Today's Must Read: The Russian Reaction

Via Digby, this article by Julia Davis at Daily Beast on the Russian reaction to Trump's order to withdraw troops from Syria. The lead-in:

The Kremlin is awash with Christmas gifts from Washington, D.C. and every move by the Trump administration seems to add to that perception. On Wednesday, appearing on the Russian state TV show “The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev,” Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies Semyon Bagdasarov said that the U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is “struggling to keep up” with the flurry of unexpected decisions by the U.S. President Donald Trump. The news that Mattis decided to step down sent shock waves across the world, being interpreted as “a dangerous signal” by America’s allies.

Meanwhile, the Mattis departure is being cheered in Russia. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Upper House of the Russian Parliament, has said that “the departure of James Mattis is a positive signal for Russia, since Mattis was far more hawkish on Russia and China than Donald Trump.” Kosachev opined that Trump apparently considered his own agenda in dealing with Russia, China and America’s allies to be "more important than keeping James Mattis at his post," concluding: "That’s an interesting signal, and a more positive one” for Russia.

Jubilation was even more apparent on Russia’s state television, which adheres closely to the Kremlin’s point of view. The host of the Russian state TV show “60 Minutes,” Olga Skabeeva asserted: “Secretary of Defense Mattis didn’t want to leave Syria, so Trump fired him. They are leaving Syria.”

It's worth reading the whole thing just to get a good picture of how Trump is serving Russian interests.

This is quite possibly the worst decision Trump has made on foreign policy, or at least the one that's going to have the worst immediate result: this, more than anything else, is a signal to the rest of the world that America under Trump is no longer a player on the world stage. And we've been the linch-pin for the world order since the end of WWII.

Lest you think I'm overstating the case, read this story:

As Nikki Haley finishes her tenure this month, the woman who has spent the last two years representing the U.S. at the United Nations has a question for the American public: Should the U.S. remain a member?

“The American people need to decide if it’s worth it,” she said in an interview with a small group of journalists this week. There is a lot of waste and abuse at the UN, she said, and it is often “politically unfair” to the U.S. and its allies. That said, she also noted that the UN was the vehicle for imposing tough sanctions on North Korea and an arms embargo on South Sudan.

No, it's not a call to withdraw -- it's just putting the idea out so it can be picked up by the right-wing echo chamber -- which has never had any great love for the UN to begin with.

And it certainly fits Trump's isolationist vision.

Digby also has this to add to the stew: the decision-making process was bizarre, to say the least:

I think it's pretty clear that Trump's impulsive decision to withdraw from Syria has little to do with anything but his emotional need to assert his power in a political environment in which he's being buffeted by scandal and his own ineptitude. This AP tick-tock runs down exactly how it happened and it's terrifying. He capitulated to Erdogan on the spot, in defiance of every one of his national security counselors, and even more disturbing, when Erdogan realized that Trump had taken his at face value instead of negotiating some kind of agreement (at best) he too urged the president to back down.

He refused.

(Emphasis in original.)


You can see my previous posts on this disaster here, here, and here.

(Side note: it's probably worth mentioning that I had a history minor with an emphasis in modern European diplomatic history. The interactions between nations have always interested me, which is probably why I'm commenting so extensively on this situation.)