Before things get crazy, or not, with the melodramatically delayed Wikileaks dump on Hillary Clinton (Julian Assange supposedly feared for his safety in a London balcony speech at the Ecuadorean embassy, so now he addresses followers at the Wikileaks 10th anniversary party in Berlin by video link), one thing in this messy, largely substance-free excuse for a presidential race is crystalline in its clarity. Donald Trump continues to struggle with basic politics, thus giving a free ride to Hillary Clinton's struggle with geopolitics.
One of the cornerstones of the former secretary of state's geopolitical strategy, the Syrian civil war, is collapsing right now, even faster than the idea that Trump can get out of his way long enough to drive some points home.
The Assad regime is calling on the rebels holding their last urban territory to surrender before the onslaught truly begins.
Iranian television highlights the progress of Syrian regime forces in retaking Aleppo, last urban stronghold of rebel forces.
While Trump struggles to fight the illegal pilfering of his tax information, showing he somehow managed to lose nearly a billion bucks one year and probably skipped paying taxes for many years, he hopes that an equally illegal pilfering, probably by Russian intelligence, of information about Hillary gives him a leg up in the race. That would be the race in which he still only trails by a handful of percentage points despite his week of mostly self-inflicted wounds.
But if Trump at all had his act together -- and hadn't already looked like a jock-sniffingly slavish fanboy of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- he could be making some real hay now out of one of Hillary's biggest mistakes, i.e., her attempts to push the US into the Syrian civil war.
For, despite expensive efforts by the US and some Gulf Arab allies who have pressured Washington, the Assad regime is on the verge of taking Aleppo, which until its recent smashing by Russian air power had been the last urban stronghold for Syrian rebels.
Trump's preposterous social media offensive against a former Miss Universe went on for days after his losing but not entirely disastrous debate with Hillary Clinton.
If Syrian regime forces, which are joined on the battlefield by Iranian special forces as well as Shiite fighters from Iraq and Lebanon, take Aleppo, the civil war essentially shrinks into a rural insurgency. And Aleppo is about to fall, almost certainly before US-backed forces get very far along in their long awaited offensive to take Mosul back from Isis.
Of course, Hillary did foresee that Assad regime forces might effectively push back the rebels, especially with the active backing of Iran, Russia, and transnational Shiite forces. Which is why she has repeatedly called for the US to impose a no-fly zone over Syria.
There is just one problem with Hillary's no-fly zone. It would probably trigger what could very quickly become a world war.
Since the governance of Syria, unlike, say, the maintenance of an open South China Sea, is hardly a core strategic interest of the United States, Hillary's Syria no-fly zone is, let's say, not a good idea. But it is of a piece with, as I discussed in July, the actions which explain why the Kremlin so dislikes the Clintons. Their moves to press Russia date back to NATO expansionism in the post-Cold War 1990s when the once-proud superpower was on its collective ass. Russians have long memories.
Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the Syria no-fly zone advocated by Hillary Clinton would require war with Russia and Syria. "That's a pretty fundamental decision that certainly I'm not gonna make," the JCS chief noted sardonically.
As you can see above, the chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, a tough Marine four-star, stated just the other day that Hillary's no-fly zone would mean war with Russia and Syria. Something he seemed notably unenthusiastic about.
Ah, but what about humanitarianism? True, the Russians did urge civilians to leave Aleppo a month ago and guaranteed their safe passage through Syrian lines. But few took up the offer. Since then they have hit hospitals and seemed less than discriminating about making sure that other civilians aren't killed. But no one who watched Vladimir Putin pound Grozny can be surprised by this. And we did make the mistake of killing more than 60 Syrian troops after the now-dead ceasefire went into effect, giving ruthless folks the sort of hazy equivalence they like to cite in passing as they pursue their obvious strategic imperatives.
Yet the humanitarian issue persists, albeit in a slightly different way. The Syrian civil war has created a terrible refugee crisis that is politically destabilizing the actually kindly government of Germany -- whose Chancellor Angela Merkel's party has recently been smoked in elections in both her home base in East Germany and Berlin -- and much of Western Europe.
Russian TV plays up Angela Merkel's woes as the German chancellor's celebration of German Unity Day is disrupted by large numbers of anti-refugee protesters.
So the good news here is seemingly perverse. Because Barack Obama is not so foolhardy as to try to impose a no-fly zone against the Russian Air Force, and its state-of-the-art anti-aircraft system, already in place in Syria, we are likely going to lose our proxy war in Syria. Which should lessen the refugee crisis in Europe and confine its next stages to the theater in which it emerged.
Which is another way of saying that the best solution to the Syrian refugee crisis has always been an end to the Syrian civil war. This is just a more embarrassing, to some, end than the always elusive victory which the regime change-pushing Clinton always sought.
Should we ever have gotten involved in the first place? Well, like most, I thrilled to the Arab Spring. But more than a year of watching daily on Al Jazeera (for which I was a part-time analyst) led to the conclusion that the situation with Assad was profoundly problematic.
He would not leave and I knew that Russia, for many reasons, and Iran, due to its struggle with the Sunni powers of Gulf Arab states, would go all out to prevent a victory for what was at best an amorphous, and infrequently jihadist, crew arrayed against him. The protest leaders in the great city squares that we fall in love with turn out not to be well suited to win elections (see Egypt) or fight civil wars (see Libya and Syria).
So there we are. Had Trump not fan-boyishly extolled Putin -- whom I encountered when I was trying to help Russian liberal reformers back when he was Boris Yeltsin's new intelligence chief and still ostensibly part of the big pro-democracy family -- as anything more than a ruthless, sophisticated professional with whom we can occasionally find common cause, he could make some big hay here at Hillary's expense.
But of course he is caught up in his own endless psychodrama, which has tragically gripped us all.
Now back to weaponized trivia ... Or not.
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