I reproduce below February 2016 commentary by George Soros which includes his assessment of the Russian Economy. This Should be of Great interest to ET participants. With the advantage of hindsight one can now better evaluate the prescience of his remarks! By George Soros FEB 10, 2016 100 Putin is No Ally Against ISIS MUNICH – The leaders of the United States and the European Union are making a grievous error in thinking that President Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a potential ally in the fight against the Islamic State. The evidence contradicts them. Putin’s current aim is to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood the EU with Syrian refugees. Russian planes have been bombing the civilian population in southern Syria forcing them to flee to Jordan and Lebanon. There are now 20,000 Syrian refugees camped out in the desert awaiting admission to Jordan. A smaller number are waiting to enter Lebanon. Both groups are growing. Russia has also launched a large-scale air attack against civilians in northern Syria. This was followed by a ground assault by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army against Aleppo, a city that used to have 2 million inhabitants. The barrel bombs caused 70,000 civilians to flee to Turkey; the ground offensive could uproot many more. The families on the move may not stop in Turkey. German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew to Ankara on February 9 to make last-minute arrangements with the Turkish government to induce the refugees already in Turkey to prolong their stay there. She offered to airlift 200,000-300,000 Syrian refugees annually directly to Europe on the condition that Turkey prevent them from going to Greece and will accept them back if they do so. Putin is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker. There is no reason to believe that he intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis. Indeed, his intervention was a strategic blunder, because it embroiled him in a conflict with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that has hurt the interests of both. But once Putin saw the opportunity to hasten the EU’s disintegration, he seized it. He has obfuscated his actions by talking of cooperating against a common enemy, ISIS. He has followed a similar approach in Ukraine, signing the Minsk Agreement but failing to carry out its provisions. It is hard to understand why the leaders of both the US and the EU take Putin at his word rather than judging him by his behavior. The only explanation I can find is that democratic politicians seek to reassure their publics by painting a more favorable picture than reality justifies. The fact is that Putin’s Russia and the EU are engaged in a race against time: The question is which one will collapse first. The Putin regime faces bankruptcy in 2017, when a large part of its foreign debt matures, and political turmoil may erupt sooner than that. Putin’s popularity, which remains high, rests on a social compact requiring the government to deliver financial stability and a slowly but steadily rising standard of living. Western sanctions, coupled with the sharp decline in the price of oil, will force the regime to fail on both counts. Russia’s budget deficit is running at 7% of GDP, and the government will have to cut it to 3% in order to prevent inflation from spiraling out of control. Russia’s social security fund is running out of money and has to be merged with the government’s infrastructure fund in order to be replenished. These and other developments will have a negative effect on living standards and opinions of the electorate before the parliamentary election in the fall. The most effective way that Putin’s regime can avoid collapse is by causing the EU to collapse sooner. An EU that is coming apart at the seams will not be able to maintain the sanctions it imposed on Russia following its incursion into Ukraine. On the contrary, Putin will be able to gain considerable economic benefits from dividing Europe and exploiting the connections with commercial interests and anti-European parties that he has carefully cultivated. As matters stand, the EU is set to disintegrate. Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent rescue packages for Greece, the EU has learned how to muddle through one crisis after another. But today it is confronted by five or six crises at the same time, which may prove to be too much. As Merkel correctly foresaw, the migration crisis has the potential to destroy the EU. When a state or association of states is in mortal danger, it is better for its leaders to confront harsh reality than to ignore it. The race for survival pits the EU against Putin’s Russia. ISIS poses a threat to both, but it should not be over-estimated. Attacks mounted by jihadi terrorists, however terrifying, do not compare with the threat emanating from Russia. ISIS (and Al Qaeda before it) has recognized the Achilles’ heel of Western civilization – the fear of death – and learned how to exploit it. By arousing latent Islamophobia in the West and inducing both publics and governments to treat Muslims with suspicion, they hope to convince young Muslims that there is no alternative to terrorism. Once this strategy is understood, there is a simple antidote: Refuse to behave the way your enemies want you to. The threat emanating from Putin’s Russia will be difficult to counter. Failure to recognize it will make the task even more difficult. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/putin-no-ally-against-isis-by-george-soros-2016-02
It seems to me that subsequent events have reinforced the prescience of the Soros commentary above. This offers a plausible explanation why Purtin would have no interest in bringing the Syrian conflict to rapid halt, and why he might have very well been complicit in the recent chemical weapons attack. Too bad one can not tweet anything this long. Donald Trump will therefore not read this, though he of all people should.
Which leaders think Putin is an ally against Isis? They just all said the chemical attack shows he is either incompetent or complicit.
Did you know the US orchestrated the conflict in Syria to get Assad out for a gas pipeline . Syria - Russia have been friends for decades with Russia in syria protecting it's gas interests (gazprom) in Europe? http://anonhq.com/real-reason-theres-conflict-syria/
I get so sick of these headlines and stories that use some subjective left wing anti Trump opinion as fact and then write long articles based on nothing more than their interpretation of something they think like it is accepted undisputed fact. Then they go back and find something and take it out of context.
Force the nose of US/Saudi/Qatar/Turkey out of Syria and civil war will end in two weeks. EU is breaking apart due to fiscal mismanagement of the governments not because of the refugees from Syria or Africa.
Literally doesn't get any more upside down. Putin's helping assad bomb the hell out of isis. And it's also a literal fact that everyone in concert with soros and the democratic party are instigating helping the rebels, which are working with AQ and Isis, defeat the assad regime. No one's accusing soros of being stupid. To put forth this analysis is just downright evil. He's as evil as they come on this planet. And he has stooges who hang on his every word.
Reading the Soros article, I was struck by how he draws such completely different conclusions than a rational person would. He completely ignores the sovereign right of euro countries to decide how many and what kind of refugees to accept. He sees that as a job for some EU commission, totally unaccountable to voters, which will jam refugees down the unwilling throats of countries, whether their voters like it or not. Then there's his obsession with Putin. Only he has it totally backwards. Putin is not engaged in some evil plan to undermine the EU. Rather, he is the leader of the international alt right, if you will. He has turned Russia around with a brand of etho-nationalism that is quite attractive to many European countries, particularly after they see how their own leaders have betrayed them. The west applied crippling economic sanctions to Russia after Putin opposed their coup in Ukraine. This came after we expanded NATO, an alliance supposedly designed to counter the risk of a soviet invasion of western Europe, right up to Russia's borders. Yet we are shocked and outraged that Putin offers to redpill european voters. People here need to understand that Putin, as much as Trump, is a target of the managed mainstream news. He is the biggest threat to the globalist agenda, so he must be destroyed. He threatens Soros' dream of a European monolith, directed by soros of course, plus he threatens the middle eastern designs of Saudi Arabia and perhaps Israel. There are daily articles now about repression of gays in parts of Russia. How many articles are there about repression of gays in Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states. Or about repression of Christians? None, that's how many.
I also found it odd that Soros funded the refugee crisis. There when Soros wrote Putin is a gifted tactician but not a strategic thinker... I thought 2 things. 1. How can that be true? good with tactics but not how they turn out? The guy has lead the return of Russia to the world stage. Kept himself in power for decades while fighting the bankers like Soros... and has made myraid choices along the way that would put soros' back into convulsions. 2. But, the turn of phrase is the same type of rhetorical device that amatuers like Piezoe use. Give a compliment as you are ripping the person to pretend you are fair minded. Now lets look at Soros' strategic and evil play in this same subject. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-...dedly-created-european-refugee-crisis-and-why Soros’s agenda is fundamentally about the destruction of national borders. This has recently been shown very clearly with his funding of the European refugee crisis. The refugee crisis has been blamed on the civil war currently raging in Syria. But did you ever wonder how all these people suddenly knew Europe would open its gates and let them in? The refugee crisis is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It coincided with OSF donating money to the US-based Migration Policy Institute and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, both Soros-sponsored organizations. Both groups advocate the resettlement of third-world Muslims into Europe. In 2015, a Sky News reporter found “Migrant Handbooks” on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was later revealed that the handbooks, which are written in Arabic, had been given to refugees before crossing the Mediterranean by a group called “Welcome to the EU.” Welcome to the EU is funded by—you guessed it—the Open Society Foundations.