Yves here. We are running a new piece by Andrew Korybko which is very likely to provoke informative reader discussion. Having said that, Korybko likes to paint with exceedingly bright colors and his disinclination for nuance has the unfortunate tendency to undercut his observations.
His frame is a criticism of the Alt-Media Community. I must confess that I have no idea what that is. Is there a secret handshake? A membership process? He depicts them as a monolith and of acting in bad faith by telling their audiences what they want to hear.
As I mentioned yesterday, the commentariat had a very lively discussion of the group-think among the anti-globalists and how they were blindsided by Israel, with US and Turkiye help (and the Russians believe, the UK too), managing to very suddenly turn the tables in its neighborhood. Some of the most influential commentators are on YouTube, and as interviewees, are not earning a dime for offering their views (save arguably Scott Ritter, who is also writing for publication and so keeping his profile high helps with readership-building). For instance, Colonel Larry Wilkerson and Ambassador Chas Freeman were of the same view Korybko attributes to Alt-Media Community. Even in post-Syria-collapse appearances, Wilkerson and Freeman still depict Israel as in very fundamental trouble.
Regarding the YouTube appearances, there is a vector for group-think on Judge Napolitano. He has a propensity to take the same clip, often of a particularly offensive or stoopid official statement (think of Sebastian Gorky puffing his chest about how Trump is really gonna put Putin in his place) and ask his guests to comment, often with leading questions. So one means of creating orthoxody-opposed opinion convergence is having YouTube hosts influencing the content.
Additional evidence of Israel’s apparent weakness were elements like the reported large number of Israelis leaving the country, particularly highly educated professionals who could land work abroad, the growing revolt among IDF reservists about serving, the parallel rejection of Haredim of demands that they be drafted, and the continuing strain on the economy, such as by Houthi (and the earlier Hezbollah) shelling.
Another contributor to groupthink was the limited number of experts with meaningful military and/or diplomatic experience in the region. On that short list are aforementioned Wilkerson, Freeman, and Ritter, plus Alastair Crooke. Crooke makes a point of maintaining a professionally cool posture, but the others, even the normally very careful and measured Freeman, have found it hard not to show their disgust for the Israel government. That hatred, which most of the world shares, in turn looks to have contributed to confirmation bias in reading considerable signs of Israel’s weakness as evidence of an irreversible deterioration.
I must have missed the discussion of whether Russia supported the Resistance. Aside from the possibility that it was helping the Houthis, Russia was pointedly sitting this one out. Russia is believed to have helped Iran after Israel started attacking Iran directly. But as much as the Anglosphere media would like people to believe, that is not the same as helping Iran with its Resistance efforts. Where were the S-400s in Lebanon, for instance?
PlutoniumKun, in comments yesterday, noted that Syria was important to Russia for long-standing reasons that had nothing to do with Israel:
As for Syria – as usual there is far too much attention paid to the big non-Middle Eastern players in this, when the real roots of what happened is much closer to Syria – in particular the UAE, Kuwait and KSA, all of which have devoted billions (and mountains of weapons) to the conflict to their various allies, and who have far deeper and better intelligence insights than anyone else. The Turks have very strong influence in the area via their traditional allies and the Muslim Brotherhood, and they’ll be using these to exert further influence, but it will only be in private agreements with Qatar, KSA, etc. They will work out something between them. If they don’t there will be chaos. Neither the US, Russia, China, Iran or anyone else will be anything but observers….
Turkey, btw, did not, as some claim, betray or lie to Russia and China (not that China has a particularly big role). They see themselves as the key regional power there, everyone else as annoying outsiders who they occasionally have to mollify. Its highly unlikely the Russians took anything they said at face value (not least because the Russians scrupulously held Assad back from striking at direct Turkish interests. Turkey had always made it clear – to the extent of shooting down at least one Russian fighter – that it saw itself as the big beast in that area and would not have made any promises to what it sees as intruders to their zone of interest.
The value of Syria to Russia was far more than just its port and airfields and position on the Mediterranean. It was its leverage point with the Gulf region as a whole and it allowed Russia a say in what is still the worlds center for oil and gas. Its now lost any influence in the region, including to a significant degree with Iran – both countries, while working well together in some respects, also have fundamentally differing strategic needs in the Caspian region. This would well worsen relations between them, especially if Russia continues to favour Azerbaijan. While the area is not a core strategic interest of Russia, it is still an area they can’t afford not to be involved in, and the absence of their presence, which has always acted to some degree as a break on the US (and others) having everything their way, could well have many unexpected second and third order effects on the regional balance there. One thing to look out for is Chechnya – there are rumours of Chechens with Russian military training fighting with the Syrian rebels – any sign of a weakening by any power in the region could well cause some unexpected revolts in any number of regions from the Black Sea to the Caspian and across to the former Soviet Republics and Pakistan.
There will be renewed talk about pipelines via Syria to the Mediterranean, but these may create unlikely allies (and enemies). Qatar wants to dominate via a land link through KSA, but their main gas reserves are essentially shared with Iran, so any agreement will involve quiet discussions with Tehran. Qatar has to thread carefully due to its ‘issues’ with KSA and the other Gulf States, but with so much money involved, expect some possibly unexpected realignments. Iran, which is also desperate to find new gas markets, may renew their focus on Armenia and Georgia.
Now to the main event.
By Andrew Korybko, a Moscow-based American political analyst who specializes in the global systemic transition to multipolarity in the New Cold War. He has a PhD from MGIMO, which is under the umbrella of the Russian Foreign Ministry. Originally published at his website
Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the Alt-Media Community now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.
The Iranian-led Resistance Axis has been defeated by Israel. Hamas’ terrorist attack on 7 October 2023 prompted Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza, which set into motion a series of conflicts that expanded to Lebanon and Syria. Israel has also bombed Yemen and Iran. Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s leaderships were destroyed, leading to a ceasefire in Lebanon, while the Assad government was just overthrown by a Turkish-backed terrorist blitz that severed Iran’s military logistics to Hezbollah.
These outcomes were already surprising enough for those who believed the late Nasrallah’s claim that “Israel is weaker than a spider web”, but many were shocked that they occurred without Russia lifting a finger to save the Resistance, with whom they thought that it had allied against Israel long ago. That second-mentioned false notion will go down in infamy as one of the most successful psy-ops ever conducted against the Alt-Media Community (AMC), and ironically enough, by its own top influencers.
It was explained in early October “Why False Perceptions About Russian Policy Towards Israel Continue To Proliferate”, which readers should review for more detail, but which can be summarized as top AMC influencers telling their audience what they thought they wanted to hear for self-interested reasons. These include generating clout, pushing their ideology, and/or soliciting donations from well-intentioned but naïve members of their audience depending on the personality involved.
The preceding analysis also lists five related ones about Russian policy towards Israel since the start of the West Asian Wars, including this one “Clarifying Lavrov’s Comparison Of The Latest Israeli-Hamas War To Russia’s Special Operation”, which itself links to several dozen others. All of them also reference this May 2018 report about “President Putin On Israel: Quotes From The Kremlin Website (2000-2018)”. All of these materials rely on official and authoritative Russian sources to arrive at their conclusions.
They prove that Putin is a proud lifelong philo-Semite who never shared the Resistance’s unifying anti-Zionist ideology, instead always expressing very deep respect for Jews and the State of Israel. Accordingly, as the final decisionmaker on Russian foreign policy, he tasked his diplomats with balancing between Israel and the Resistance. To that end, Russia never took either’s side and always remained neutral in their disputes, including the West Asian Wars.
The most that he ever personally did was condemn Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians, but always in the same breath as condemning Hamas’ infamous terrorist attack on 7 October 2023. As for Russia, the most that it ever did was repeat the same rhetoric and occasionally condemn Israel’s strikes against the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria, which Russia never interfered with. Not once did it try to deter or intercept them, retaliate afterwards, or give Syria the capabilities and authorization to do so either.
This was due to the deconfliction mechanism that Putin and Bibi agreed to in late September 2015 shortly before the Syrian operation. It was never confirmed for obvious diplomatic reasons, but these actions (or rather lack thereof) suggested that Putin believed that Iran’s anti-Israeli activities Syria posed a legitimate threat to Israel. For that reason, Russia always stood aside whenever Israel bombed Iran there, but Russia still sometimes complained due to Israel’s attacks formally violating international law.
It’s an objectively existing and easily verifiable fact that Russia’s opposition to Israel’s regional activities, be they in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, or Iran, always remained strictly confined to the political realm of official statements. Not once did Russia ever threaten to unilaterally sanction Israel, let alone even remotely hint at military action against it as punishment. Russia won’t even symbolically designate Israel as an “unfriendly state”, though that’s because it doesn’t abide by US sanctions and won’t arm Ukraine.
Therein lies another fact that most in the AMC were either unaware of or in denial about and it’s that Israel isn’t the US’ puppet otherwise it would have already done those two things long ago. It’s beyond the scope of the present piece to explain this, as well as why the Biden Administration has tried to destabilize and overthrow Bibi, but this analysis here dives into the details and cites related articles. The point is that Russian-Israeli ties remain cordial and these two are far from the foes that some thought.
It therefore never made sense to imagine that Putin, who considers himself to be the consummate pragmatist, would burn the bridge that he personally invested nearly a quarter-century of his time building with Bibi between their two nations. After all, Putin boasted in 2019 that “Russians and Israelis have ties of family and friendship. This is a true common family; I can say this without exaggeration. Almost 2 million Russian speakers live in Israel. We consider Israel a Russian-speaking country.”
He was speaking before the Keren Heyesod Foundation, one of the world’s oldest Zionist lobbying organizations, during its annual conference in Moscow that year. Whenever members of the AMC were confronted with these “politically inconvenient” facts from official and authoritative sources such as the Kremlin’s own website, they spun a “5D chess master plan” conspiracy theory alleging that he was just “psyching out the Zionists”. Top influencers also aggressively “canceled” anyone who brought this up.
The end result was that these false perceptions of Russian-Israeli relations as well as Putin’s own views towards this subject continued to proliferate unchallenged through the AMC, thus leading to the impression that they were secretly allied with Iran due to their allegedly shared anti-Zionist ideals. This notion became a matter of dogma for many in the AMC and correspondingly turned into an axiom of International Relations for them. Anyone who claimed otherwise was smeared as a “Zionist”.
It’s now known after Russia didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance that they were never actually allies. Some of those that still can’t accept that they’ve been lied to by trusted AMC influencers who duped them for self-interested reasons (clout, ideology, and/or soliciting donations) now speculate that Russia “betrayed” the Resistance and “sold out to the Zionists” even though Russia was never on either’s side. If they don’t soon shake off their cognitive dissonance, they’ll detach themselves further from reality.
In retrospect, Russia dodged a bullet by wisely choosing not to ally with the now-defeated Resistance Axis since it would have needlessly ruined its relations with Israel, the undisputable victor of the West Asian Wars. Putin made the right choice, which was always driven by his rational calculation of what was in Russia’s objective interests as a state, not due to “Zionist influence” like some in the AMC now ridiculously claim to defame him after being mad that he didn’t lift a finger to save the Resistance.
The takeaways from this are several: 1) Putin and his representatives don’t play “5D chess”, they always say what they truly mean; 2) Russia isn’t anti-Israel nor anti-Zionist, but it also isn’t anti-Iran nor anti-Resistance either; 3) the AMC is full of charlatans who, for self-interested reasons, tell their audience whatever they think they want to hear; 4) their audience should thus hold them to account for lying about Russian-Israeli and Russian-Resistance relations; 5) and the AMC requires urgent reform.
