Donald Trump spoke too soon. ISIS is not dead. What American troops and Kurdish fighters have fought for over the last five years disappeared in less than a week. The American abandonment of the Kurds has meant ISIS fighters and their supporters have been freed to reorganize. In the diplomatic mess that is Syria, Bashar Assad’s Syrian forces, propped up by Russia, are now moving in to replace the void. The Kurds have struck a deal with the Syrians to help protect the border region from the invading Turks. It’s a big win for Assad, and Vladimir Putin. From Business Insider:
“The unlikely sequence of events began earlier this month after President Donald Trump ended US opposition to a Turkish offensive into Syria during a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The call ended the US mission to fight the terrorist group ISIS and reduce Iranian and Russian influence in war-shattered Syria. And it left Tehran, Moscow, and Damascus with a huge victory that required little more than watching the American presence disappear on its own.“
As one western military official told the publication, “Russian President Vladimir “Putin likely can’t believe his luck.”
James Hohmann of the Washington Post’s Daily 202 writes, Putin has won so much the last three years that he may get tired of winning.
The U.S. intelligence community’s January 2017 report on Russian interference in the previous year’s presidential campaign sought to explain why Donald Trump was so attractive to Moscow. This sentence has fresh salience: “Pro-Kremlin proxy Vladimir Zhirinovskiy, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, proclaimed just before the election that if [Trump] won, Russia would ‘drink champagne’ in anticipation of being able to advance its positions on Syria and Ukraine.”
No doubt it’s time for Moscow to pop the cork.
Hohmann points to a a piece in The Daily Beast that says Trump is moving down Putin’s wish list. Such as:
Trump’s claims that Ukraine—not Russia—is somehow responsible for the 2016 election interference fall right in line with conspiracy theories the Kremlin has been propagating for years. …
“The ousting of Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, was also in line with the Kremlin’s wishes. Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk [Putin is the godfather of his daughter] has a longstanding grudge against Ambassador Yovanovitch. Medvedchuk cheered for the U.S. ambassador to be recalled and the Russian state media predicted that Ambassador Yovanovitch would be Trump’s ‘first victim in Ukraine.’”
