By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, August 18, 2016
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 the shipment 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
fighters operating 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 smugly predicted 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, 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.
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