This photo, grabbed from Russian Defense Ministry video footage issued Aug. 16, is said to show a Tu-22M3 long-range bomber releasing its payload above Syria after it took off from an air base in Iran. (Russian Defense Ministry
This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended
not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely
nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to
operate from its soil. Until now.
The reordering of the Middle East is
proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the
region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get
after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from
the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on
Syria. Consider:
● Iran
The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a
rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a
strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of
sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed
in with major deals, including theshipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now
marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.
● Iraq
These bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace.
Before President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, that could not have happened.
The resulting vacuum has not only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it
has gradually allowed a hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit.
According to a Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite
militia fightersoperating inside
Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.
● Syria
When Russia dramatically intervened last year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing
campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smuglypredicted that Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar
al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized the
upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of state is
running around trying to sue for peace,
offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only
Putin will promise to conquer gently.
Consider what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very
weak hand — a rump Russian state, shorn of empire and saddled with a backward
economy and a rusting military — he has restored Russia to great-power status.
Reduced to irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.
In Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn
the map. His annexation of Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager
to throw off the few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape
of eastern Ukraine continues.
Ten thousand have already died and now Putin is threatening even more open warfare. Under the
absurd pretext of Ukrainian terrorism in Crimea (reminiscent of Hitler’s claim
that he invaded Poland in response to a Polish border incursion), Putin has
threatened retaliation,
massed troops in eight locations on the Ukrainian border, ordered Black Sea naval exercises and
moved advanced anti-aircraft batteries into Crimea, giving Moscow control over
much of Ukrainian airspace.
And why shouldn’t he? He’s pushing on an open
door. Obama still refuses to send Ukraine even defensive weapons. The
administration’s response to these provocations? Urging “both sides” to
exercise restraint. Both sides, mind you.
And in a gratuitous flaunting of its
newly expanded reach, Russia will be conducting joint naval exercises with
China in the South China Sea, in obvious support of Beijing’s territorial
claims and illegal military bases.
Yet the president shows little concern.
He is too smart not to understand geopolitics; he simply doesn’t care. In part
because his priorities are domestic. In part because he thinks we lack clean
hands and thus the moral standing to continue to play international arbiter.
And in part because he’s convinced that in the
long run it doesn’t matter. Fluctuations in great power relations are
inherently ephemeral. For a man who sees a moral arc in the universe bending inexorably toward justice,
calculations of raw realpolitik are 20th-century thinking — primitive,
obsolete, the obsession of small minds.
Obama made all this perfectly clear in
speeches at the U.N., in Cairo and here at home in his very first year in
office. Two terms later, we see the result. Ukraine dismembered. Eastern Europe
on edge. Syria a charnel house. Iran subsuming Iraq. Russia and Iran on the
march across the entire northern Middle East.
At the heart of this disorder is a simple
asymmetry. It is in worldview. The major revisionist powers — China, Russia and
Iran — know what they want: power, territory, tribute. And they’re going after
it. Barack Obama takes Ecclesiastes’ view that these are vanities, nothing but
vanities.
In the kingdom of heaven, no doubt. Here
on earth, however — Aleppo to Donetsk, Estonia to the Spratly Islands — it
matters greatly.
*****
*****
My only comment is that there is now 153 days 6 hours
and 14 minutes left until Obama leaves office
