Consider the last one. The overwhelming flow of refugees into Europe from Mideast has stunned the nations and elites of Europe. Half of Syria’s population has been internally displaced in the last several years — mainly by devastating bombing of civilians by Assad’s Russia-supplied air power in the cities in which he had lost control to pro-democracy insurgents and then to the Islamist ISIS. Over four million are now outside Syria, and the number is growing.
Pro-Western insurgency in Syria lost steam when Obama hesitated, refused to supply weapons, and then was outmaneuvered by Russia’s foreign minister into fruitless negotiations and retreating from a previously promised “red line” action.
Disagreements in Europe how to handle and where to settle the refugee crush of “biblical proportions” have erupted into political arguments between large and small, west and center member states of the European Union, and are threatening to undermine the EU as a unified force standing in the way of Russia’s political penetration into central Europe.
Clearly, the virtual refugee invasion of Europe from Mideast and Africa is playing into Kremlin’s hands. Russia has no intention to mitigate the Syrian crisis (Mr. Putin likes the word “crisis”) by doing away with Assad’s regime.
The latest US twist on Syria can be gleamed after the latest communications between high-level US and Russian officials. According to the Financial Times, US Secretary John Kerry appeared to suggest that the Obama administration could accept the Syrian president remaining in the short term, although no settlement could be achieved with the long-term presence of Assad (“US and Russia hold high-level talks over Syria,” Sept. 19).
Aren’t all settlements “short-term” in this world?
Also, per the same article, the Pentagon said that the U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and his Russian counterpart Sergey Shoigu talked about ways to “de-conflict” their respective operations in Syria, including the risk of confrontation.
The Islamist ISIS has been as good as a declared common enemy of the United States and Russia. Only one thing is wrong with this discovery. America’s most dangerous enemy is Russia, as many thinking US officials have stated recently and in the past. President Obama may not think so. During 2012 presidential campaign, referring to Mitt Romney’s remark that Russia is the number one enemy, Obama sarcastically called it “the 1980s thinking.”
Obama made many right calls as president, especially withdrawing from Iraq and downsizing US role in Afghanistan. In each of them the US has been fighting the wrong enemy (as it did in Vietnam), and lost in all three for the same reason, with a huge cost in lives and economy losses. Obama also deserves credit for his understanding of existential danger from climate change and the right steps to reduce carbon emissions, unlike what we see in useless and vacuous debates among his Repablican Party opponents, who avoid saying how they would handle specific problems. Obama’s controversial stance on domestic issues, in which he has been very active lately, is open to diversity of opinion.
But Obama’s track record in handling Russia’s political and military expansion in Europe and Mideast is an unmitigated disaster. Concerning the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, Obama passed the ball to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a wonderful record in her job description, but no Wehrmacht to defend Europe, much less to help Ukraine. NATO in its present shape and no American leadership is a symbol rather than a force that can fight.
This feat of Obama in itself will be remembered in his legacy as the great extinction of Western brainpower, losing out to a Eurasian empire, Russia that has only a fraction of US capability in all respects, except parity in nuclear bombs. Which leads to a diagnosis of basic defect in current US leadership: cowardice. How far can a strong country like the United States be pushed around by a voracious bandit in the Kremlin? He may be pretending to be reckless to instill fear, but outlaws of his kind usually pull the tail behind legs and run when confronted forcefully.
Contrary to picturing ISIS as much more than another Mideast aberration, the United States should be focusing on Russia, not on its Syrian adventures, by providing weapons for Ukraine as the first step, and letting Mr. Putin look across his shoulder while traveling to Syria with his expeditionary outfits. The Wall Street Journal made this observation in an opinion column September 17: “Letting them fight (Russians against ISIS) is also Mr. Obama’s strategy”. This would not be a bad “short-term” strategy.
But the prevailing arrangement seems to be the one hinted at by Mr. Kerry, a compromise to let Bashir Assad stay. In some ways, the Russians and the US are already in a tacit alliance, writes Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times (September 22). And hear this: “the main outside forces (US and Russia) should work for a ceasefire between the Syrian regime and the moderate rebels, followed by an interim government and UN-sponsored elections, which would decide the fate of the current regime”.
Moderate rebels? They virtually melted away as a fighting force two years ago, after being abandoned in the Obama deal with Russia in favor of (here we go again) UN-sponsored negotiations that ended in nothing. Earlier this year the Obama administration allocated $400 million to train a new rebel force. The results are disappointing. Only between 40 and 50 fighters graduated from that training, and only 5 were deployed on some mission. And so, what ceasefire can be conceptualized between moderate rebels and Assad’s forces?
Clearly, the “compromise” now talked about is nothing more than more of Assad, this time with Russian troops entrenched in Syria. And, yes, Americans helping from the air to contain the ISIS. Gideon Rachman and others find this arrangement as “a necessary compromise with evil.”
But in Putin’s view, the West must also “re-establish normal relations” with Russia (lift sanctions imposed for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine), and stop supporting “radical extremist forces” (such as Ukraine’s post-Maidan government). That seems to be the price he is demanding for Russia’s “cooperation” in Syria.
Russian presence in Syria, of course, does nothing to solve the refugee and migrant exodus to Europe that drives the European Union into a near-existential crisis that will tear it apart if migrations continue at the present rate. This becomes a monstrous lever for Putin with Russian boots on the ground in Syria. All in all, this seems to be the right moment for the White House to become real and begin to send weapons to Ukraine.
his is the place to make a stand, and not on the Elbe River.
