesced - and incomparably more happily than Assad - to Turkish and Gulf Sunni security dominance of the sparsely populated heart of the combined territory of Iraq and Syria, provided it was exchanged for a guarantee of their vital interest of access to the Mediterranean. Instead, the Obama administration has allowed the most uncompromising Wahhabist-Salafist extremists of the Gulf Sunni establishment to effectively dictate a policy of eliminating Assad at any cost, with cool strategic rationale eviscerated by the flame of sectarian passion. In straining for a gnat, America has swallowed the proverbial camel, leaving the door wide open to the fate of the Mideast being dictated by the Axis of Fatima.
Russian propaganda has already seized on French opposition criticism of Hollande's high moral grandstanding: just who does this clown think he is to accuse the one person who has confronted ISIS aggressively enough to finally overturn its secret support by so-called Western allies in the Middle East?
Less than a year ago, it was none other than Hollande who practically begged the Kremlin to help him retaliate against ISIS after a terrorist attack in Paris killed around 130 people. In response, Russia not only bombed the terrorist state's illicit oil trade so heavily that it was ultimately reduced to a trickle, but in the process humiliated Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan so thoroughly for secretly aiding and abetting ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria that the latter tried to corral NATO into an armed conflict with Moscow, shooting down a Russian warplane which momentarily strayed across the Turkish border from Syria in the hope that Russia would retaliate (and letting a local sponsored militia then kill one of the bailed-out pilots on the ground).
As a sign of Putin's unique gift as a geopolitical power player, the Kremlin has now turned the tables around completely: it's now Erdogan who has come around to Russia's way of thinking in Syria, even as feckless Western powers like France and Britain - who are all but exposing themselves as little more than lapdogs for an enraged and befuddled Washington - hit new heights of diplomatic stupidity and realpolitik deficiency with their blanket segregation of "humanitarian" concerns from the hard realities of proxy warfare to overthrow an unwanted dictator.
Now that Putin and Erdogan have sealed their rapprochement with the reinstatement of the much anticipated "Turk Stream" pipeline project, further collusion between Moscow and Ankara to stabilize the Syrian crisis is likely. For Putin, this turn is worth incalculably more than having his name rehabilitated with a puffed-up self-important pathetic joke of a US surrogate whose ego hopelessly outstrips his achievements.
Events since the breakdown of last month's US-Russia ceasefire agreement in Syria have probably convinced Turkey by now that the Americans have finally abandoned the original goal of regime change against Assad, and that even a likely Hillary Clinton victory next month is unlikely to change that. No amount of Washingtonian rhetoric can alter the sobering calculus that US military operations against the Syrian regime would be an effective declaration of war against not only Damascus, but Moscow and Tehran as well - a prospective adventure the Iranians have derided as "suicidal" for American interests in the region.
Having been convinced by Russia and Iran that US threats at this point amount to little more than hot air, Turkey has most likely reduced or cut off supplies and arms traversing its territory to jihadists and rebels fighting the Assad regime across its Syrian frontier; this would appear to be largely behind the Syrian government's gains in and around Aleppo since the renewal of hostilities in the final week of September, and also why a jihadist counteroffensive in Hama province which appeared so threatening around the same time late last month has been largely reversed.
Ankara now has little leverage against the Kremlin and the ayatollahs should the Axis of Fatima reignite the Kurdish issue in Syria's northern frontier region to punish it for still refusing to give up a proxy war to overthrow Assad. But Putin and Khamenei know what his bottom lines are and appear willing to concede them. That's quite a contrast with his phony friends in the West who are still pestering him over "human rights" for the traitors who tried to kill him in the July putsch, or who are still effectively blackmailing his government over its prospective EU membership contingent on proper handling of Syrian refugees.
It's clear that Mr. Erdogan wants an effective veto over both Kurdish and Iranian influence in both Syria and Iraq as ISIS is finally whittled back in the vast contiguous desert spanning the hinterland of the two countries. Putin's Turkish diplomacy has doubtless focused on these core interests of Ankara, and the revival of the pipeline deal indicates how masterfully he has satisfied his fellow strongman's prerogatives.
In Syria, Turkey clearly wants to extend its "Euphrates Shield" operation to push further southwards from the border buffer zone it has already established when it evicted ISIS about six weeks ago, before further Kurdish consolidation of the area. Ideally, Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) units will play a key role in the coming assault to liberate Raqqa - being fellow Sunni Arabs, they're most suitable to long-term occupation of this jihadist stronghold sector - but at present they're still too thin and weak in the area compared to the Kurdish YPG (peshmerga) militia-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which remains better positioned and heavily favored by its Pentagon sponsors to lead the campaign for the caliphate capital. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a tug-of-war might be raging between Erdogan's security-intelligence apparatus and its CIA counterparts as to if and how best to redeploy the FSA: the spooks at Langley probably don't want too many of them pulled out of anti-Assad front lines in western Syria too quickly to beef up Turkish-led operations against ISIS to the north and east, because that would betray a Turkish capitulation to Russia which would deeply embarrass the US.
Russia's sensible strategy with regards to the Turkish presence in Syria should be focused on delaying for as long as possible any powerful SDF operation on Raqqa: the longer this is put off, the more likely it becomes that Turkish proxies of the FSA and other "moderate" Syrian opposition get reshuffled from the fight against Assad to an alternate anti-ISIS front much deeper inland, to eventually play a large if not the leading role in Raqqa's liberation before a US-led Kurdish operation seizes the initiative from Moscow and Ankara. Neither Putin nor Erdogan should be particularly concerned about this latter possibility, in any case: because it would entail virtual ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen by Kurds, ISIS can be expected to put up a good fight; or if not, the Turks can reopen covert arms and supply channels to the caliphate to hold off the SDF (a move that would irk the US but smirk Russia).
Of course, the longer term problem of what happens to those parts of eastern Syria liberated from ISIS will remain: Will the Sunni Arabs and Turkmen get their own federation just as the Kurds have created theirs? Will they still be represented by Damascus internationally? For Moscow and Ankara, these are probably secondary concerns: the main consideration both now and in future is the simple matter of who will be responsible for the security of these distant locales not controllable from Damascus. If Russia throws its weight behind a long-term or even permanent Turkish peacekeeping presence in areas that the Turks clear of ISIS - under UN auspices, of course - the door could open to much-needed Saudi and other Gulf Sunni peacekeeping participation in the Syrian interior, as well. That sure won't go down well with Assad, but still won't be a particularly high price to pay for political survival and prospective international rehabilitation (at least with much of the non-Western world).
Recent developments in Iraq could already be a harbinger of what's coming in Syria in terms of cooperative Russo-Turkish conflict management. Last week, a row erupted between Turkey and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq over the former's extended deployment of a contingent of troops in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ankara has clearly signaled that it wants Sunnis - be they Arabs, Kurds, or Turkmen - to take part in the liberation of the ISIS Iraqi capital of Mosul, which is being led by the heavily Shiite Iraqi government army. While Baghdad is understandably furious, its response is hampered by its double dependence on the US (for air power) and Iran (for local militia muscle on the ground), each with its own distinct interest in keeping Mosul mostly Sunni: the US, obviously, for the purposes of checking Iranian influence in northern Iraq; the Iranians to secure their primary strategic goal of an unbroken corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, which is only attainable with Kurdish collusion and some grudging Turkish acceptance that Moscow is probably being asked to mediate.
Amidst all this strategic jockeying in the region by its major players, Western marginalization in Syria is becoming increasingly evident - and so is its potential negative spillover to the US and Western position in Iraq and the broader region more generally. If it were but more open to Russia's underlying viewpoint that Assad has a vital role to play in Syria's eventual stabilization, Washington would have enjoyed much greater flexibility to bargain away its regime change program for a much faster resolution of the ISIS problem. Russia and Iran would have gladly acquiesced - and incomparably more happily than Assad - to Turkish and Gulf Sunni security dominance of the sparsely populated heart of the combined territory of Iraq and Syria, provided it was exchanged for a guarantee of their vital interest of access to the Mediterranean. Instead, the Obama administration has allowed the most uncompromising Wahhabist-Salafist extremists of the Gulf Sunni establishment to effectively dictate a policy of eliminating Assad at any cost, with cool strategic rationale eviscerated by the flame of sectarian passion. In straining for a gnat, America has swallowed the proverbial camel, leaving the door wide open to the fate of the Mideast being dictated by the Axis of Fatima.
Saturday, October 8, 2016
In just one week, Russia strongarms the West
In what has been a banner week for the new Cold War or Cold War lite, Russia has wasted not a single day showing the West and the US in particular just how costly will be any policy of confrontation against it or even the slightest hint that they still entertain fantasies of regime change in the Kremlin.
With the announcement that its aerial campaign in Syria is now open-ended, on top of a new deployment of the advanced S-300V anti-missile system to its naval base there, Russia has moved to decisively secure its long-term interests in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean with a permanent physical security presence.
At virtually the same time, Moscow has ramped up the threat of a new nuclear arms race by withdrawing from an important plutonium disposal accord from the early 2000s that would have seen it and Washington each destroy weapons-grade material for 8,500 new nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, a weeklong drill for thermonuclear warfare involving much of the Russian military and reportedly up to 40 million civilians has also been taking place, and yesterday it was reported that short-range Iskander-M nuclear-capable missiles were deployed to the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, from where they can threaten the new NATO deployments in the Baltic republics and Poland with instant annihilation.
And so, Vladimir Putin - who celebrated his 64th birthday yesterday - has sent quite a strong message to lame-duck Barack Obama: This will be your great legacy - a dramatically deteriorated security posture for both the US and NATO in the face of a resurgent Russian military - unless you finally use what little time you have left to rebuild our broken relationship.
With no plausible response in the realm of hard power geopolitics, Washington is reduced to clawing for abstract moral victories. Secretary of State John Kerry has floated pushing for a UN war crimes investigation against Russia and the Syrian regime over their recent actions around the besieged Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo; and yesterday for the first time, Washington formally acknowledged that it was in fact the Russian government which was behind the hacking of the Democratic party's servers over the summer.
American and more general Western weakness in the face of Russian assertiveness has become striking. Not only have NATO and the US-led coalition in the Middle East been militarily pigeonholed from free strategic action to salvage Western dominance, but it's increasingly obvious that this apparent shift in the balance of power has deep economic underpinnings.
Russia has proved utterly impossible to isolate or seal off as a means of forcing it - through impoverishment - to behave more in line with Western preferences and prejudices. Because Russian trade with North America is negligible, the success of sanctions against it always depended on the EU, but now it's quite obvious that the EU actually needs Russia as much as vice versa and probably more.
Russia has emerged one of the relative winners of the withering oil price war since 2014. The current level of $40 to $50 a barrel is not far from what it needs to stabilize the economy and budget, and its production has continued to set new records in defiance of OPEC and US shale. Anything significantly below this, and it's actually the large Western European banks - notably Germany's flagship Deutsche Bank, the poster child of the West's latest financial volatility - that stand to fail before any significant Russian entity.
The burgeoning strategic alliance with China, which sees Russia as one of the key elements of its new "Silk and Road" Eurasian economic initiative, gives Moscow a potentially pivotal role in the ongoing shift of economic power from West to East. And not least because Moscow has prudently cultivated good relations with every other key Eurasian player as well - Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on. Its pragmatic and winning attitude is clearly making headway even with US allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.
Overall, it's still too early to tell what if anything of consequence will ultimately come of the Sino-Russian partnership to reshape the economic and thus the geopolitical alignment of the Eurasian supercontinent, but despite the underwhelming progress to date, even this has already been enough to dispel the sheer doom and gloom that Western punditry and Russian liberals so dismissively assumed would be the fate of a revanchist-militarist Moscow with ambitions far exceeding its capacities; though admittedly, this is more indicative of just how deeply systemic and chronic a funk the West (especially Europe) has itself fallen into.
That being said, the West still doesn't realize this - its elites are not much less likely than the sport-hooligan masses to be distracted by the latest exploits or sexploits of the Kardashians - and in all likelihood won't realize it except in fits and starts for a while yet. Of all the factors that help Putin's quest to make Russia great again, this is probably the biggest one: with such an egregious combination of complacency, apathy, negligence, and puerile preoccupation with the petty vanities of social media-driven mass consumerist-voyeurism, the "free world" is literally begging to cede its leadership - both moral and physical - of the international community to more serious stakeholders.
With the announcement that its aerial campaign in Syria is now open-ended, on top of a new deployment of the advanced S-300V anti-missile system to its naval base there, Russia has moved to decisively secure its long-term interests in the Levant and eastern Mediterranean with a permanent physical security presence.
At virtually the same time, Moscow has ramped up the threat of a new nuclear arms race by withdrawing from an important plutonium disposal accord from the early 2000s that would have seen it and Washington each destroy weapons-grade material for 8,500 new nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, a weeklong drill for thermonuclear warfare involving much of the Russian military and reportedly up to 40 million civilians has also been taking place, and yesterday it was reported that short-range Iskander-M nuclear-capable missiles were deployed to the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, from where they can threaten the new NATO deployments in the Baltic republics and Poland with instant annihilation.
And so, Vladimir Putin - who celebrated his 64th birthday yesterday - has sent quite a strong message to lame-duck Barack Obama: This will be your great legacy - a dramatically deteriorated security posture for both the US and NATO in the face of a resurgent Russian military - unless you finally use what little time you have left to rebuild our broken relationship.
With no plausible response in the realm of hard power geopolitics, Washington is reduced to clawing for abstract moral victories. Secretary of State John Kerry has floated pushing for a UN war crimes investigation against Russia and the Syrian regime over their recent actions around the besieged Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo; and yesterday for the first time, Washington formally acknowledged that it was in fact the Russian government which was behind the hacking of the Democratic party's servers over the summer.
American and more general Western weakness in the face of Russian assertiveness has become striking. Not only have NATO and the US-led coalition in the Middle East been militarily pigeonholed from free strategic action to salvage Western dominance, but it's increasingly obvious that this apparent shift in the balance of power has deep economic underpinnings.
Russia has proved utterly impossible to isolate or seal off as a means of forcing it - through impoverishment - to behave more in line with Western preferences and prejudices. Because Russian trade with North America is negligible, the success of sanctions against it always depended on the EU, but now it's quite obvious that the EU actually needs Russia as much as vice versa and probably more.
Russia has emerged one of the relative winners of the withering oil price war since 2014. The current level of $40 to $50 a barrel is not far from what it needs to stabilize the economy and budget, and its production has continued to set new records in defiance of OPEC and US shale. Anything significantly below this, and it's actually the large Western European banks - notably Germany's flagship Deutsche Bank, the poster child of the West's latest financial volatility - that stand to fail before any significant Russian entity.
The burgeoning strategic alliance with China, which sees Russia as one of the key elements of its new "Silk and Road" Eurasian economic initiative, gives Moscow a potentially pivotal role in the ongoing shift of economic power from West to East. And not least because Moscow has prudently cultivated good relations with every other key Eurasian player as well - Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on. Its pragmatic and winning attitude is clearly making headway even with US allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.
Overall, it's still too early to tell what if anything of consequence will ultimately come of the Sino-Russian partnership to reshape the economic and thus the geopolitical alignment of the Eurasian supercontinent, but despite the underwhelming progress to date, even this has already been enough to dispel the sheer doom and gloom that Western punditry and Russian liberals so dismissively assumed would be the fate of a revanchist-militarist Moscow with ambitions far exceeding its capacities; though admittedly, this is more indicative of just how deeply systemic and chronic a funk the West (especially Europe) has itself fallen into.
That being said, the West still doesn't realize this - its elites are not much less likely than the sport-hooligan masses to be distracted by the latest exploits or sexploits of the Kardashians - and in all likelihood won't realize it except in fits and starts for a while yet. Of all the factors that help Putin's quest to make Russia great again, this is probably the biggest one: with such an egregious combination of complacency, apathy, negligence, and puerile preoccupation with the petty vanities of social media-driven mass consumerist-voyeurism, the "free world" is literally begging to cede its leadership - both moral and physical - of the international community to more serious stakeholders.
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