Oh dear. Taxi for septimus!
An odd question given that you even quoted the mention of “enemy’s enemy.”
Da’esh is in combat with other Sunni forces and has made the lives of Sunni civilians Hell. Opposition to Da’esh could be a common ground which helps repair the Sunni-Shi’ite schism.
Russia and Assad are happy to direct their aggressions against other Sunni forces, while leaving Da’esh and the U.S.-led coalition snarled in war against each other.
Sure, nothing to do with the aggressive expansion of NATO. I wonder how the US would feel if a revived Warsaw Pact started enrolling countries right on the US borders? I’m sure they would be just fine with it.
And which of the two has injected itself into more foreign wars over the past few decades? It’s not even close. Yet Russia is the aggressor here? The name of Orwell is aptly invoked.
The era of ‘halfway decent’ relations between America and Russia was also the era in which Russia was undergoing economic, social and demographic collapse. That all started reversing itself around the time Putin took over (which is not to say he was responsible for any of it: the collapse was bound to end some time, after all, and he had the good luck to be sitting on the throne when it happened), but it’s not an accident that Russians don’t look fondly on that era.
NATO is a defensive military alliance and countries are free to join or not. The Warsaw Pact was a PR stunt to try and make an equivalent-looking international organization together to mask the USSR’s utter domination of the other Pact members, which with the exception of Yugoslavia and Albania, would have compelled them to join any USSR-West military conflict anyway whether or not the Warsaw Pact existed.
No one made the Baltic states wish to join NATO. Or Romania. Or Bulgaria. Or Montenegro. They chose to do so. Perhaps Russian leaders should engage in some self-reflection and see if maybe their policies, brinksmanship, and overall cultural soft power (or lack thereof) could have played a significant role in this.
I don’t think anyone is accusing Russia of being an aggressor in Syria, though they arguably are in the Crimea and in the Donbass. But Russophiles don’t seem to understand that it is possible for the U.S. to have been an aggressor in one situation while Russia could have been an aggressor in another entirely different situation. This “tu quoque” you can’t call Russia an aggressor or warmonger because the U.S. has done it too is not much of a defense. Actually, it’s not one at all.
I’d note that the countries that joined NATO did so because they feared falling under Russian domination again. And that failure to include many of these countries in NATO practically invites Russian attempts to do just that.
Now if Russia wants to cut off relations and embargo nations who join NATO as we do with Cuba, that’s certainly their right. What they do not have the right to do is try to take over these countries.
Petraeus says to prioritise ISIL over Assad. Gee, who would be the most obvious nation to call on as an ally in that change of policy, David … might there be a country already doing exactly that?
You know that Russian airstrikes aren’t focusing on ISIS, right? Most of their attacks are against non-ISIS antigovernment forces, and right now, they’re hitting Aleppo and Idlib. Except for a strike on Raqqa and a few on ISIS positions near Deir ez Zor, they’re mostly leaving ISIS alone.
The group hitting ISIS is the coalition of American, Canadian, Australian, Western European, and Arab countries.
To the Russians, anyone who opposes Assad is by definition ISIS. It’s simpler that way.
Turkey. So long as they stop sabotaging themselves by threatening to go to war with the YPG in Syria and stop pissing off the Iraqi Government by keeping Turkish troops in northern Iraq without permission.