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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| One Cheer for Vladimir Putin |
| 2015-09-22 |
| There are a lot of reasons I don't watch Republican political debates. One of them is that I might throw a whiskey glass at the television screen every time one of the contendors tries to show how tough he or she is by excoriating Vladimir Putin. Big talkers. My fellow Republicans oscillate between the view that Russia is about to implode and the view that Putin is about to make war on NATO. Both views are equally silly. Putin is playing a weak hand skillfully, trying to keep Russia in the game as a world power (if not a superpower). He also rules the one Christian country that has been fighting a war with Islamic terrorists for decades. After years of colossal American blunders in the Levant, there's no way we can exclude Putin from a seat at the table. That's a fact of life, and all the bloviating in the world won't change it. It's also a fact that Russia has interests which sometimes run counter to ours and sometimes coincide with ours. Where our interests coincide, we should work with Russia; where our interests diverge, we should foil Russia. That's called Realpolitik and it's what great powers do for a living. Because the Obama administration is so beguiled by its anti-colonial, blame-America version of Wilsonian idealism, Putin just might play the pivotal role in the Levant during the next eighteen months. Below is an essay I posted under the title "Vladimir Putin: Spoiler or Statesman?" at Asia Times. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #5 Iblis - I hope you are right. My own take is tragically different. As I see things, the main battle for the rest of this century will be a global existential conflict between Islam and everything that is not Islam. Sadly, I think that Islam is going to win, to the everlasting detriment of human civilization - as it will have once existed. I envision isolated surviving pockets of non-Islam, existing on the fringes - with all of these groups lamenting "What the hell were our great-great-grand ancestors THINKING, back at the turn of the last century, to have allowed the pestilence of Islam to have grown from a relatively weak influence in a prosperous world, to becoming the dominant power on earth. Demographics will have been part of the answer, along with depraved complacency, and distraction by elite political correctness. I hope to hell that I am wrong. |
| Posted by: Lone Ranger 2015-09-22 21:45 |
| #4 My gut feeling is that Islamic terrorism will be, historically, a flash in the pan. Today's violence represents the death throws of the 7th Century, fueled by petro dollars. It will burn out in our lifetimes. The long war is against totalitarianism, which today takes the form of Putin in Russia and to a lesser extent the Chinese. This war is already over 100 years old and will still be fought by our great-grandchildren -- assuming Champ can't find a way to lose in the next 18 months. |
| Posted by: Iblis 2015-09-22 18:34 |
| #3 FTA: "That raises an interesting question: can the rest of the world work around the vacuum that has become American foreign policy? " Years earlier, IIRC, Spengler himself wrote that "when the cat's away, the mice will kill each other." |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2015-09-22 15:03 |
| #2 FTA: "The odds of such an outcome remain slim, to be sure, and not least because the Obama administration would have to take the sort of action it seems congenitally unable to take." The Obama administering is pursuing utterly different goals than what Spengler talks about in this article. Congenital abilities have nothing to do with that. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2015-09-22 15:02 |
| #1 FTA: "Russia and China were playing a balance-of-power game not much different than Washington’s" Uh, no. Washington's game (aka the Obamagenda) is not at all about pursuing a balance of power, but about DIS-empowering the USA in the pursuit of a dys- or u-topian fantasy. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2015-09-22 14:59 |