The Kuznetsov, with its ramped flight deck and lack of a catapult system, can’t launch its jet aircraft — a mixture of MiG 29Ks and Su-33s — fully loaded with weapons and fuel, Gorenburg said. But for the Russians, that isn’t nearly as important as their military being able to field carrier-capable aircraft and training pilots in the extremely difficult task of taking off and landing from a floating runway in the middle of the ocean.
.. “This show of force, and great power status, is largely for a domestic audience,”
After Losses in Syria and Iraq, ISIS Moves the Goal Posts
Islamic State leaders had long promised their followers an apocalyptic battle — foretold, some believe, by the Prophet Muhammad — in an otherwise nondescript village they controlled in northern Syria.
But the warriors of the self-declared caliphate lost the village, Dabiq, in just a few hours over the weekend as Syrian rebels, backed by Turkey, closed in. To soften the symbolic blow, the Islamic State switched rhetorical gears,declaring that the real Dabiq battle would come some other time.
.. as Dabiq was surrounded on three sides by the Turkish-backed rebel force, Islamic State followers “began to frantically explain why the approaching showdown in Dabiq would not be THE showdown,”
.. Islamic State media outlets pointed out that other conditions for the prophesied battle had not materialized, like the appearance of a “crusader army,” or the Mahdi, a messiah-like figure, or an 80-nation coalition of fighters.
.. Dabiq has been central to the group’s identity. The Islamic State’s online magazine is called Dabiq, and its news agency, Amaq, is named after the surrounding area. And many Islamic State opponents seized on the village’s fall and the recalibration of the group’s messaging as proof that its grand visions were falling apart.
..Seizing the border area that includes Dabiq helped the rebels in several ways: It showed their potential backers that the rebels could fight the Islamic State. It also carves out a relatively safe area for their Syrian supporters; some refugees have already returned to the area.
And it helps delegitimize the Islamic State’s ability to compete with the rebels for supporters and fighters, like Sunni Muslims who also believe in the prophecy about Dabiq.
Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition
While vacationing in the south of France, Prince bin Salman spotted a 440-foot yacht floating off the coast. He dispatched an aide to buy the ship, the Serene, which was owned by Yuri Shefler, a Russian vodka tycoon. The deal was done within hours, at a price of approximately 500 million euros (roughly $550 million today), according to an associate of Mr. Shefler and a Saudi close to the royal family. The Russian moved off the yacht the same day.
.. His seemingly boundless ambitions have led many Saudis and foreign officials to suspect that his ultimate goal is not just to transform the kingdom, but also to shove aside the current crown prince, his 57-year-old cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, to become the next king. Such a move could further upset his relatives and — if successful — give the country what it has never seen: a young king who could rule the kingdom for many decades.
.. Many young Saudis admire him as an energetic representative of their generation who has addressed some of the country’s problems with uncommon bluntness. The kingdom’s news media have built his image as a hardworking, businesslike leader less concerned than his predecessors with the trappings of royalty.
Others see him as a power-hungry upstart who is risking instability by changing too much, too fast.
.. The crown prince has diabetes, and suffers from the lingering effects of an assassination attempt in 2009 by a jihadist who detonated a bomb he had hidden in his rectum.
.. His younger cousin, meanwhile, has worked to remain in the spotlight, touring world capitals, speaking with foreign journalists, beingphotographed with the Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg and presenting himself as a face of a new Saudi Arabia.
.. the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which since it was begun last year has failed to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital. The war has driven much of Yemen toward famine and killed thousands of civilians while costing the Saudi government tens of billions of dollars.
.. Although all agreed that the kingdom had to respond when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital and forced the government into exile, Prince bin Salman took the lead, launching the war in March 2015 without full coordination across the security services.
.. Prince bin Nayef, who won the respect of Saudis and American officials for dismantling Al Qaeda in the kingdom nearly a decade ago and now sees it taking advantage of chaos in Yemen
.. This is part of what analysts say is Prince bin Salman’s attempt to foster a sense of Saudi national identity that has not existed since the kingdom’s founding in 1932.
“There has been a surge of Saudi nationalism since the campaign in Yemen began, with the sense that Saudi Arabia is taking independent collective action,”
.. “His main message is that Saudi Arabia is a force to be reckoned with,” Mr. Katulis said.
.. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, which means that Prince bin Salman was given all of his powers by a vote of one: his own father.
.. Prince bin Nayef was the first of the founder’s grandsons to be put in line. Many hailed the move because of the prince’s success at fighting Al Qaeda and because he has only daughters, leading many to hope he would choose a successor based on merit rather than paternity.
.. Read in one way, the documents are an ambitious blueprint to change the Saudi way of life. Read in another, they are a scathing indictment of how poorly the kingdom has been run by Prince bin Salman’s elders.
.. Read in one way, the documents are an ambitious blueprint to change the Saudi way of life. Read in another, they are a scathing indictment of how poorly the kingdom has been run by Prince bin Salman’s elders.
.. Many members of the royal family remain wary of the young prince’s projects and ultimate ambitions. Some mock him as the “Prince of the Vision” and complain about his army of well-paid foreign consultants and image-makers.
.. Many members of the royal family remain wary of the young prince’s projects and ultimate ambitions. Some mock him as the “Prince of the Vision” and complain about his army of well-paid foreign consultants and image-makers.
.. Personal relationships have long been the bedrock of American-Saudi relations, yet the Obama administration has struggled to find someone to develop a rapport with the prince. The job has largely fallen to Secretary of State John Kerry
.. In September 2015, dinner at Mr. Kerry’s house ended with Prince bin Salman playing Beethoven on the piano for the secretary of state and the other guests.
.. His desire to reimagine the Saudi state is reflected in his admiration — some even call it envy — for the kingdom’s more modern and progressive neighbor in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates.
.. “If the king’s health starts to deteriorate, Mohammed bin Salman is very likely to try to get Mohammed bin Nayef out of the picture,” said Mr. Riedel, the former C.I.A. analyst.
The End of Interventionism
The era of the West’s enthusiasm for military intervention is over. Two reports on Iraq and Libya—written from the heart of the British establishment and published recently—have delivered its obituary. Each is damning; together, they dismember the case for intervention in both its neocon and liberal-hawk variants. Although their focus is almost exclusively on decision-making within Whitehall—the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the Ministry of Defence, and, above all, No. 10 Downing Street—Americans will recognize many of the same ills afflicting their own government.
.. Many liberals opposed the Iraq intervention because they disliked its architect and suspected its motives. But they still believed that Western, and especially U.S., military power, used assertively, could make the world a better place.
.. The 2011 Libya bombing was a swift response by liberal hawks to what most agreed was an imminent massacre. It was both opportunistic—a material interest in Libya’s oil industry, and bolstering French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s faltering political stature were strong motivations—and also a test of the noble doctrine of the “responsibility to protect,” adopted at the United Nations in 2005.
.. The Chilcot report on the Iraq War (so called after the investigation’s chair, Sir John Chilcot) reveals, most notably, that key war decisions were taken solely—during unminuted meetings—by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who would ignore legal advice he didn’t like and circumvented official procedures for cabinet collective decision-making. The report, which catalogs numerous obfuscations and outright lies of the Blair administration, offers a verdict that is all the more damning because of its laconic understatement: “The circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.”
.. The central failing of military intervention is not coordination, secretiveness, or dishonesty, though these certainly exist. At its core, the problem is the iron law of organized violence: intervention is war, and war commands those who choose to fight, however much they may believe they are its masters.
.. In order to deter Iran, and to appear strong across the region, Saddam needed to project an illusion of power. His army had been shattered in the 1991 Gulf War. Admitting that he had lost his weapons of mass destruction would be tantamount to conceding that he was defenseless. Not only would this have made Iraq seem vulnerable to Iran, but it would have stripped Saddam himself of his dignity and aura of strength, leaving him exposed to challenges from within his own ranks.
.. Having vilified Saddam, they could not make the necessary leap to see the world from his point of view.