RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/11/ties-bind-russia-iran-and-hezbollah-but-theyre-rip/
Syria has become the “sick man” of the Middle East, a territory laden with death and homelessness. In 2014 erstwhile president Barak Obama invited the Russians into the region to control the use of poison gas by their surrogate Bashar Assad. In 2015, as the Russians intervention expanded President Obama said this “is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire.” Senator McCain responded on the Senate floor that the policy of the Obama administration “replaced the risk of action with the perils of inaction.”

Today we can see the perils of inaction unfold. Russia is dominant over nearly half of Syria, within only a few months of the intervention, Russian presence had put an end to any serious attempt by backers of the rebels to topple the Assad regime.

Moreover, Russian leaders reached an accord with Turkey which had attempted to destabilize the regime and instead reached an alliance based on its active hostility to the Kurds. It can now be asserted that with these alterations in policy, almost all those countries that once backed the opposition now depend on Russia to salvage the situation for them in Syria. It is by consent that Russia is the “strong horse of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The idea that Russia would serve as the balance wheel against Iran when it also maintains a tenuous alliance demonstrates the belief it is a better guarantor of stability than the United States. However, the Russians have not displayed consistency. Jordan, the U.S., Lebanon hoped that Russia would depart from its alliance with Iran and allow for a hopeful vision of the future. That has not yet emerged. But the State Department continues to believe Russia can be drawn away from its ties to Iran and Hezbollah. This initiative drives the present Russian-U.S. negotiation in the area.

https://www.steynonline.com/8700/sea-change

When every last Trudeau eyebrow has been scraped off the floor of the Manoir Richelieu, it’s worth remembering that the divisions in the G7 are not quite as straightforward as the media would have us believe. For one thing, it’s not G6 vs Trump; there’s another disrupter in town:

Just met the new Prime Minister of Italy, @GiuseppeConteIT, a really great guy. He will be honored in Washington, at the @WhiteHouse, shortly.

Signor Conte heads what would once have been regarded as a pantomime-horse coalition of two rear ends: the left-wing Five Star Movement (M5S) and the right-wing Northern League (Lega). The so-called GroKo – the Christian Democrat/Social Democrat “Große Koalition” that governed Germany for most of the last thirteen years – was regarded as an alliance of all the prudent, sensible, mainstream persons, the kind who think nothing of admitting one-and-a-half million poorly educated, largely unemployable, demographically transformative young Muslim men into a country and then wondering why the gang-rape statistics are through the roof. By contrast, the Italian government is a coalition of the non-prudent non-sensible non-mainstream – the “alt-left” and the “far-right”. So how can that possibly work?

Well, we’re about to find out. In the two weeks he’s been in office, the new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini (leader of the Lega) has talked non-stop about migrants and his plans to deport over half-a-million of them: “The good times for illegals are over,” he declares confidently. “Get ready to pack your bags.” On election day, his party won 17 per cent of the vote; after a fortnight of deportation talk, he’s up to 27 per cent. Having talked the talk, he’s now walking the walk: For the first time since the “humanitarian crisis” began five years ago, the Italian government has closed its ports to a migrant vessel: The MV Aquarius, operated by SOS Mediterranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was refused permission to dock in Sicily, and told to push off and find somewhere else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3VPWzSXQQg