Last week, Russian planes began flying out of Iranian air bases to bomb Syrian rebels—the first time the ayatollahs have allowed another country’s military to operate from their territory. To Charles Krauthammer, this—along with Russia’s consolidation of its position in Syria, participation in joint naval exercises with China, and apparent preparations for more war in Ukraine—is reason for grave concern. Evidently not, however, to the U.S. government:
The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq, and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. . . .
The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed in with major deals, including the shipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection. . . .
Yet the president shows little concern, . . . in part because he’s convinced that in the long run it doesn’t matter. Fluctuations in great-power relations are inherently ephemeral. For a man who sees a moral arc in the universe bending inexorably toward justice, calculations of raw Realpolitik are 20th-century thinking—primitive, obsolete, the obsession of small minds. . . .
The major revisionist powers—China, Russia, and Iran—know what they want: power, territory, tribute. And they’re going after it. Barack Obama takes Ecclesiastes’ view that these are vanities, nothing but vanities. In the kingdom of heaven, no doubt. Here on earth, however—Aleppo to Donetsk, Estonia to the Spratly Islands—it matters greatly.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-price-of-powerlessness/2016/08/18/f61d2c34-6575-11e6-96c0-37533479f3f5_story.html