Bad-boy foreign leaders shouldn’t underestimate Trump’s appetite for election-year drama

Turkey, Russia and China are just three countries taking advantage of the moment to act aggressively around the world and test American resolve. All three are betting that the United States is too mired in crisis to react powerfully to strategic challenges overseas. All three might be making a miscalculation.

Turkey is threatening its neighbors and claiming new maritime borders; Russia is poisoning its opposition and posturing around Belarus; and China continues to build up its defense forces while cracking down on dissent at home and abroad. It’s all a potently toxic brew of hyper-national ambitions heartily guzzled by Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

They are drunk with the idea that right now is their time to act aggressively because America can’t or won’t seriously engage to stop them. If they’re right and can achieve their goals because America continues to stand on the sidelines, they win their bet without paying a hefty price. READ MORE

In fight for Libya, Russia and Turkey keep a 19th-century war on the front burner

Russia and Turkey just escalated their two-front war over which country will be the big dog in the Middle East. The two rivals have been at this game for a couple of centuries, but it just got a lot more serious this week when Russia introduced jet fighters into the Libyan civil war.

Coronavirus may have shut down Texas beauty parlors and Louisiana bars, stopped international travel and cleared streets across the globe, but hasn’t brought war to a halt. Rather, Russia and Turkey are in the midst of a multifront proxy escalation in both Libya and Syria.

Russians have long memories. They recall when Imperial Russia fought Ottoman Turkey in the bloody Crimean War. Ottoman Muslim forces fought Christian Tsarist troops on the Black Sea peninsula, where more fighters fell to the Asiatic cholera epidemic than on the battlefield.

Turkey won. Russia today, however, once again occupies Crimea. The 19th-century Crimean War was the crucible in which were forged Russo-Turkish antagonisms and their 21st-century imperial dreams. READ MORE

When it comes to bearing brunt of war’s brutality, it’s women and children first

Sex and gender decide our fate more than some like to admit. Men and money make the world go ‘round, after all, and grown men are mostly responsible for society’s most critical decisions surrounding war and peace. Children don’t vote, and women often don’t have a voice.

The latest military rout taking place in northern Syria is only the most recent installment of war’s practice of disappearing the dead. Not because the killed are invisible, but because they are unseen. There are many victims in these conflicts, but the ones who suffer most and longest always seem to be the women and children.

ISIS remains a particularly vile scourge to both moms and kids. READ MORE

Putin, Assad, Erdoğan and Khamenei — the four horsemen of the apocalypse 2.0

Texas tornadoes are potentially caused by the “flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil” according to the Butterfly Effect theory. Determining the ultimate cause and effects in weather is a tough call, however, given how many random physical factors ultimately come into play. But it’s fascinating to think that a distant and peacefully fluttering butterfly has so much potential power.

Easier to determine is how one man’s wanton tongue wagging and temper tweeting can not only cause a political storm but has now unleashed the four horsemen of a modern regional apocalypse: Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, Syrian President Bashir al Assad, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the ever-present Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Donald J. Trump, in his “great and unmatched wisdom,” has shown that not only can he distract a domestic electorate but that the power of his presidency can create limitless distant chaos, death and destruction with the tap of a thumb and the flip of a finger. Now that’s power.

Trump’s causal tweet-to-terror relationship reanimated the biblical fearsome four horsemen who, in their initial iteration, represented Conquest, War, Famine and Death. This is no small feat. In one feckless action, the president of the United States has whipped up the apocalyptic forces that one hoped the world’s most powerful man would instead be able to tamp down. READ MORE

Nobody likes Trump’s decision to abandon the Kurds — not even the ‘Blob’

Foreign policy and national-security issues are on the back burner during the Democratic primary debates as candidates focus on healthcare, taxation, guns, border issues and cosmic love.

Despite the candidates’ early lack of attention to America’s overseas engagement, foreign policy is always on the minds of a Washington-dominated set of grand poohbahs and brainiacs known as “The Blob” — a disdainful term coined during the Obama administration.

The Blob has recently criticized President Trump for throwing Syria’s ISIS-defeating Kurds to the Turkish wolves. Trump’s break with presidential convention — and possibly constitutional law — to curry personal and political favor with foreign powers has further exercised an already hyperventilating Blob. READ MORE

In a world of populist tyrants, this still was a good week for democracy

Democracy goes through ups and downs, even experiencing recessions like the stock market. This is a particularly tough time for democracies around the world, with some places once judged to have turned the corner on their authoritarian past coming back as bigger, badder, anti-democratic governments. Hungary, Poland, Italy, Russia, the Philippines and several other countries are riding on the edge of populist electoral sentiment.

This week, however, was a particularly good one for people yearning to be free. It was an especially good week for those wanting to keep or to take back their government. Three nations showed us the way: Turkey, Ethiopia and the Czech Republic.

Let’s face it, democracies around the world are getting challenged by dictators and demagogues. My Hoover Institution colleague Larry Diamond’s new book, “Ill Winds,” assesses this abysmal global state of democracy, finding that these ill winds are whipping up “Russian rage, Chinese ambition, and American complacency.” READ MORE

The death penalty? Kill it off, around the world

Newspaper columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing is the latest high-profile example of a sovereign meting out extreme justice and capital punishment. CIA analysts concluded that Khashoggi was brutally killed last October inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey.

And, shockingly, it was legal.

One reason the Saudis have not faced international retribution in the courts or official diplomatic blowback for the killing is simple: Death is a legal form of punishment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Like it or not, the sentence was handed down, perhaps by Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself, and the cruel execution was conducted within the consulate and on what is arguably Saudi Arabia’s diplomatically sovereign territory. READ MORE

NBA player goes one-on-one with the petulant President Erdoğan

Shoot a 3-pointer, go to jail.

If Turkey’s spoiled-sport president gets his way, he will soon be locking up Enes Kanter, a Turkish-American star center for the New York Knicks.

The reason for a just-requested Interpol “Red Notice” arrest warrant is not Kanter’s aggressive defensive style, it is his offensive speech calling President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, among other things, the “Hitler of our century.” Erdogan returned the favor and labeled Kanter “a terrorist.

Unlike in the United States, where public figures can’t be libeled, criticism of the Turkish president is illegal. I can write that President Trump is a boob and feel pretty secure that the black helicopters won’t descend on my home. Well, maybe not totally secure as the U.S. Attorney General nominee William Barr recently told the Senate that he “can conceive” of instances where journalists might be arrested. READ MORE

This is not what Vladimir Putin wanted for Christmas

Vladimir Putin won’t find many great presents under the Christmas tree this year.

Orthodox Christian religious leaders worldwide are weakening an important institution that gave him outsize power and legitimacy.

The Russian Orthodox Church is being broken up, and an independent Ukraine Orthodox Church will be established. The Ukrainian flock soon will be led not by the Moscow-based church and Patriarchate, but rather by its own independent church and youthful leadership. Ukraine and its political class are suddenly freed from an influential Russian institution that has been fiercely loyal to Putin.

This was not on Putin’s Christmas list. Instead, the news is like a lump of coal in his stocking.

Russia’s wider designs on — and power over — Ukraine have included a wide hybrid war from the Donbass to the recent naval blockade in the Black Sea. Moscow has its fingerprints on the shoot-down of the Malaysian MH-17 passenger plane over Ukrainian territory and its paw prints on an annexed Crimea. Every step of the way, Putin has found legitimacy in his actions and the nation’s military activity through reignited Russian nationalism and the silent acquiescence of Moscow’s spiritual leadership and clergy. READ MORE

The truth of Khashoggi‘s death is buried under a mountain of Saudi lies

Osama bin Laden was killed by American special forces on foreign soil. His body was secreted off to a U.S. Navy ship and received ablutions, prayers. It was wrapped in a white sheet out of respect for the dead and flollowing Islamic custom. He was then given a sea burial and returned to his maker.

Jamal Khashoggi‘s body remains desecrated and his spirit despoiled.

This is the sad tale of the death of two Saudis, one a targeted terrorist, the other an innocent journalist. 

No matter how you feel about giving mass murderer bin Laden a proper and respectful burial, you have to credit the United States for giving a sworn enemy his last rites. It’s only a small part of what makes America great. It’s also what makes America big. READ MORE

Kanye West can help Trump recognize the Armenian genocide

Armenia is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Kanye West and the Kardashians. Truth is, however, Kanye has always cared and sang about justice and his wife's Armenian-American family has always felt strongly about the need to recognize one of the world's greatest crimes and injustices — the Armenian genocide.

Kanye should leverage his newfound kinship with President Trump to prod him towards doing what no other sitting American president has done: Use an executive order to declare that the murderous events of 1915 were the world’s first modern genocide.

Genocide means a single group is targeted for systematic and premeditated death and extinction. Armenian families who survived the genocide await the world’s recognition of this reprehensible event. America officially regards it as regrettable, unfortunate, and tragic, but does not recognize it as the event that spurred the word “genocide.” It is time.  READ MORE

Hostile Turkey warns U.S.-backed Kurds, aims to sideline Washington

Simmering for years, the full outbreak of hostilities between American-backed forces and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey is now finally at a boil. Turkey, an unreliable NATO ally at best, has again made clear that the U.S. is not welcome in the neighborhood.

President Erdogan just threatened to crush the “terror army” — what he calls the American-armed and supported Kurdish troops assembling on Turkey's Syrian border — by putting the developing 30,000 Kurd anti-ISIS force directly in Ankara’s crosshairs. Erdogan promised to “strangle” this U.S.-backed force “before it’s even born.”

Turkey’s aggressive threats and active troop movements dissolve U.S. hopes for a more stabilized region and further diminish America's already waning influence in the broader Middle East. An increasingly present and embraced Russia and more regionally assertive Iran also further sideline America. The newly developing anti-American power dynamic certainly dashes any plans to “take the oil” from Iraq and Kurdistan, as candidate Donald Trump suggested in 2016.  READ MORE