Mick Hartley

Obama warns Trump to "stand up to Putin". Which, as Tony Badran points out, is rich:

Talking to reporters in Germany on Thursday, President Barack Obama expressed the hope that President-elect Donald Trump will be “willing to stand up to Russia where they are deviating from our values and international norms.” For anyone who has followed U.S. Syria policy closely for the past six years, the question of exactly what Obama believes those “values” and “norms” are—given his deliberate and determined facilitation of the slaughter of 500,000 Syrians, in concert with Assad, Iran, and Putin—is certainly an interesting one. The political meaning of Obama’s statement was clear, though: The president hopes to stick Trump with the gruesome results of his Syria policy while pretending that what might well turn out to be Trump’s own cooperation with Putin is somehow a startling departure from the course that he set and proudly and repeatedly refused to alter during six years of stomach-turning mass murder of innocent civilians by a genocidal regime.

Historians and scholars will no doubt spend years excavating the enormous mountain of bad faith and poor decision-making that led to the moral, political, and large-scale human disaster of America’s complicity in Assad’s genocide, which has been visible for the past few years to the entire world—and especially to the people of the Middle East, whose good opinion Obama once sought to court. The decision not to intervene in Syria’s civil war, and then to facilitate Assad’s murder of his own people through political and military coordination with Iran and Russia, was Obama’s, and Obama’s alone…

The liberal world order may well be destined to come to an end under Trump's "America First" and Putin's resurgent Russia, but Obama has laid the groundwork.