Once again, the West has been caught flat-footed by an aggressive Russian move. According to U.S. and European preconceptions about what constitutes Russia’s interests, Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria makes no sense. U.S. President Obama last Friday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin of blundering into a quagmire. As Peter Sanger put it in the New York Times: “Frustrated by their own inability to resolve the crisis over more than four years, the President and his team express a quiet confidence that Moscow almost certainly will be no more successful.” A longer campaign, this strain of thinking goes, cannot be …read more
Source: The American Interest
