Frenemies
The conflicted U.S.-Russia partnership in Syria gets harder
Before the United States was helping Ukraine against Russia, it was helping Russia in Syria. As it fought Islamic State in the region, the United States shared airspace and target data with Russian counterparts. With President Obama’s assent, Russia took a lead role in an international investigation of chemical weapons attacks, allowing President Vladimir Putin to play the diplomat. When President Trump ordered U.S. troops out of northeast Syria in 2019, he allowed Russian forces in to broker a ceasefire between Kurd-led militias and Turkey.
Russia joined the war in 2015 on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Long a client state of the Soviet Union, Syria relied on Moscow to control airspace and target its enemies as the war dragged on more than a decade. The United States did not support Assad, but saw Russia’s involvement as a way to curtail its own.
Now President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is reverberating in Syria, more than 1,000 miles away from Ukraine’s front lines. Its military stretched to a breaking point in the war next door, Moscow’s diminished capacities in Syria have disrupted the conflict’s complex power dynamics, imperiling the relative calm that has prevailed since March 2020 and threatening to unleash renewed conflict.
This year coalition outposts are reporting an uptick in ISIS-affiliated attacks, including a drone attack today at a U.S. base at the Iraq-Syria border that injured two. Further, the strategic shifts evident in Syria have consequences for the war in Ukraine and Western alliances, reports Mona Yacoubian in War On the Rocks—an emboldened Turkey that threatens NATO cohesion; an opportunistic Iran siding with Russia; and a conflicted Israel that faces increasing belligerence from Russia. Mollifying Turkey with new warplanes, as the Biden administration appears poised to do, is more likely to feed the Russia-Turkey-Iran axis, further destabilize Syria, and more.
Welcome to this January 20 edition of Globe Trot. T.S. Eliot may apply if you are like me and many who find the new year a time of waiting: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Germany: Defense Minister Boris Pistorius dashed Ukrainians’ hopes for Western battle tanks, deferring a decision to supply Leopard 2 tanks ahead of an expected spring offensive by Russia. Germany must approve European allies, like the UK, donating their own Leopard tanks because of export restrictions on the German-made vehicles.
Other Western allies stepped forward as Western defense officials met at Ramstein Air Base today, with the Netherlands agreeing to provide Patriot missile systems, while Finland and France will up military aid. Germany’s holdout, as the largest nation in Europe, is rankling the coalition and Ukrainians caught in the dead of winter and approaching a full year of war.
“Hundreds of thank-yous are not hundreds of tanks,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told the gathering via live video. “All of us can use thousands of words in discussions, but I cannot use words instead of guns.”
Other news worth your time this week—
Switzerland: The World Economic Forum at Davos focused on Ukraine, with noteworthy speeches by Ukraine First Lady Olena Zelenska and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Zelenska: “How does the world want to achieve climate neutrality when so far it has not even stopped the burning of entire cities in Ukraine?”
Stoltenberg: “Weapons are the way to peace.”
Russia: This week Yakutsk in Eastern Siberia saw its coldest temperature in two decades, -62.7°C or -80.86°F. Frigid weather across the Northern Hemisphere is up to 50 degrees F below normal, and rivals temperatures on Mars.
Afghanistan also faces record cold amid brutal conditions under the Taliban government.
Israel: The Biden administration is building on the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize relations between Israel and Arab foes, codified in the Abraham Accords. In meetings this week between U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the two discussed efforts to deepen the Accords “with emphasis on a breakthrough regarding Saudi Arabia,” according to a statement by Netanyahu’s office.
Armenia and Azerbaijan: Christian families in Nagorno-Karabakh, a region of Azerbaijan that is home to 120,000 Armenians, have endured a month’s blockade of the main road into the region and risk catastrophe. For Armenians, the blockade amounts to a second genocide, and the Biden administration is mostly looking the other way.
Nepal: The investigation into the air crash that killed all 72 people onboard may be helped with a Facebook live video recorded by passengers on descent.
Brazil: Hundreds of Christian organizations had a role or members who took part in the destructive Jan. 8 riot against the government, and a survey showed that 64 percent of evangelicals supported a military coup.
Botswana: How did a landlocked, population-light neighbor surpass the per capita GDP of South Africa, once Africa’s largest economy?
Global: Open Doors’ 2023 World Watch List shows North Korea once again taking top billing as a global persecutor, following an increase in arrests of Christians under an “anti-reactionary thought” law. Last year Afghanistan topped the rankings with the Taliban takeover of the country. More than 5,600 Christians were killed for their faith last year, and over 2,100 churches attacked or closed.
Looking back: Popular historian Paul Johnson—whose 1983 Modern Times influenced a generation of conservatives—died last week at 94. The British journalist began his career at the leftist New Statesman, where he became editor before moving “rapidly to the right when he saw the chaos and impoverishment caused by militant unionism,” writes Theodore Dalrymple. His view are “unfashionable now on the American left and even the so-called nationalist conservative right,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Johnson said, “I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen.”
Upcoming: A one-of-a-kind C.S. Lewis summer seminar is happening at his home near Oxford.
Books: In search of paradise, the theme of his new book The Half Known Life, Pico Iyer discovers an old reality—
… if I really did come upon a calm and self-contained Eden, what would it have to gain from me? I, like any visitor, could only be the serpent in the garden.