Russia launched its first airstrikes in Syria on Wednesday. They were almost all in western Syria. They did not fall on the Islamic State or the other terrorist groups raping and pillaging the Syrian countryside, creating the largest international refugee crisis in decades.
Rather, the Russian airstrikes fell on the moderate rebel groups that the U.S. has been notionally supporting against the country’s tyrant Bashar al-Assad.
President Obama seems surprised by this, but his surprise is inexcusably disingenuous or obtuse.
Assad is and has long been an ally of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Russia entered the Syrian civil war as any rational person would have expected, on the side of his ally and of the Iranian paramilitaries that support him. Does anyone in the administration dare to say they were shocked — shocked — that Putin is indifferent to both the horror and the strategic threat posed by the Islamic State. Why, yes the Obama administration does dare to claim surprise. When Russian bombs began to fall on their predictable targets, American officials reacted by claiming they were “taken aback,” as if they were genuinely wounded and upset.
On Monday, Obama had addressed the United Nations with the ridiculous idea that Washington and Moscow might would work together in Syria. “The United States is prepared to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict,” Obama said.
But countries with opposite goals in the same region cannot really work together. A cunning one can suggest it and a foolish one can believe it. One would expect a U.S. president to understand this and take action accordingly, not just to count on his own naive gestures of international friendship to make the world safer.
Putin has been busy in the last three years undermining American interests everywhere possible. Despite wielding a national government budget that is a small fraction of Obama’s — it was one-seventh, even before oil prices plunged — Putin is winning. Recall that it was he who dissuaded Obama from the “unbelievably small” campaign of airstrikes that he had hoped to launch against Assad in 2013. Putin helped strengthen Iran’s hand in negotiating against the U.S. during nuclear talks. Putin also waged an aggressive war for territorial gain in Ukraine.
As a much wiser man than Obama once put it in a presidential debate, Russia is America’s number one geopolitical foe. Obama laughed this off at the time with what seemed like a clever retort about the 1980s wanting their foreign policy back, but as his seventh year in the White House winds down, the truth of that assertion is evident. It’s a shame it took him so long to learn.
It hardly seemed possible, but Russia is now in the process of turning Syria into an even bigger mess than it already was. As the Iowa and New Hampshire nominating contests approach, voters will have to make up their minds whether Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chief diplomat and the very person he sent to “reset” relations with Russia, is the right person to clean up that mess.
