We Just Lost the Initiative.....

The United Nations may not be completely broken, but it has a checkered peacekeeping record. A stifling bureaucracy married with Cold War alignment instead of current geopolitical reality has created an organization which has limited its efficiency and effectiveness. The days of state-on-state conventional and large scale warfare has been effectively minimized. Instead civil wars, tribal and sectarian conflict, and terrorism are the current major threats to the world order. The UN has been slow to adapt to these new threats and their enduring consequence, such as the refugee crisis caused by instability in the Levant due to the effects of the Syrian civil war. The primary purpose of the UN, as described in the Charter , is "to maintain international peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peac...

Now the United States, France, and Great Britain have dropped their bombs on supposed critical nodes for the Assad chemical weapons industrial complexes, what is next? This is deja vu all over again. Since the 90s, bombing static known targets without an overall strategy has been the modus operandi of the politicos. Yet, it rarely moves the reality on the ground. Syria has been a particular bugaboo for the US political and military leadership. We missed an opportunity to assist the Syrians to reshape their country and the region during the Obama presidency and the Trump administration has shown not to be deft enough to navigate the precarious situation. As Syria drifted rudderless into the swirling abyss, Iran and Russia capitalized on the situation and have endeared themselves with Assad. Now any resolution to the Syrian civil war will have to go through Iran and Russia, who will ensure the continuation of the Assad regime. What are alternatives? Post World War II geopolitical struc...