Opinion -- Putin is No Ally Against ISIS

Piptaker · Apr 14, 2017

piezoe said:
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
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So Soros is telling us the EU is eventually going to collapse due to the refugee crisis and it's all Putin's fault. Yeah right Georgy......

piezoe · Apr 14, 2017

Piptaker said:
So Soros is telling us the EU is eventually going to collapse due to the refugee crisis and it's all Putin's fault. Yeah right Georgy......
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I wouldn't pay any attention to Soros, if I were you, if you think his analysis is wrong.

Piptaker · Apr 14, 2017

piezoe said:
I wouldn't pay any attention to Soros, if I were you, if you think his analysis is wrong.
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I think Soros is a snake oil charlatan who's persuading governments to enact policy.

Piptaker · Apr 14, 2017

And Soros supports and encourages government totalitarianism against the EU citizens.

jem · Apr 17, 2017

I am going to pull a piezoe here without doing the work to create a specious piece. I will just provide the outline.

I will write a fact about Soros childhood under totalitarianism
I will drop a name of some famous pychoanalyist - maybe carl jung who made some esoteric comment about childhood trauma.
I will then point out child hood trauma in some hitler type person.
I will then draw an analogy to Soros.
I will then get some current famous person quotes about soros.
I will then write "while we can't be certain" it seems since Soros suffered in his childhood from totalitarianism he wants everyone in the west to suffer a similar result at the hands of his financier buddies.

Tsing Tao · Apr 17, 2017

LOL...editorial from Soros. What's next? Opinion piece from Satan?

AAAintheBeltway · Apr 17, 2017

The bottom line is that Soros' brand of totalitarian repression is unpopular with voters, both here and in Europe. He has to depend on a lying media and corrupt government officials to enslave the citizens and steal their countries. There is no shortage of either.

AAAintheBeltway · Apr 17, 2017

Notice the misdirection in Soros' message. To fool the gullible, he styles his approach as "Open Societies" but they are anything but open. In the name of openness, he wants to take away basic aspects of national sovereignty, like control of one's own borders. Just like the progressive view of the First Amendment, Soros supports your right to an independent opinion, so long as it corresponds with his. Otherwise you are a Nazi and should be thankful not to be in prison.

java · Apr 17, 2017

The dirty little secret is always what happens to you if you disagree? They just assume everyone will agree, why would they not, we give them everything.

jem · Apr 18, 2017

exactly correct.
Orwell predicted this exact type of newspeak crap would come from the totalitarians.

AAAintheBeltway said:
Notice the misdirection in Soros' message. To fool the gullible, he styles his approach as "Open Societies" but they are anything but open. In the name of openness, he wants to take away basic aspects of national sovereignty, like control of one's own borders. Just like the progressive view of the First Amendment, Soros supports your right to an independent opinion, so long as it corresponds with his. Otherwise you are a Nazi and should be thankful not to be in prison.
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