| | | | An Ugly Victory Lap in Russia | | Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's surprise meeting with Vladimir Putin ahead of a Russian-hosted summit on Syria's future was essentially a victory lap, writes Yochi Dreazen for Vox. Despite all the U.S. bluster, Assad – and Russia – have won the Syrian civil war.
"The meeting marks just the second time in six years of brutal fighting that Assad has been willing to leave Syria; unsurprisingly, both were to Russia, which helped Assad beat back his rivals by sending troops, bombers, attack helicopters, and other weaponry weapons into Syria," Dreazen writes.
"Russia…poured money, weapons, and troops into Syria, helping Assad rapidly began to reclaim territory from the rebel groups and deal them a string of battlefield defeats. The biggest blow came last December, when Assad retook Aleppo, one of Syria's biggest cities and a longtime rebel stronghold. (It was a somewhat Pyrrhic victory; brutal strikes by Russian and Syrian warplanes and helicopters leveled much of the city, killed thousands of its residents, and forcing tens of thousands of others to flee for their lives)."
"The problem is that Trump, like his predecessors, did nothing of any real significance to push Assad out. Putin, meanwhile, worked hard -- and was willing to risk the lives of many of his own troops -- to make sure Assad stayed in power. It's no wonder that Assad traveled to Russia to Putin to publicly thank him; in a very real way, Putin is the biggest reason that Assad has effectively won the Syrian civil war."
| | The Mladic Trial Verdict Is Clear. It's Legacy, Not So Much | | Five years after his trial began, and more than two decades after the war crimes of which he was accused, former Bosnian Serb army leader Ratko Mladic has been found guilty of genocide. But while justice may have caught up with Mladic and others, the legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is mixed, The Economist says.
"The trial will have changed no minds," The Economist argues, noting that "[l]ike many Serbs he was convinced that the tribunal was an anti-Serb kangaroo court."
"The tribunal sought to bring reconciliation to the region, but in that it failed. It has amassed a huge archive of testimony about every detail of the Yugoslav wars, an extraordinary resource for future historians. Still, the hope had been that if political and military leaders ended up in court for their deeds in wartime, that would discourage future ones from committing such atrocities. From Syria to the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar's Rohingyas, this has proved to be a pious dream."
| | No, China Isn't Winning the Space Race | | | China's space program has made dramatic strides in recent years. But the main competition for the commercial future of outer space won't just be between governments, but among private firms, too, argues Adam Minter for Bloomberg View. And that could favor the United States.
"It's true that by comparison to China, the U.S. space program appears to have stagnated. Americans haven't left low-Earth orbit since the last moon landing in 1972. The International Space Station -- history's most expensive scientific instrument -- is underutilized, and presidential plans to return to the moon have faltered over the last two decades," Minter writes.
"Yet, thus far China's centrally planned and military-centered space program has only replicated achievements made decades ago by other national space programs…Even China's boldest initiative -- developing those nuclear rocket engines for interplanetary space shuttles -- isn't a new idea. From 1955 to 1972, the U.S. conducted its own nuclear rocket research, which Congress canceled in 1973 over cost concerns.
"Today, the most innovative research into space travel has shifted to the private sector, especially in the U.S. SpaceX's commercial rockets have not only cut the cost of launching into Earth orbit. They're precursors to bigger rockets the company hopes will send humans to Mars before the end of the 2020s, long before China's state-funded program achieves the same." | | Time for Some Bold Thinking on America's Nukes? | | While the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was debating the merits or otherwise of a U.S. president's broad authority to launch a nuclear strike, "a growing number of former defense officials, scholars of military strategy and some members of Congress" believe that one option should be taken off the table altogether, Scot Paltrow writes for Reuters. Is it time for America to scrap its intercontinental ballistic missiles?
Critics of the ICBM arsenal argue that "in the event of an apparent enemy attack, a president's decision to launch must be made so fast that there would not be time to verify the threat. False warnings could arise from human error, malfunctioning early warning satellites or hacking by third parties," Paltrow says.
"Once launched, America's current generation of ICBM missiles, the Minuteman III, cannot be recalled: They have no communication equipment because the United States fears on-board gear would be vulnerable to electronic interference by an enemy.
"These critics recommend relying instead on the other two legs of the U.S. nuclear 'triad': submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers armed with hydrogen bombs or nuclear-warhead cruise missiles. The president would have more time to decide whether to use subs or bombers."
| | Russia's Southern (Europe) Strategy | | Worries over Russian interference in elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands have made headlines. But to understand Moscow's intentions, it's also worth looking south, suggests a new Atlantic Council report. Greece, Italy and Spain should beware.
"These countries bore the brunt of Europe's major crises in the last decade: the 2008 economic crisis and the 2015 refugee crisis. In the aftermath of the economic crisis, Greece, Italy, and Spain experienced double digit unemployment and income drops coupled with reductions to social safety nets," the report says. "The EU's response for Europe's large southern economies was to impose austerity measures. And while in the long run, these policies helped shore up the economies (signs of recovery emerged in 2016), in the short term, they bred resentment among citizens against the EU, mainstream parties, and the Western model of liberal democracy. Then, Syrian refugees began arriving by the thousands on the Italian and Greek shores."
"[I]t is this 'volatile socio-economic climate' that 'has proven to be fertile ground for Russian overtures' while providing an opening for political parties oriented toward the East rather than the West. The Kremlin has actively stepped into this opening by providing political and media support to pro-Russian forces, leveraging historical, religious, and cultural ties, and cultivating (either directly or through proxies) a network of pro-Moscow civil society organizations to promote Russia's goal of weakening the EU and NATO."
| | Worried the Turkey Comes with a Side of Politics? You're Not Alone | | Dreading the possibility that politics might come up at Thanksgiving dinner (at least those of you in the United States)? You're not alone, according to a new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. In fact, more than a third of Americans say they "dread the thought."
"Democrats are slightly more likely than Republicans to say they're uneasy about political discussions at the table, 39 percent to 33 percent. And women are more likely than men to say they dread the thought of talking politics, 41 percent to 31 percent," Laurie Kellman and Emily Swanson write for AP.
"Those who do think there's at least some possibility of politics coming up are somewhat more likely to feel optimistic about it than Americans as a whole. Among this group, 30 percent say they'd be eager to talk politics and 34 percent would dread it."
| | | Our regular Global Briefing will be back on Monday, November 27. | | | | | | |
