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“Vladimir Putin is back — and stealing Barack Obama’s thunder on the world’s stage,” read the article on CNN’s politics website. “Putin’s message at the UN podium on Monday was a simple one: US interventions and unilateralism have backfired in the Middle East, and it is time to try something new,” the website added.
Another American news outlet, The New York Post, praised the Russian president, calling him “the world’s most powerful leader”, sadly adding that it was their own president who had turned him into as such.
“The baton was officially transferred Monday to the world’s new sole superpower — and Vladimir Putin willingly picked it up,” reads one of its articles.
“At long last, a decisive world leader is projecting genuine leadership in the Middle East generally, and the Syrian crisis in particular. Unfortunately, that leader is Russia’s Vladimir Putin — not President Obama,” read another one.
The major winning point for Russia, it adds, is its policy on resolving the Syrian crisis and his call for a broad international coalition to fight the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“Obama declared his willingness ‘to work with any nation, including Russia and Iran, to resolve the conflict.’ Putin had already answered Obama’s words with action — stunning Washington with an intelligence-sharing accord with Iran, Iraq and Syria.”
The New York Times also noted that the call for “a genuinely broad international coalition appears to be a step to outmanoeuvre Mr Obama on Syria”.
French news channel France 24 pointed out that President Putin’s speech and his meeting with his US counterpart marked the return of the Russian leader, who had been sidelined by the West because of the Ukrainian conflict and his unwavering support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, on the international stage.
The Russian head of state, it says, is slowly taking his place in the centre of the game on Syria.
The Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz was also impressed by Vladimir Putin.
“Putin’s speech shows who is in charge,” it said. The “Obama administration’s impotence and failure to bring any sort of resolution to [the] Syrian civil war or to curb ISIS significantly has allowed Putin to take the initiative.”
“The last time Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, exactly 10 years ago, he made do with a five-minute speech extolling the UN’s virtues. On Monday, it was a different, much more aggressive Putin. He spoke for 20 minutes and presented a clear and forceful foreign policy for his country,” it added.
“It seems that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first to recognise the new reality, when he rushed to Moscow last week to discuss coordination methods which would allow Israeli forces to continue operating in Syria, alongside the new Russian presence. For now, Putin is in charge,” it concluded.
Both Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin frequently claim to reject outdated Cold War thinking, but it’s hard to avoid the comparison when both leaders devoted their addresses to the UN General Assembly on Monday morning to rejecting the other’s worldview.
Speaking shortly after Obama dismissed Russia’s view that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad can be a partner in fighting ISIS, Putin, making his first address to the General Assembly in a decade, blamed foreign — read: US — interference for helping the spread of extremism in the Middle East. “Rather than bringing about reforms, an aggressive foreign interference has resulted in the brazen destruction of institutions,” he said. Addressing “those who’ve caused the situation,” Putin said he’s temped to ask, “Do you realise now what you’ve done?” (Putin never referred to the US specifically, only to an unnamed Voldemort-like malevolent presence doing terrible things in the world.)
Attacking the policies of two US presidents in one fell swoop, Putin noted that the ranks of ISIS include former Iraqi service members who were decommissioned after the 2003 invasion, as well as the “ranks of so-called moderate opposition. First they are armed and trained, and then they defect to the Islamic State.”
Saying “we cannot allow these criminals who have already tasted blood to return home and continue their evil doings,” Putin argued that ISIS’s growth poses a threat to all nations, including Russia, and called for the formation of an international partnership “similar to the anti-Hitler coalition” in order to fight them. (That would be a coalition with several brutal dictators competing for the role of Stalin.)
This wasn’t the only historical analogy in Putin’s remarks. He also compared western attempts to spread democracy in the Middle East to Soviet-era experiments in spreading Communism around the globe, suggesting they were destined for similar failure. “No one has to conform to a single development model that someone has recognized as the only right one,” he said.
Moments after Obama rejected the notion of a “conspiracy of US-controlled NGOs” to overthrow governments around the world, Putin described the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s government as a “military coup” that was “orchestrated from outside.”
Putin also defended Russia’s use of its veto at the UN Security Council, which US officials say undermines the authority of the body by shielding violators of international law from criticism and sanctions. Russia’s response is that the US is simply irritated by a check on its unrestrained power in international affairs. Putin rejected criticism of Russia’s veto as “a dangerous attempt to “undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations” by a power who “thought they knew better and didn’t have to reckon with the UN.”
Wonder who he could be talking about? —Sputnik/Slate.
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