Bob's Blog

So, the New York Times has a story that Putin wants to help Trump get elected. Tom Rogan writes in part in the Washington Examiner,

Yes, Trump has made misguided comments with regards to his personal relationship with Putin. But he has also presided over very significant increases in U.S. and NATO defense outlays, the unified alignment of that alliance in resistance to Russian ballistic missile proliferation, more aggressive intelligence operations against Russia, and the deployment of U.S. nuclear strike capabilities specifically designed to challenge Russia's evolved strategic doctrine. The scaled nuclear development and defense spending programs here are collectively opposed by the Democratic presidential field.

On Ukraine, aside from the obvious impeachment issues, Trump has provided Kyiv with lethal weapons and high-value intelligence support. Crucially, he has also provided diplomatic support against significant Franco-German pressure on President Volodymyr Zelesnky to accept a cease-fire on Russian terms.

On the associated issue of energy policy, only Trump stands in favor of that economic weapon Putin most fears: fracking and expanded U.S. energy exports. In contrast, the 2020 Democratic Party is a Putin dream world on this energy issue.

Similarly, Trump's strengthening of the U.S. alliances with Israel and the Sunni Arab monarchies is a major obstacle to Putin's effort to usurp America as the key international power broker in the Middle East. While Trump's abandonment of the Syrian Kurds has undermined U.S. credibility in the Middle East, he has restricted the confidence hemorrhage by retaining some U.S. military forces in Syria. The collective Democratic presidential field disagrees with Trump's approach, at least as applied to the Sunni monarchies.

One final issue here?

Bernie Sanders. Because the idea that Putin would prefer all the above to a president who took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, likes many of Russia's allies, and wants to gut U.S. defense spending, end or greatly diminish U.S. alliances with the Sunni monarchies, and ban fracking?

Give me a break.

Read more here.

Reuters announces,

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday that his government was resigning to give President Vladimir Putin room to carry out the changes he wants to make to the constitution.

Read more here!

Have you ever noticed Putin's walk? Here he is at his inauguration ceremony. Notice how he swings the left arm but keeps the right ready to reach for his gun? Here is an article that speculates that he and other top Russian officials learned to walk that way during their KGB training.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Jewish World Review,

Some members of Congress are asking why Obama administration officials such as Brennan, Samantha Power and Susan Rice requested surveillance files on Trump campaign officials, may have unmasked names, and may have allowed those names to be illegally leaked to the press.

...Earlier, some Republican anti-Trump operators (and later some Clinton campaign operatives) hired former British spy and opposition researcher Christopher Steele to compile a dossier on Donald Trump that would include some ludicrous Russia-related allegations. Weirder still, Steele's firm may have had some contacts with none other than Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Sen. John McCain, a former target of candidate Trump's invective, acquired the anti-Trump dossier and made sure that the FBI investigated the phony dirt. Comey did just that.

In no time, the so-called Steele dossier was leaked. The website Buzzfeed admitted it could not verify any of the accusations but published the entire sordid file anyway.

One of the principals of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, was a board member of a green energy firm that suddenly saw an infusion of Russian cash -- purportedly in an attempt to sway Podesta.

Congressional science and energy committees and subcommittees are currently interested in whether the Russians funneled cash into American anti-fracking groups such as Sea Change on the expectation that they might help derail American energy exploration and production.

The Russian government has lost nearly half its oil revenue because of the innovative American ability to frack gas and oil, which has crashed world energy prices. Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently will do anything to see it stopped.

Who could prompt enough investigations and inquiries to overwhelm and distract the entire U.S. government at a time when North Korea is aiming missiles at U.S. territory, Iran is pressing ahead to develop a nuclear weapon, Syria is a genocidal mess, and immigrants from the war-torn Middle East are sweeping across Europe?

Putin is now America's puppet master -- and we are his empty-headed playthings dangling from his Kremlin strings.

Read more here.

Mark Steyn: "Once you strip away a century of Communism, Russia is essentially the prodigal child of western civilization. I'm glad Flynn is gone, not because of ties to the Russians, but because he was in the pay of Erdogan, and I regard Erdogan as a far greater threat to western civilization than Vladimir Putin!"

h/t Bookworm Room

Fred Lucas writes at the Daily Signal about Trump's pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. Some, like John McCain, are critical of the fact that Tillerson has worked well withPutin, who gave Tillerson an award called "the Order of Friendship." Is it wrong for America and Russia to live in friendship with one another? Lucas brings up another point of criticism:

Tillerson is also meeting resistance from some social conservatives for his support of allowing gay youth members in the Boy Scouts and for his company’s financial support of Planned Parenthood.

During Tillerson’s tenure as CEO, Exxon Mobil was among the corporations that gave money directly to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.

Tillerson was a Boy Scout in his youth and went on to become an Eagle Scout. He became the national president of the Boy Scouts of America in 2010, and served in the role until 2012. He continued to serve as the organization’s national executive, where he reportedly played a key role in building a consensus to do away with the scouts’ ban on gay youth members.

“Under his chairmanship, Exxon Mobil’s score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate ‘Equality’ Index has … skyrocketed to 87 percent,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins wrote.

Perkins continued to attack Tillerson’s record on social conservative issues:

Still, Trump calls Rex a “world class player and dealmaker,” but if these are the kinds of deals Tillerson makes — sending dollars to an abortion business that’s just been referred for criminal prosecution and risking the well-being of young boys under his charge in an attempt to placate radical homosexual activists — then who knows what sort of ‘diplomacy he would champion at [the Department of State]?

...On Facebook, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice praised the choice of Tillerson.

“Rex Tillerson is an excellent choice for secretary of state,” Rice wrote. “He will bring to the post remarkable and broad international experience; a deep understanding of the global economy; and a belief in America’s special role in the world.”

...Trump spent much of 2016 opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal with the United States and 11 other countries. However, Tillerson has gone on record supporting the deal, the Daily Beast reported.

“Even when a nation does not have a rich endowment of resources, we have learned that open markets and free trade can bring nations the energy supplies they need,” Tillerson said in a June 3, 2013, speech at the Asia Society Global Forum in the District of Columbia. “But only governments can open the avenues of free trade. … One of the most promising developments on this front is the ongoing effort for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The 11 nations that have been working to lower trade barriers and end protectionist policies under this partnership are a diverse mix of developed and developing economies. But all of them understand the value of open markets to growth and progress for every nation.”

Read more here.

The New York Post reports that Obama and Putin shared "stone-cold stares" in Peru. There is a brief video and photo at the Post. Later, Putin said he had spoken with Trump, and

that the president-elect “reaffirmed his intent to normalize relations with Russia,” and “I naturally said the same.”

Read more here.

"On Monday Russia cancelled its weapon-grade plutonium disposal agreement with the US." Jeffrey Lewis describes in Foreign Policy why this is such a big deal:

And we're talking about a lot of plutonium here. ... One hundred and twenty-eight metric tons is enough for 32,000 nuclear weapons. Want to get your arms race on? ... what are we other than doomed."

...Yet the ship of state is locked on course, with bipartisan support. Nothing will be allowed to stop Barack Obama's third term via Hillary Clinton, therefore it is steady as she goes. Nobody really believes that accusations of election law violations, the revelation that two bankers boxes full of printed emails promised the FBI were missing or anything else will derail her inevitable shuffle to the White House. Not after newly disclosed emails show how Hillary was coached to avoid trouble with the FBI by the White House itself. Not after it was announced that "House Speaker Paul Ryan will not campaign with Donald Trump Saturday as he had previously planned.

Whatever Putin is playing at, Russia must be close to all in. There cannot be much of a margin left. With an shrinking economy smaller than Italy or South Korea's the Kremlin is taking outsize chance by challenging the West across such a broad front. The payoff must logically be worth the risk and either the Russian knows what he's doing or he does not. Putin appears to be relying almost entirely on his ability to out-think Hillary, Kerry, Obama and perhaps Trump though he may have something hidden up his sleeve: perhaps a deal with China; maybe some powerful blackmail card.

Read more here.

Vladimer Putin is quoted in The Times:

“I swear if they bomb Russia, in half an hour every muslim will die” Vladimir Putin

The Russian leader is reportedly mounting an enormous military mission to take control of the terror group’s stronghold of Raqqa.

The city is the self-declared capital of ISIS in Syria and is patrolled by as many as 5,000 jihadi members.

Putin is set to mobilise 150,000 reservists who he conscripted into the military in September.

Yesterday, following the Paris attacks, Putin hinted he was ready to join forces with the West to tackle Islamic State.

He told David Cameron: “The recent tragic events in France show that we should join efforts in preventing terror.”

A Mercedes crosses over into the lane going in the opposite direction. The car it hits is Vladimer Putin's. Putin is not in it, but his favorite driver is killed.

Putin and Obama met today for the last time before Obama leaves office.

Austin Bay writes at Observer,

Clinton’s rogue communication system could have compromised the identities of U.S. intelligence officers and human intelligence assets (HUMINT, human intelligence sources, i.e., flesh and blood, people who risk their lives to provide the U.S. with intelligence information).

...Covert intelligence work is difficult. Intelligence officers—who by the very nature of their work are fully engaged in protecting U.S. national security—are vulnerable.

In Hillary Clinton’s judgment, protecting her political viability was more important than protecting U.S. national security. Keeping her work-related communications from the clutches of federal record maintenance laws and the Freedom of Information Act was more important than following the laws protecting the handling of national security-related information.

...It’s now evident to all but the willfully stupid that in their 2012 presidential campaign debate Mitt Romney was right about Russia and Barack Obama wrong: Russia led by Vladimir Putin is a geo-political adversary, if not quite a dyed-in-the-wool enemy.

Obama mocked him. In February 2014, Putin-led Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. In March 2014 the Kremlin annexed the region. That smashed the 1994 Budapest Accord, one of the documents that provided the diplomatic framework for political stability in post-Cold War eastern Europe. The Clinton Administration backed the Budapest Accord.

I think Vladimir Putin has demonstrated a willingness to do anything that gains him an advantage, especially with little risk.

Russian blackmail classifies as a potential threat, and another reason I believe a full and complete investigation of Hillary Clinton’s national security crime requires a special prosecutor. By the way, on June 14 U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan referred to the FBI investigation as a “criminal investigation,” confirming what White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said June 9. The executive and judicial branches are now in agreement.

So. Will Vlad blackmail Hillary? Or, “When Will Vlad blackmail Hillary?” Sure, it’s speculation. It’s a scenario. It’s like a radio-era detective serial.

Stay tuned for the next episode.

Read more here.

Michael Totten writes at World Affairs Journal,

America is tired of being America, so Russia is being Russia again.

...The telegram to President Obama has arrived: “The Iranian-Syria-Hezbollah axis—by far the world’s most powerful terrorist nexus and the bane of American servicemen and policymakers for more than three decades—is now officially the Russian-Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis. Details to follow.”

Syria became a Russian client state in 1966 when the Arab Socialist Baath Party seized power in a coup d’état, overthrowing the relatively moderate Aflaqites and establishing a far more brutal regime influenced heavily by Marxism-Leninism.

The relationship atrophied, of course, after the Soviet Union collapsed. For a long time, Moscow could barely hold its own country together, and Syria found its international support from the Islamic Republic of Iran and its terrorist army in Lebanon, Hezbollah.

But Russia is back on its feet again, Assad needs some help, and four and a half years into the Syrian civil war, it’s obvious that the United States is largely uninterested in any serious attempt to resolve the conflict one way or another. Russia can do whatever it wants.

...According to at least one American defense official, as of September 14th—two weeks before the intervention officially began—Russia’s deployment was already the largest since the Soviet days. In late September, Moscow began launching airstrikes against the smorgasbord of Syrian rebels fighting the government in and around the cities of Homs and Hama, well outside territory held by ISIS, supposedly the target of the intervention. And by early October, Russia was launching cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea and coordinating its attacks with Hezbollah.

Putin offered the prospect of a coalition against terror. But while the US and Russia agreed to a memorandum of understanding to avoid accidentally shooting each other out of the skies over Syria, Washington and Moscow otherwise aren’t cooperating.

...The US is right to oppose both ISIS and the Assad regime. Syria’s government has sponsored terrorism not only against every single one of its neighbors, but also against the United States in Iraq. But let’s be honest: There will be no nonviolent political transition in Syria. The regime is overwhelmingly dominated by members of the non-Muslim Alawite minority, who will never negotiate with jihadists who want to impale them as infidels, nor with the ragtag “democratic forces” (now largely driven by Kurdish fighters) theoretically backed by the US.

A proper transition to an inclusive and even quasi-civilized government in Damascus would first require the destruction of both the regime and the extremists, and right now no one is making any attempt to bring that about.

Fighting an insurgency with airstrikes, artillery, and cruise missiles is for losers. The US has been pinpricking ISIS from the skies for more than a year now with little to show for it. The Israelis thought they could beat Hezbollah from the air in 2006 and failed even more spectacularly.

Want to fight an effective counterinsurgency? Call General David Petraeus. He pulled it off smashingly in Iraq, but it required billions upon billions of dollars, tens of thousands of ground troops, substantial support from the local population, and years of determined effort and battlefield casualties.

And his gains evaporated almost instantly after he and his fellow soldiers went home.

Vladimir Putin is not going to call David Petraeus. At least for now, he’s only interested in a low-risk, low-budget intervention. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly and the Moscow Times newspaper, Russia’s Syrian campaign is costing $4 million a day. That’s just $1.5 billion a year. Which sounds like a lot until you consider that the United States spent roughly $1.4 trillion in Iraq—a thousand times as much.

Will Russia be able to pacify an entire country while spending just a fraction of a percent as much as the US spent to pacify Iraq only temporarily? Probably not.

But no matter. Putin has three goals in Syria, and none of them involve permanent pacification.

First and most immediately he wants to prop up Russia’s sole ally in the Arab world.

The second goal is announcing that he wants America’s job as the world’s superpower now that we’re sick of it.

Putin wants America’s job because, why not? Russia is not Belgium, and it is not Canada. It was one of only two superpowers until the Soviet Union imploded under the weight of its own belligerent imbecility, and it has been wallowing in a post-imperial funk—“malaise” in Jimmy Carter’s lexicon—ever since.

...His third reason for intervening in Syria is because it’s good for him personally. During the Communist era, many Russians took pride in the fact that their nation was powerful even though it was poor. Putin can’t raise Russian living standards to Western levels, but he can revive some of the motherland’s former glory, and he can do it without the slave labor camps. The man is no Joseph Stalin. Secretary of State John Kerry was right to compare Putin to a 19th-century czar born two centuries late. His ratings are far better than those of any Romanov: Shortly before Halloween, less than a month into his Syrian bombing campaign, Putin’s approval ratings in Russia exceeded 90 percent.

...A weak nation couldn’t even consider doing what he’s doing. Only strong nations can project hard power beyond their own borders. Belgium can’t do it. Canada and Mexico can’t do it. None of the Arab states can do it.

...The administration has had trouble with Russia right from the start, beginning with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much lampooned “reset” with Moscow, which seemed to treat Putin’s intransigence as a hangover from the Bush administration.

The “reset” obviously failed. Badly. Putin is who he is. George W. Bush didn’t make him that way. The Soviet Union and the KGB made him that way. Any viable “reset” would have to come from the Russian side. The idea that Putin would play well with others if we simply acted nice and smiley was as delusional as calling Assad a reformer.

...Yes, the Cold War is over, and yes, Putin is spectacularly unlikely to ever attack the American homeland or any of America’s allies in NATO or elsewhere. But it’s obvious—isn’t it?—that Russia is brazenly expanding its role in the world, and that it’s doing so at America’s expense.

...Let’s go back to George Kennan, who said famously that “Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.”

There’s a reason for that, and it’s deeply embedded in Russia’s history and geography.

Look at a map. Russia is an enormous, sprawling monstrosity of a nation even without its former Soviet satellites. It spans 11 times zones—nearly halfway around the planet—and overwhelms almost all of Eurasia.

...After Russians threw off the Asian yoke, they knew they had to expand their territory as far as possible from the population core in Eastern Europe if they were to survive. So Russia expanded, all the way to the other side of the world—not just 11 time zones, but 12. (Let’s not forget that even Alaska once belonged to Moscow.)

Rather than even considering membership in the European Union—Russia would view it as a sort of surrender—Putin is forging his Eurasian Economic Union instead. It so far consists of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia.

The European Union is somewhat decentralized. Germany and France have a lot of influence in decisionmaking, but no single nation dictates to everyone else. The Eurasian Economic Union, though, has Moscow in the cockpit with everyone else as junior partners or, as Kennan would have put it, vassals.

There’s no better way to win favor in Tehran than by co-sponsoring Iran’s own Middle Eastern proxies, Assad and Hezbollah. And there’s no better way to keep the West from breathing up his pant legs in the Middle East than by making himself the new power broker in a region long influenced by the United States, which he clearly sees as his biggest geopolitical foe.

“Russia wants to get rid of ISIS,” Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on the campaign trail. “We want to get rid of ISIS. Maybe let Russia do it. Let ’em get rid of ISIS. What the hell do we care?”

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the general truth that Russian expansionism has been almost entirely deleterious for everybody but Russians. Vladimir Putin isn’t interested in getting rid of ISIS. At least not initially.

...Either way, freezing Syria’s status quo may be the best Russia can get. If it’s willing to send in massive numbers of ground troops, sure it could destroy the ISIS “state” in the east, but how long would that last? The United States defeated ISIS under its previous name, al-Qaeda in Iraq, only to watch it mushroom again as soon as American soldiers were out of the way.

Predicting the course of events is a difficult science generally, and especially difficult in a byzantine place like the Middle East. Lord only knows where Russia’s adventure will lead, especially if it lasts several years. Keenly perceptive analysts can sometimes see around one corner, but nobody can see around four.

Obama may be right that Putin is getting himself into a quagmire that he will sorely regret, but it partly depends on Putin’s goals. If he simply wants to shore up Assad and doesn’t care what ISIS does on its own turf in the hinterlands, his odds of success are excellent.

One thing at least is certain: Getting Russia out of the Middle East again will take a long time.

Read more here.

Nick Gutteridge reports at the UK Sunday Express,

Vladimir Putin has ordered a huge crackdown on ISIS jihadis.

The iron-fisted president has called in his feared secret service to round up thousands of jihadis just hours after it emerged that British police are wilfully letting our extremists flee to safe havens abroad.

Moscow has identified more than 2,900 of its citizens suspected of joining ISIS and other radical Islamist groups, and is actively hunting them down both at home and abroad.

In Syria Mr Putin's warplanes and feared Spetsnaz special forces troops are tracking and killing Russian-born jihadis to prevent them from returning home and carrying out terrorist atrocities.

So far they have taken out 198 radicalised jihadis in a matter of months, whilst a further 214 have fled back to Russia where they have been "put under close control" of the security services.

Russia has arrested thousands of ISIS sypathisers

Of the survivors, 80 are already behind bars after being convicted of terrorist offences, whilst a further 41 have been arrested and are awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, the authorities in Moscow are prosecuting more than a thousand ISIS sympathisers, recruiters and financiers in a huge bid to wipe their evil scourge from the country's history books.

A further 100 have had their passports revoked, meaning they cannot travel to Syria and Iraq to fight for the warped terrorists.

On top of those investigators have launched probes into 1,600 private individuals and businesses who they believe may have been involved in the production and dissemination of ISIS propaganda.

Agents have launched a huge crackdown to destroy the terrorists' financing operation in Russia and have completed 5,000 checks on the accounts of suspicious people and companies, leading to 270 prosecutions.

In contrast it emerged yesterday that overwhelmed British security services are allowing our homegrown jihadis to leave freely, deciding it is safer to get them out of the country than keep tabs on them.

Spies are operating a "home and away" policy whereby some extremists who they fear may plot terror attacks against the UK are being allowed to travel abroad and start new lives in safe havens.

Read more here.

Each time I go to the gym, one of the first things I do is look around and see if anyone is watching what is on t.v. If nobody is looking at the t.v. set, I switch the channel to Fox News. I do not have Fox News here at home. Today the Fox people were talking about Putin saying something nice about Donald Trump. A man who had silver gray hair, and therefore should be expected to have a degree of wisdom, was shaking his head. He walked over to me and said, "Putin likes Adolph, so now we're supposed to like Adolph?"

So that's the latest from the Left? The man who is trying to stop Obama from bringing unvetted Muslims into America is now equated with Adolph Hitler?

I did not engage with the man, but pumped a little extra iron on my next set.

victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

Turkey has become a favorite stop abroad for Obama to lecture his fellow Americans about their ethical shortcomings, from past treatment of Native Americans to their present supposed xenophobia over not accepting Syrian refugees en masse. Yet the more Obama has appeased Erdogan, the more anti-Western and anti-American Turkey has become.

Erdogan has insidiously eroded Turkish democracy, free speech, and human rights. He is turning the once-secular state into an Islamic nation. Thousands of Turkish soccer fans recently shouted “Allahu Akbar” when asked for a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks. So much for NATO solidarity.

...Small, vulnerable nations and peoples of the region — Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — used to be terrified of Turkish aggression. They are starting to become afraid again under Erdogan’s new Islamic militancy.

...Turkey now demands justice from Russia for violating Turkish airspace. But no country in the world violates foreign airspace as often as Turkey. A Greek defense analyst counted 2,244 times that Turkey violated Greek airspace in 2014 — an average of more than six violations per day. The Erdogan government believes that the way to solve disagreement with fellow NATO member Greece over a few disputed Aegean islands and oil finds is to send up its much larger air force to bully the Greeks — especially after their recent financial meltdown.

...Suddenly, Turkey’s NATO membership is important to Erdogan in his dispute with Putin. But the real irony is that the autocratic Erdogan is the dictatorial Putin’s mirror image. No two leaders deserve each other more.

Read more here.