They met...finally. The two leaders had stated their views beforehand in public. It is hard to believe that their private meeting turned out a "love fest".
Obama laid down the consequences. Putin cross-examined the causes. The US President looked into the abyss clinging to the life-vest of generalities. The Russian leader had already changed the layout of facts on the ground. The Moscow/Damascus/Tehran axis comes as no surprise. The Iraqi "co-optation" freaked most American pundits out. The US has the largest diplomatic facility world-wide in Baghdad. What for?
Putin is not a cypher. He is actually highly predictable, since his admitted major goal is to regain the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union. The American administration's disdain of history has nefarious aftershocks and the lack of familiarity or empathy with the thinking of others has become frightening. The post-Versailles trauma still holds an unpleasant mirror to our face.
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, from Western Europe to Asia, egos have been bruised by American amateurism and abstract wishful thinking. Hence Putin's paranoia is perceived as the result of US incoherence while it salmost !hould have been, rightly so, considered as a post-Cold war revanchist game-changer. Obama's intentions are often laudable but whenever the distance between "logos" and "praxis" becomes to wide, the perception of reality becomes blurred. Miscalculations are waiting to happen.
The Russian analysis of the global Syrian situation is logical. Identifiable enemies must be crushed, be it with undesirable allies. There is a Putin world-view. There is no US doctrine at the moment. Obama claims the mantle of climate change, disputed by the Pope, while the geo-political map is on fire. A just cause will soon begin to look trivial in the absence of any form of deterrence to avoid that overall the bad metastasizes into worse.
Meanwhile Crimea is in Putin's pocket and Eastern Ukraine is a "fait accompli " almost !
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