Why didn\u2019t Putin and his cronies simply buy Crimea from Ukraine \u2013 at ten cents an acre, like the Americans once bought Alaska from Alexander II of Russia \u2013 rather than launch a clumsy and noisy guerrilla war whose public relations outcome was predictable at the outset? The answer, I believe \u2013 concealed, camouflaged and biding its time \u2013 lies thousands of miles away, in the desert sands of the Middle East.<\/p>\n
I have been saying that \u201cMuslim\u201d terrorism is a Russian secret services canard \u2013 and, to the small extent their self-serving aims are congruent, that of the CIA as well \u2013 ever since Putin declared, in a speech made even before he became Russia\u2019s \u201cpresident,\u201d that \u201cRussia will be the West\u2019s shield from the Muslim menace.\u201d\u00a0 By this he meant, needless to say, that Russia would be sponsoring \u201cMuslim\u201d attacks against the West until Western democracies are intimidated enough to trade freedom for security.\u00a0 Thus ISIS, I believe, is merely the latest in a long series of \u201cMuslim\u201d bugaboos grown by the Kremlin like homunculi in a mad scientist\u2019s laboratory.<\/p>\n
This post\u2019s aim is not to adduce proof, but to encourage independent ratiocination.\u00a0 Consider how similar Putin\u2019s geopolitical strategy is to that of Stalin, who helped to incubate the Nazis in Weimar Germany as that epoch\u2019s ayatollahs, mullahs, and caliphs.\u00a0 Stalin\u2019s calculation was that once Hitler had terrified the West enough, no Western politician would find the prospect of Red Army tanks purging Nazi evil from the whole of the European continent objectionable.\u00a0 Fortunately for us today, Hitler pre-empted Stalin and, by the time the war was over, American troops were in Berlin to defend Western Europe from its Russian liberators.<\/p>\n
This time around, there are no American troops in the Middle East, where ISIS is now Putin\u2019s Hitler.\u00a0 Last week\u2019s newspapers were filled with reports that thousands of ISIS stooges had arrived in Europe, camouflaged as refugees, to blow up churches, schools, and government buildings; this week\u2019s reports are of Russian arms and troops bound for Syria to confront \u201cMuslim\u201d extremism in a twenty-first century parody of a Crusade; and the following week, on September 28, Putin will address the United Nations, Urbi et Orbi<\/i>, to share with all progressive Christendom his vision of himself as the modern St. George.<\/p>\n
If Russian arms and troops continue to arrive in Syria, what or who is to stop Putin from taking over all of the Middle East, precisely as Stalin hoped to take over all of Europe?\u00a0 Seen in this light, Crimea is a red herring.\u00a0 Putin does not want to swap the West\u2019s condoning the annexation for Russia\u2019s taming the \u201cMuslim\u201d threat; instead, he wants the West to believe that, having done a naughty thing in his own back yard, he is about to do a nice one in the West\u2019s.\u00a0 A plenary indulgence, such as obtained by the early Crusaders, is what he expects to receive for his armed peregrinatio in terram sanctam.\u00a0 <\/i>And, once Russian tanks are on the ground and Russian military bases have dotted the map of the region, I repeat, nothing will stand between the Kremlin\u2019s exculpation and its control of the Holy Land.<\/p>\n
A global oil monopoly for Russia will be far and away the most trifling of strategic consequences if these events come to pass.\u00a0 There\u2019s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, of course.\u00a0 But I fear that the West\u2019s geopolitical strategy \u2013 ever since Stalin was pacified at Yalta with the central part of\u00a0 Europe which he persuaded the West was \u201cEastern\u201d \u2013 has been little more than blind reliance on the power of that English proverb.<\/p>\n
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\u00a9 Copyright Andrei Navrozov and The Fleming Foundation<\/p>\n