First Win for Trump-Putin Summit: Agreement to Restrain Iran in Syria
by Joel B. Pollack
BreitBart.com
18 Jul 2018
President Donald Trump has been criticized by the media and by Beltway politicians of both parties for his meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on Monday. But the summit has already produced a very significant win: namely, agreement to avoid a war in the Middle East by restraining Iran in Syria.
As Breitbart News columnist Caroline Glick noted last month, it was crucial that Trump confront Putin over Syria, because Russia was about to allow Iranian and Hezbollah soldiers, dressed in Syrian uniforms, to move into southwestern Syria along the border with Israel and Jordan.
That was not a situation that the U.S. or Israel could accept.
As Glick explained:
The U.S. has a major interest as well in preventing Iran’s Hezbollah forces from deploying in Syria and in Yemen. The U.S. has an interest in preventing Russia from taking over Syria. … [T]he physical deployment of Iranian-controlled forces along the Syrian-Israeli border and the Syrian-Jordanian border all but ensures a major war between Israel and these forces — including Syrian military forces, which are also controlled by Iran. It raises the likelihood of a Jordanian war with these same forces to an unprecedented level.
The Iranian-Israeli war will spread to Lebanon, which is controlled by Iran through Hezbollah. It can easily spread to Gaza as well, given Iran’s sponsorship of the Hamas terror regime that rules the area.
North Korea, Glick added, would also interpret Iranian deployment along the Syrian border as a sign of American weakness, and U.S. allies around the world would once again lose confidence in America’s protection, as they did under President Barack Obama.
But in the days leading up to Helsinki, the Trump administration maneuvered to constrain Russia’s options. The U.S. and Israel, exerting both military force in Syria and diplomatic pressure on Moscow, made clear that Putin would not have a free hand there.
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