I was surprised--amazed, really--that Russia would take such bold action. Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been geopolitically contemptuous of Russia, with successive American administrations simply ignoring Russia in their calculations about how to go about ruling the world.
Poppy Bush had promised Mikhail Gorbachev that the US would not expand NATO to take in the Eastern European and Baltic states, and he, Bill Clinton, and George W. proceeded to do just that. They took it for granted that Russia--under the leadership of their drunken stooge, Yeltsin, and devastated by the American-induced shock-therapy restoration of capitalism--could do nothing. With his war on Russia's close ally, Serbia, Bill Clinton (demonstrating that NATO never was a defensive alliance) announced that, henceforth, NATO's judgement trumped all other precepts of international law, and the alliance was free to attack any country on Earth; he, too, presumed Russia could do nothing about it. In Libya, the Obama administration got the Russians (and Chinese) to vote for a "humanitarian" UN resolution, which Obama then both used as an excuse and blatantly flouted to bomb the crap out of Libya for the purpose of "regime change"--assuming, again, that Russia could do nothing about it. G. W. Bush abrogated the ABM Treaty, and he and Obama moved to station "missile defenses" in Eastern Europe that Russia knows very well are weapons designed to enable a U.S. first-strike capability; they assumed, of course, that Russia could do nothing about it.
The first hint of a change in Russia's stance came in 2013, when Putin adroitly annulled the "chemical weapons" pretext for the attack on Syria that Obama was itching to launch at the time. Although the decisive impediment to that planned aggression was adamant popular resistance, punctuated by the British parliament just saying No! (another portentous denial of assumed compliance), Putin earned the lasting enmity of America's deep-state neocons. Still, this Syrian gambit was diplomatic jiu-jitsu by Russia, turning Kerry's proclamations about Syria surrendering chemical weapons against him; there was no hint that Russia would or could have offered any military resistance to the attack the United States would have launched.
That kind of resistance first peeked out in the context of the Ukraine upheaval in 2014, where Russia made clear it would use its military to backstop Crimea's break from, and Donbass's resistance to, the American-instigated, Nazi-infested coup regime in Kiev. (And I use that N-word advisedly. See my take on that here and here.) Still, this resistance was on Russia's home turf, as it were, and Russian armed forces remained in the background. There was no overt Russian military action outside of its borderlands, and no hint that Russia would or could project its own military power, let alone challenge American military action, in a distant venue. It was, and still is, true that the U.S. military is capable of global "power projection" in a way that Russia's (or anybody else's) is not. So it was possible for American planners to continue assuming that however the U.S. military intervened in a far-flung country, there was nothing Russia could do about it. Nobody really got the point that Russia was starting to say: There is some borscht we will not eat.
The rotten soup that Russia rejected in Syria is the toxic recipe of regime change via jihadi proxy forces mixed with the assumption of moral superiority, which allows the U.S. and its allies to rearrange countries without regard to the traditional niceties of national sovereignty or international law.
In that context, the Russian military intervention not only, as Kerry said, "changed the equation" in Syria, it was a game-changing move in world politics. To the great consternation of the American imperial regime, for the first time since the Cold War, a country has proclaimed to the world: When it comes to the proactive use of military force in critical conjunctures, two can play.
What's Left
Whether Russian intervention to rescue the actually-existing Syrian Baathist government was a "good" or "bad" thing has been a contentious issue within the left. The answer to that depends on whether one sees the conflict that's been raging in Syria since 2011 (at least) as: a) predominantly an indigenous democratic revolt against a monstrous tyrant, dominated and directed by Syrians in the nation's interest, even if also manned by Syrian and some foreign jihadis and armed, financed, and abetted by the U.S., Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, and Israel; this is the dominant Western narrative, ubiquitously promoted in the media, or b) one of a series of imperialist jihadi proxy wars that, at best, hijacked whatever Syrian democratic elements existed at the outset--a war that is dominated and directed by foreign jihadi and state actors, and that seeks to destroy the last bastion of secular Arab nationalism, in order to create a weak, divided, sectarian non-state that suits those foreign interests; this is a version of events found only in the foreign and alternative press.
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