Not only has Russia avoided a quagmire in Syria, its successes on the battlefield against CIA-backed rebels have given it new leverage in the Middle East. The New York Times:
“Russia has won the proxy war, at least for now,” said Michael Kofman, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
Russia’s battlefield successes in Syria have given Moscow, isolated by the West after its annexation of Crimea and other incursions into Ukraine, new leverage in decisions about the future of the Middle East.
Remember the good old days when all the Obama acolytes gloated that the hapless Putin had fallen into Obama’s trap in Syria, that poor pitiful Putin would be caught in a quagmire in Syria just like Brezhnev in Afghanistan, while America’s moral standing and world influence would grow?
Now even the NYT seems ready to accept that the jaws of the trap aren’t closing as planned, and that Putin’s Syria policy is, well, working, while the American record in that miserable country is one of, well, failure.