War Against the Islamic State Is War Against US Hegemony

If reports about the arrival of thousands of Iranian soldiers in Syria for the liberation of Aleppo turn out to be true, it is effectively the beginning of a ground operation as a new stage in Russia’s anti-terrorist operation.

As the first days of its offensive have shown, the Syrian army is too weak to defeat the Islamic State and the other terrorists quickly, and the West expected that Moscow, having become convinced of this, would be forced to begin a ground operation on its own — hello, second Afghanistan.

But the Kremlin has other thoughts on the matter: The vast and well-trained Iranian military under the protection of Russian air and naval forces from the Caspian to the Mediterranean should become a strike force that will crush the terrorists directly on the ground.

At the same time, the participation of Russia’s special forces in discrete, particularly difficult operations isn’t being ruled out. Iran’s head-on entry into the war with the Islamic State group means a real military alliance of Iranians and Russians against the American terrorists, and this is likely to become the catalyst for a new wave of tectonic shifts in world politics.

We must understand and remember that in calling for the creation of a “coalition like the anti-Hitler coalition,” Putin had in mind not so much a coalition against the Islamic State group as one against its creators.

Official Russia is more and more transparently pointing out that all the Islamist terrorists are created and supported by Washington and its satellites. And the U.S. is less and less capable of hiding it, since the Russians, with their intervention, are, as with a scalpel, revealing its dirty games. The Islamic State group and other terrorists are a U.S. tool against Syria and thereafter against China and Russia. The war declared by Russia against the Islamic State group means action against the U.S. — hence the irritable reaction.

The entrance of Iran and subsequently Iraq into the fight, with the possible neutrality of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel, will lead to a crisis, at which point the U.S. will either lose the Middle East and a significant portion of its influence on the world or will be forced to openly support the terrorists, including the Islamic State group.

The response to such a turn of events could be the open alignment with Russia, Syria, Iran and Iraq of such a “small” country as China. This would in fact mean the creation of an anti-American coalition like the anti-Hitler coalition.

The current Middle East really looks very similar to the Balkans before World War I. A global military confrontation might begin from it between the hegemon and the new poles of power.

At the same time, given Syria’s relative remoteness from the European, American and Asian capitals and the existence of modern (non-nuclear) missile weapon systems, there is the possibility of reining in the hegemon without large-scale hostilities. For this, however, we must act extremely precisely, in anticipation and in unison.