A critical moment is approaching for the post-post-Cold War global order. In the coming weeks, how the new US presidential administration of Donald Trump handles the simultaneous strategic crises on the Korean peninsula, in eastern Europe, and the Middle East could well determine the shape of global geopolitics for years to come.
Nearly three weeks ago, when Trump stunned the world by launching retaliatory missile strikes against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the latter's purported reuse of banned chemical weapons, both euphoria and dismay accompanied the dramatic pronouncement by Washington that it was no longer hesitant to use its sheer military might against sovereign nation-states again, not merely terrorist and non-state militant extremist groups.
And today, proponents of a more aggressive US military posture towards unfriendly rogue regimes got what could turn out to be a major vindication of newfound American hawkishness in both objective military as well as subjective propaganda terms: an announcement by Russia that it has withdrawn nearly half its air wing from Syria that had been supporting the Assad regime's nearly six-year-long campaign against armed rebels aiming to topple him.
Were Syrian peace to be determined by the Syrian people in conjunction with the US and Russia as respective honest brokers for the opposition and the Damascus government, there would be much ground for optimism in this Russian pullback: Washington and Moscow, despite sharp differences both in Syria and elsewhere, have essentially mutually arrived at a point of swapping arms for diplomacy as the tool of choice for ending the conflict that has claimed up to half a million lives and displaced a mild-apocalyptic 10-plus million refugees. A peace deal struck now stands a fair chance of securing both the American interest of easing Assad out of power and the Russian interest of maintaining military access to the country, especially its critical sole Mediterranean naval base; whatever the eventual fate of Assad personally - a negotiable matter, for all its delicacy - the remnants of the Syrian state can now be preserved and eventually rebuilt by all legitimate native stakeholders under the watchful gaze of the UN Security Council.
But the grave lurking danger is that Russian disengagement from military operations on behalf of Assad in favor of intensified re-engagement in a political process may only expose the far more intractable underlying contradiction which has fueled the long Syrian war: the emergence of Shiite superpower Iran as a powerful and even potentially dominant regional player, with tentacles stretching from the Gaza strip to the steppes of central Afghanistan, from the highlands of eastern Turkey to the desert swathes of Houthi-held Yemen.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal currently under intense fresh scrutiny by the Trump administration could yet emerge as the great stumbling block to US-Iranian détente and, with it, peace in Syria and Iraq as well.
Central to the dilemma for Washington is that even with full Iranian compliance, as the Trump team has in fact just certified in a regular review, it simply doesn't comprehensively cover the entire scope of Tehran's suspected nuclear activities; even worse, neither does it roll back any know-how acquired to date by Iranian scientists and weapons developers. As such, the accord's promised eventual benefits to the Ayatollahs - sanctions relief and a greater opening to the global economy - are seemingly too great to concede for only partial denuclearization; and yet at the same time, it has drastically reduced American freedom of maneuver with respect to Iranian ambitions in the critical Syrian-Levantine sector where Tehran's powerful proxy Hezbollah has only further entrenched its pivotal military and political role at the expense of Washington's chief regional allies, Israel, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab states.
A confrontation of some kind is therefore all but inevitable, because the longer-term trend of creeping Shiite ascendancy led by a resurgent successor to ancient Persia is becoming unmistakably structural and chronic in its apparent nature; if ever there were a moment to forcefully reverse, halt, or even merely delay it, now would be it. And it can only be done with a severity backed up by real concrete ability and willingness to inflict pain and loss on Tehran's now almost four-decade-old theocratic regime - a recipe for a dangerous brinkmanship that nobody wants, but that nobody may be able to back down from without a dear domestic political price.
It has in fact emerged (via his son) that for President Trump, it was none other than the "disastrous" Iran nuclear deal - as its contours began to emerge in late spring 2015 - that compelled him more than any other single factor to run for the most powerful office. There can be little doubt, then, that he intends to stare down Ayatollah Khamenei to the bitter end if it came to it, with no intention of blinking first. The Iranian supreme leader for his part has staked too much of his historical credibility - not merely in-the-moment approval ratings - on ascribing substance to the chants of "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" which have remained such a hallmark and staple of his state's rallying principle even long after any personal animosity towards the West has largely disappeared among ordinary Iranians.
And so, actual conflict or avoidance thereof with Iran - and thereby the peace and stability of the greater Middle East - could all boil down to how astutely Trump and Khamenei first sense and then either collude or clash with the greater currents of both Islamic and world history. War is by no means inevitable between America and Iran; but neither is peace. Something far bigger - over and beyond Trump or Khamenei or even Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu themselves - may be coming into play here: a truly escalating crescendo to the end of the end times. A clash of civilizations with apocalyptic overtones: can America and Israel accept the prospect of an Iran which won't be cowed into stopping its march to eventually bring Jerusalem effectively under its mercy?
Perhaps, in the end, the vengeance of Fatima cannot be avoided...but only so that it ushers in the ever greater Providence of her prototype, Mary.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Thursday, April 20, 2017
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine
As Ukraine spirals downward towards another possible revolution, Donald Trump appears trapped on this most critical front of the comprehensive East-West standoff between the US-led global alliance system and Vladimir Putin's Russian-led Eurasian authoritarian axis.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Russia's entry into North Korean crisis means general East-West accord is imperative
As the North Korean nuclear crisis slowly but surely escalates to a soft boil, China has officially asked Russia for help in cooling tensions between the US and the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un before red lines are crossed by either side. Coming less than a week after new US president Donald Trump seemingly enlisted Chinese communist general secretary Xi Jinping in a quasi-alliance to eliminate the North's accelerating weapons program, it sets up an apparent contradiction at the heart of US-China relations in the strategic security realm - a reaffirmation of the Sino-Russian Eurasian axis which stands in direct defiance of Washington's apparent newfangled threat of unilateral coercion against rogue states like North Korea and Syria. All this in spite of continued US-China integration in the economic realm that both sides cheerfully blessed in Trump's recent summit with Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Star Wars returns: the new nuclear arms race
As of mid-March 2017, the new nuclear arms race between Russia and the US is well afoot. The consequences for global peace and stability may well be dire.
Reports have emerged that the US Navy has so dramatically increased the precision killing power of its formidable D-5 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) that the American underwater arsenal alone can now completely eliminate the entire stationary silo-based Russian arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
At last year's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin could barely contain his outrage at the nonchalance with which the US was proceeding with its trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, especially how the so-called "missile defense system" was being used as a convenient media and public relations cover to in fact develop far more rapid and effective offensive nuclear, first-strike capabilities. The end goal of everything being crystal clear: to render Russia's massive nuclear arsenal essentially obsolete, its missiles overwhelmed by an anti-missile shield if not simply exposed to the debilitating blitz of a preemptive attack the speed and surprise of which was never feasible throughout the last century's Cold War, and which in practice ended up being little more than the aspiration of Ronald Reagan's celebrated "Star Wars" program of the early-to-mid 1980s.
Star Wars is now coming back alright - with a vengeance. There can be no other intent of such a massive and ambitious US nuclear modernization program than to once more tip the scales of doomsday supremacy in the West's favor: the best defense, in nuclear as well as conventional warfare, is as ever a good offense.
From Russia's perspective, what's so troubling about the new US nuclear arms push is that it all seems to boil down to squeezing its early warning window to virtually nil: the crux of Washington's efforts to gain a nuclear edge on Moscow seems to be to render the existing Russian early warning network utterly incapable of giving sufficient advance notification of a preemptive strike.
Russia's predicament, being as it is still far behind the US in any kind of space-based strategic detection system, is that it now has less than ten minutes of total preparation before the cream of its strategic nuclear arsenal is eliminated in a sea-launched first strike by America's feared Ohio-class "boomer" subs, each with their 24 Trident II D-5 missiles carrying between them a whopping 192 half-megaton, independently targeted warheads. With the addition of the chilling "super-fuze" technology to dramatically augment both the precision and timing of their detonations, the US Navy now needs as little as two to three such boomers stationed off Russia's Arctic coast - still practically undetectable by available Russian sonar technology - to wipe out Russia's entire stationary land-based nuclear deterrent within a mere 600 seconds.
No wonder the urgency of Russia's recent push for nuclear modernization, which has itself set off alarm bells in the Pentagon as to the relative frustratingly slow progress of its own land-based and air-launched nuclear upgrades. In the interests of sheer survival, the Kremlin has had no option but to reduce the warning-to-launch interval for its silo-based rockets to a mere four minutes or less - matching for the first time their American counterparts.
Worse is set to come. Should Moscow determine that American plans for augmenting rapid first-strike are indeed far more ambitious - that they indeed will include not merely new-generation ultra-fast cruise missiles ("scramjet" systems) which will be conveniently deployed in forward areas via so-called "missile defense systems" as well as on nuclear attack subs and new stealthy destroyers, but eventually will include true space-based platforms like hypersonic weapon delivery vehicles which can hypothetically be stationed permanently adjacent to or even directly above Russian airspace - then little will stand in the way of a full-blown Star Wars competition for the ultimate high ground in combat.
Realistically, that day is still a ways off if it comes, but in the meantime the real problem nonetheless for the Kremlin is how to preserve a credible nuclear deterrent in the face of an ever more formidably prompt American first-strike posture. And realistically, its response can only be an essentially asymmetric one, given its technical and financial shortfalls vis-à-vis Washington.
While Russia can eventually match US super-cruise missiles with its own, these would mainly be effective against ground-based NATO targets to the west; the overwhelming American superiority at sea and in the air, however - that is, the Arctic and the Pacific - necessitates a fundamental dispersal of the bulk of Moscow's land-based deterrent. So in the coming decade, we should at the very least expect to see two wide-scale developments: 1) the scattering of Russian silos from their existing clusters which date to the last Cold War to a considerably larger constellation of far more solitary deployments, 2) the introduction of much greater numbers of truck-launched mobile systems, which themselves along with their support networks must be augmented for prolonged off-roading and constant concealment maneuvers.
Further, as the actual US missile defense capability improves and expands, Russia will have little choice but to boost the sheer number of missiles and warheads to ensure that an appreciable portion of its deterrent can indeed penetrate.
Russia may also determine that the best asymmetric investments are to be made in countering the fundamental American strength: space-based surveillance and reconnaissance. It may find common cause with China in spending heavily on anti-satellite and anti-radiation countermeasures; yet this would have the effect of only accelerating the American push into truly next-generation space systems, i.e. the hypersonic glide bomber and other advanced high-altitude drones.
Taken together, given how formidable the technical and monetary demands of keeping apace with the US, it appears inevitable that Russia will enter into a full-blown strategic alliance with China: the two individually by themselves simply cannot hope to block American supremacy from reasserting itself in their respective spheres of influence, and must increasingly work and move in lockstep to balance it.
China for its part would prefer to not acquire a massive nuclear arsenal of its own, despite its capability to do so - this would take far too much away from its priority of economic modernization, and sour relations with America so badly that this goal is unacceptably compromised. Beijing thus needs Moscow to remain the militarily superior party - and will gladly lend its increased (and still increasing) technological and financial muscle to aid the latter's belated quest to stay generally abreast of the Americans. The already extant Chinese edge over Russia in such areas as surface warships and drones will be of particular interest to both sides: filling Russian deficiencies is vital to China's security, and doing so is far less costly to Sino-US relations than becoming the new Russia itself.
Thus, as of spring 2017, as the world enters the post-post-Cold War era in earnest, it stands to reason that nuclear arms races are far from a thing of the past. The only question more consequential than the Sword of Damocles lingering over from the post-Cold War period (1991-2014), namely that of nukes in the hands of rogue states and actors, is the renewed conundrum of how nukes will play their long-established role in great power competition and dealing, with all the implications this has for both the diplomatic and military aspects of the overarching international system still dominated by just a few select marquee players. And as this piece makes clear, this latter question is far more consequential, in fact.
Reports have emerged that the US Navy has so dramatically increased the precision killing power of its formidable D-5 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) that the American underwater arsenal alone can now completely eliminate the entire stationary silo-based Russian arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
At last year's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin could barely contain his outrage at the nonchalance with which the US was proceeding with its trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, especially how the so-called "missile defense system" was being used as a convenient media and public relations cover to in fact develop far more rapid and effective offensive nuclear, first-strike capabilities. The end goal of everything being crystal clear: to render Russia's massive nuclear arsenal essentially obsolete, its missiles overwhelmed by an anti-missile shield if not simply exposed to the debilitating blitz of a preemptive attack the speed and surprise of which was never feasible throughout the last century's Cold War, and which in practice ended up being little more than the aspiration of Ronald Reagan's celebrated "Star Wars" program of the early-to-mid 1980s.
Star Wars is now coming back alright - with a vengeance. There can be no other intent of such a massive and ambitious US nuclear modernization program than to once more tip the scales of doomsday supremacy in the West's favor: the best defense, in nuclear as well as conventional warfare, is as ever a good offense.
From Russia's perspective, what's so troubling about the new US nuclear arms push is that it all seems to boil down to squeezing its early warning window to virtually nil: the crux of Washington's efforts to gain a nuclear edge on Moscow seems to be to render the existing Russian early warning network utterly incapable of giving sufficient advance notification of a preemptive strike.
Russia's predicament, being as it is still far behind the US in any kind of space-based strategic detection system, is that it now has less than ten minutes of total preparation before the cream of its strategic nuclear arsenal is eliminated in a sea-launched first strike by America's feared Ohio-class "boomer" subs, each with their 24 Trident II D-5 missiles carrying between them a whopping 192 half-megaton, independently targeted warheads. With the addition of the chilling "super-fuze" technology to dramatically augment both the precision and timing of their detonations, the US Navy now needs as little as two to three such boomers stationed off Russia's Arctic coast - still practically undetectable by available Russian sonar technology - to wipe out Russia's entire stationary land-based nuclear deterrent within a mere 600 seconds.
No wonder the urgency of Russia's recent push for nuclear modernization, which has itself set off alarm bells in the Pentagon as to the relative frustratingly slow progress of its own land-based and air-launched nuclear upgrades. In the interests of sheer survival, the Kremlin has had no option but to reduce the warning-to-launch interval for its silo-based rockets to a mere four minutes or less - matching for the first time their American counterparts.
Worse is set to come. Should Moscow determine that American plans for augmenting rapid first-strike are indeed far more ambitious - that they indeed will include not merely new-generation ultra-fast cruise missiles ("scramjet" systems) which will be conveniently deployed in forward areas via so-called "missile defense systems" as well as on nuclear attack subs and new stealthy destroyers, but eventually will include true space-based platforms like hypersonic weapon delivery vehicles which can hypothetically be stationed permanently adjacent to or even directly above Russian airspace - then little will stand in the way of a full-blown Star Wars competition for the ultimate high ground in combat.
Realistically, that day is still a ways off if it comes, but in the meantime the real problem nonetheless for the Kremlin is how to preserve a credible nuclear deterrent in the face of an ever more formidably prompt American first-strike posture. And realistically, its response can only be an essentially asymmetric one, given its technical and financial shortfalls vis-à-vis Washington.
While Russia can eventually match US super-cruise missiles with its own, these would mainly be effective against ground-based NATO targets to the west; the overwhelming American superiority at sea and in the air, however - that is, the Arctic and the Pacific - necessitates a fundamental dispersal of the bulk of Moscow's land-based deterrent. So in the coming decade, we should at the very least expect to see two wide-scale developments: 1) the scattering of Russian silos from their existing clusters which date to the last Cold War to a considerably larger constellation of far more solitary deployments, 2) the introduction of much greater numbers of truck-launched mobile systems, which themselves along with their support networks must be augmented for prolonged off-roading and constant concealment maneuvers.
Further, as the actual US missile defense capability improves and expands, Russia will have little choice but to boost the sheer number of missiles and warheads to ensure that an appreciable portion of its deterrent can indeed penetrate.
Russia may also determine that the best asymmetric investments are to be made in countering the fundamental American strength: space-based surveillance and reconnaissance. It may find common cause with China in spending heavily on anti-satellite and anti-radiation countermeasures; yet this would have the effect of only accelerating the American push into truly next-generation space systems, i.e. the hypersonic glide bomber and other advanced high-altitude drones.
Taken together, given how formidable the technical and monetary demands of keeping apace with the US, it appears inevitable that Russia will enter into a full-blown strategic alliance with China: the two individually by themselves simply cannot hope to block American supremacy from reasserting itself in their respective spheres of influence, and must increasingly work and move in lockstep to balance it.
China for its part would prefer to not acquire a massive nuclear arsenal of its own, despite its capability to do so - this would take far too much away from its priority of economic modernization, and sour relations with America so badly that this goal is unacceptably compromised. Beijing thus needs Moscow to remain the militarily superior party - and will gladly lend its increased (and still increasing) technological and financial muscle to aid the latter's belated quest to stay generally abreast of the Americans. The already extant Chinese edge over Russia in such areas as surface warships and drones will be of particular interest to both sides: filling Russian deficiencies is vital to China's security, and doing so is far less costly to Sino-US relations than becoming the new Russia itself.
Thus, as of spring 2017, as the world enters the post-post-Cold War era in earnest, it stands to reason that nuclear arms races are far from a thing of the past. The only question more consequential than the Sword of Damocles lingering over from the post-Cold War period (1991-2014), namely that of nukes in the hands of rogue states and actors, is the renewed conundrum of how nukes will play their long-established role in great power competition and dealing, with all the implications this has for both the diplomatic and military aspects of the overarching international system still dominated by just a few select marquee players. And as this piece makes clear, this latter question is far more consequential, in fact.
Monday, February 27, 2017
3 years ago, Russia ended Pax Americana - and it is on the move again
Three years ago today, February 27, 2014, Pax Americana was abruptly ended when a small but ultra-elite detachment of Russian special forces, stripped of their official military insignia and reduced to "little green men", seized control of key state buildings and critical infrastructure across the heavily Russophone Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, virtually instantly effecting the first violent expansion of national borders in Europe since World War Two.
Today, both the US and the West generally remain in practical denial of what a monumental shift this event signaled: it was the moment that their triumphalist march since the end of the Cold War (1989-1991), which had already sputtered badly in the 2008-09 financial crisis, effectively went into full retreat.
In the days and weeks following the Crimean seizure, which Russia's Vladimir Putin clearly ordered both as vengeance for the pro-Western "Euromaidan" revolution which toppled his ally president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine in the preceding week and also as a prudent precaution against future NATO takeover of Russia's longtime principal warm-water naval base at Sevastopol, it became clear that the US-led alliance had no coercive options whatsoever to punish Moscow for its aggression. Instead, as the worst East-West standoff in a quarter-century escalated in the ensuing months with the rise of a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the increasingly fantastic US and EU demand for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine has become a virtual byword for Western fecklessness and timidity.
As of today, early 2017, Russia is emerging as the clear winner in the new Cold War lite whose origins can be traced to the Ukraine crisis of 2013-14. It has survived the West's determined effort to bring it to its knees through sanctions and economic blackmail, even as it has beefed up both its conventional and nuclear military posture to a level that intimidates the cream puffs of NATO and EU capitals, who have finally been put on notice by a new administration in Washington that their effective free-riding on American military might won't be tolerated any longer.
As it turns out, the very things that the West points to as signs of Russia's inherent weakness and inferiority - its ruthless suppression of dissent and civil liberties - are now the Kremlin's most salient strengths in what it clearly views as an existential war against the US empire: Moscow relishes its ability to brand its domestic opponents as nothing less than traitors and fifth columnists working with Washington and Brussels to undermine Russian sovereignty and integrity, and thus furnish an easy justification for their ruthless repression and terrorization.
Russia, not America, is now to be feared and respected as the big boss with all the big guns - and no compunction about using them, albeit judiciously. Its own borders are secure and sealed. It can conduct military operations in support of its friends in the Muslim world (i.e. Syria) that show no quarter to unruly insurgents and "terrorists", and even more to the point, aren't concerned with civilian casualties as a hindrance to accomplishing the brutal mission. Security and order take precedence over freedom and rights; sovereignty and cultural jingoism over open commons and universal brotherhood. Since 2014, Putin's Russia has effectively rewritten the post-post-Cold War values playbook - and the West still doesn't realize it.
Russia is on the move again in 2017 - the centennial of its great revolution which gave birth to the Soviet Union, a great double-edged sword in her history whose legacy is something of a love-hate matter for its present rulers. In the last three years, she has simply given up trying to become Western in the fullest sense of individual rights and pluralism of competing ideas; she may still tolerate some degree of these but in her essence has moved closer to China dramatically in terms of a founding and overarching worldview. And between her 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal and Beijing's $10 trillion economy, she is increasingly confident that it is America - under a divisive new president who (not so) secretly wishes he could also jail or even shoot hostile journalists - who will now follow Russia's cues on the issues that matter most.
Today, both the US and the West generally remain in practical denial of what a monumental shift this event signaled: it was the moment that their triumphalist march since the end of the Cold War (1989-1991), which had already sputtered badly in the 2008-09 financial crisis, effectively went into full retreat.
In the days and weeks following the Crimean seizure, which Russia's Vladimir Putin clearly ordered both as vengeance for the pro-Western "Euromaidan" revolution which toppled his ally president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine in the preceding week and also as a prudent precaution against future NATO takeover of Russia's longtime principal warm-water naval base at Sevastopol, it became clear that the US-led alliance had no coercive options whatsoever to punish Moscow for its aggression. Instead, as the worst East-West standoff in a quarter-century escalated in the ensuing months with the rise of a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the increasingly fantastic US and EU demand for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine has become a virtual byword for Western fecklessness and timidity.
As of today, early 2017, Russia is emerging as the clear winner in the new Cold War lite whose origins can be traced to the Ukraine crisis of 2013-14. It has survived the West's determined effort to bring it to its knees through sanctions and economic blackmail, even as it has beefed up both its conventional and nuclear military posture to a level that intimidates the cream puffs of NATO and EU capitals, who have finally been put on notice by a new administration in Washington that their effective free-riding on American military might won't be tolerated any longer.
As it turns out, the very things that the West points to as signs of Russia's inherent weakness and inferiority - its ruthless suppression of dissent and civil liberties - are now the Kremlin's most salient strengths in what it clearly views as an existential war against the US empire: Moscow relishes its ability to brand its domestic opponents as nothing less than traitors and fifth columnists working with Washington and Brussels to undermine Russian sovereignty and integrity, and thus furnish an easy justification for their ruthless repression and terrorization.
Russia, not America, is now to be feared and respected as the big boss with all the big guns - and no compunction about using them, albeit judiciously. Its own borders are secure and sealed. It can conduct military operations in support of its friends in the Muslim world (i.e. Syria) that show no quarter to unruly insurgents and "terrorists", and even more to the point, aren't concerned with civilian casualties as a hindrance to accomplishing the brutal mission. Security and order take precedence over freedom and rights; sovereignty and cultural jingoism over open commons and universal brotherhood. Since 2014, Putin's Russia has effectively rewritten the post-post-Cold War values playbook - and the West still doesn't realize it.
Russia is on the move again in 2017 - the centennial of its great revolution which gave birth to the Soviet Union, a great double-edged sword in her history whose legacy is something of a love-hate matter for its present rulers. In the last three years, she has simply given up trying to become Western in the fullest sense of individual rights and pluralism of competing ideas; she may still tolerate some degree of these but in her essence has moved closer to China dramatically in terms of a founding and overarching worldview. And between her 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal and Beijing's $10 trillion economy, she is increasingly confident that it is America - under a divisive new president who (not so) secretly wishes he could also jail or even shoot hostile journalists - who will now follow Russia's cues on the issues that matter most.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
Russia's only a regional power alright - it's just in every region that matters
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).
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).
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.)
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