PUTIN TAKES THE GLOBAL LONG VIEW IN NEXT MOVES IN SYRIA by Harper

 

As has been noted on this site in recent weeks, a decisive military victory could be achieved in Syria by the R+6 forces, with the addition of two divisions of Russian troops.  The remaining strongholds of both the Islamic State and Nusra could be over-run in a matter of months, under such a beefed-up Russian deployment.  Clearly, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top military commanders are aware of this reality.  Yet, so far, despite recent hints of a further Russian military deployment into Syria, no such decisive decision has been taken, begging a fair question:  What is holding the Russian President back from bringing the Syrian war to a short-term successful conclusion?  Sane military and intelligence circles in the United States would quietly applaud such an intervention, President Obama would make some public pronouncements of complaint, but would not do anything further.  Saudi Arabia would sulk and ultimately blame the Obama Administration for "allowing" such an outcome, that flies in the face of their persistent goal of installing a Sunni Salafist regime in Damascus.  Even the would-be Sultan of the New Ottoman Empire, President Erdogan, would take it in stride--so long as Syria remained a unified nation without a large portion hived off into an independent Kurdistan.

 

IMHO, President Putin is holding back for larger strategic reasons that go beyond Syria or the Middle East.  Putin knows that there are growing splits within Europe over both the NATO provocations against Russia, which will be advanced at the upcoming NATO heads of state summit in Warsaw in early July. He knows that the European Union will soon be deciding on whether to extend the sanctions against Russia beyond the July 31 expiration date, and that there are a number of important European states where there is diminishing enthusiasm for the sanctions and for the ostracizing of Russia.  Putin just visited Greece and offered to invest in a major gas storage facility that would be a tremendous boost for the desperate Greek economy.  Italy's Prime Minister Renzi has broken ranks and announced he will attend the St. Petersburg Economic Forum later this summer.  European Council President Junker has announced he, too, will attend.  Germany's Foreign Minister Steinmeier has issued statements during a recent tour of the three Baltic states, in favor of pulling back from the Russian sanctions, if not all at once.  He has linked lifting of the sanctions to "progress" on Russia's part in implementing the Minsk II agreement on eastern Ukraine.  Russia has been asked to support a plan for elections in the Donbass region, overseen and policed by the OSCE.  Nobody is talking about rolling back the status of Crimea in all of the talk of reducing or terminating sanctions.  European nations are divided.

Putin is also in the process of successfully engineering his own "Asia pivot," one that is based more on economic than purely military ties.  The recent visit to Russia by Japanese Prime Minister Abe was an important signal that Tokyo is not willing to always follow Washington's lead--when vital Japanese economic and diplomatic interests are at stake.  Abe will attend the Far East Economic Forum in Vladivostok this summer at Putin's invitation, and Putin will visit Japan before the end of the year.  There is a real prospect that the northern islands dispute, which has been a barrier to close Russian-Japanese economic ties, will be settled sometime in mid-2017, according some well-placed Japanese friends.

In short, President Putin is taking into consideration a complex series of global developments and opportunities.  He will act decisively, but not in haste. The Russian military intervention in Syria, launched last September, has stabilized the Assad regime and seen the Syrian Army rebuilt into a far more effective fighting force.  Putin has also seen that Iran's effectiveness in Syria has proven to be over-rated.  When Russia pulled back some of its military support for the Assad government earlier this year, anticipating that Iran would be able to fill that vacuum, it proved not to be the case.  Russia is now quietly back in Syria on a scale equal to the peak of the late 2015 intervention.

It may be fairly debated whether the broader calculations--NATO's pending deployments along the Russian western front, the emerging splits in Europe, the opportunities in Asia--warrant holding back from an all-out decisive offensive in Syria.  But it is clearly the case that there are global strategic factors that are in play.  Putin is taking the long view and the global view of how Russia can best manage a dangerous and unpredictable world disorder. 

Comments

[SmoothieX12]

I don't think that BREXIT, while fairly important, is on the top of Putin's list of geopolitical priorities. Ukraine and smooth decoupling, in case of negative for Russia dynamics there, from Europe are by far more important. After Germany's addition of Russia to its "White Book" today as an opponent, it seems the strategic issue is settled.

[kao_hsien_chih]

David H.,

I wanted to chime in something that came to my mind somewhat belatedly after reading your post and Schwartz's article. Since it has been a long time since I had read it, I probably am remembering the details wrong...

Supposedly, when the Lakota tribe was being forced off their "ancestral" sacred lands of the Black Hills, one of them asked a Crow tribesman serving as a scout for US cavalry why he was helping the white men do this to "his own kind." The Crow replied, "because the Black Hills used to belong to the Crow several generations ago, until the Lakota took it from us." This fits with what A. I. Schmelzer said about the Turks and the Kurds some days ago, too, I suppose, and could be the same about the Lithuanians and the Poles or the Croats and the Serbs.

It struck me how the version told by the Lakota became the dominant version of the story for the Plains Indian tribes in multiculturalist textbooks, even though they were a conquering, militant, and warlike tribe who did not, let's say, play nice with their neighbors. Instead of a feared aggressor against whom weaker tribes willingly sided with the white men (not unlike the way Tlaxcalans and other neighbors of the Aztecs sided with the conquistadores), they became transmogrified to fit the multicultural sensibility of today's cosmopolitan morality. Hardly unique to North America: there was a book written some years ago that praised Genghis Khan as a sort of great multicultural hero, precisely because he caused the untold bloodshed that destroyed social fabric throughout the old world. It was all "worth it" I guess in the name of modernity, to quote Albright Khan, I guess.

The tribal histories of the "minority" peoples are often complicated and don't fit neatly into the multicultural sensibilities of modern elites. Today's "white men" want to live in a world where the lion and the lamb sleep side by side and are surprised when neither the lamb or the lion shares his idea of perfect world, for the reasons that are obvious to them but not to the "white man." (In case other readers hadn't noticed, I'm using the term "white man" sarcastically.) So I guess the solution is to declare that it's all the fault of the lion...until the lions go extinct at which point the lion is made into an icon of multispecies unity against the evil old version of the "white man," in whose mythologized story all of the non-human animal lined up behind the lion to resist the evil imperialism...so the new, enlightened "white man" should be like the lion and unify all animalkind to lie next to each other...in which irredentist, irrational lamb becomes the problem. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

[kao_hsien_chih]

Pilsudski, in 1920, might have said the same thing. His big idea (Promethianism) was that various "oppressed" natinoalities of the old Russian Empire could be mobilized under Polish leadership and be coaxed to resist the Russians. The biggest piece to their puzzle was also Ukraine. Kinda fitting since, as far as I know, the Brzezinski clan originates from the Western Ukraine, where Polish noblemen ruled over Ukrainian serfs and thought that the serfs naturally sided with them against the Russians. During both World Wars, the serfs showed that their attitudes were, eh, a bit more complicated--they sure didn't like the Russians, but they didn't like the Poles either.

[LeaNder]

We had rumors over here, to the extend I watch it, that Russia was trying to stir nationalist moods among part of our citizen.

I was not ever convinced. But admittedly did not take a closer look. From my uninformed and really highly superficial look at it, Russia no doubt may have connected with its based with Russian ancestry base over here.

****
Besides, I somewhat doubt that GB's exit would matter much to Russia, you wouldn't of course assume that if you have the feeling it may prefer to see a weaker EU. ... convince me, it may be an advantage for Russia to see GB outside the EU.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93United_Kingdom_relations#Since_2010

[LeaNder]

Putin's decision to wait longer before going after Al Qaeda has. EU's backing of Erdogan and the Syrian rebel mix including Al Qaeda and the results of that policy from terrorism to immigration is pushing the so-called "populist" anti-EU parties from height to height.

I wouldn't as easily link cause and result, as you do.

What exactly should I know about Russia's "inaction" at one point in time, and the immigrant wave. I am aware that there is an argument out there that the Tayyip deliberately caused this to blackmail Europe. ... How many immigrants had Turkey taken in herself before it started big over here?

Concerning German ground: the old AfD (anti Euro) versus the newly split off one? Ever taken a look at the intellectual weekly background in Germany of the new AfD during recent decades?

[Charles Michael]

dedollarization:
it seems Iran is asking payments in euro for its oil
Russian Oil and Gaz to China are more and more paid in Yuan
there are somme talks of India joining the trend.
China's currency is now part of the FMI basket, rubble is still free-floating and convertible.

[turcopolier]

annamaria

" ... recent Wikileaks revelations of US State Department leaks that show plans to destabilize Syria and overthrow the Syrian government as early as 2006. The leaks reveal that these plans were given to the US directly from the Israeli government and would be formalized through instigating civil strife and sectarianism" Citation? pl

[LondonBob]

Leave have a small lead in the recent polls. Added to that is leave voters are much more motivated and thus more likely to vote.

Not sure Russia is much fussed either way.

[Seamus Padraig]

" Have Brzezinski and Albright actually forgotten the realities of the worlds from which they came, and simply succumbed to an American nationalist cloud-cuckooland? Or is what they say simply an exercise in pure cynicism?"

Well, being a cynic myself, I'd say the latter, David. Our State Dept. types have gotten very good at using these multi-ethnic states to their advantage--either to break them up (as in Yugoslavia and Iraq) or to cause grief for a neighboring state (the way Georgia and Ukraine have done to Russia). If you've ever read Brzezinski's book 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997), you know he's nobody's fool. He understands very well the importance of Ukraine to Russia:

"Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia."

[Babak Makkinejad]

Yes, Euro is a sovereign currency but Yuan is not. And it is impossible for me to see EU emerging as an independent power from the United States. For that to occur, they have to let Germany run all of Europe - that won't happen.

Iran is not acting as a sovereign monetary authority - which would require her to float her currency and let the chips fall where they may.

The Iranian central bank, like so many other central banks in the world, is acting like a currency board - itself a relict of the colonial times.

[Jack]

Thanks for the info from across the pond. While it is none of my business I am very curious how the Brits are going to decide.

[Bandolero]

annamaria

I agree that the Golan heights is a central point in the Syrian war. My belief is that this is the central point why Israel supports regime change in Syria, and why western governments - under pressure from the Israeli lobby - support jihadis for regime change in Syria. I understand that weakening Iran and gas pipelines do also play a role in western governments calculus, however I suspect they are minor compared to Israel and the Golan.

Leander

Whether the current German and EU elite or the AfD is of weaker intellectual background in Germany I would say would be open for discussion. I have no opinion on this, except that I may find it possible that Björn Höcke has a stronger intellectual background than German DM Flintenuschi. However, I have an opinion about the strong poll numbers of so-called populist parties in the EU. I believe that these strong poll numbers of the parties disliked by the current EU elites are connected to failed policies like supporting jihadis in Syria and hostility against Russia. And I suspect the longer the EU continues these policies, the stronger the populist parties will become. Whether it is Hofer in Austria recently, Virginia Raggi from M5S in mayoral elections in Rome today, the AfD in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in September, or Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections next year, I do think these parties are fueled by policies like supporting jihadis for regime change in Syria and they will grow as long as the EU doesn't abandon that policy.