Countdown to catastrophe: It’s a nightmare scenario. But as the war of words between Russia and the U.S. cranks up, historian DOMINIC SANDBROOK imagines the very worst
By DOMINIC SANDBROOK
DailyMail.com
10 April 2017
The date is Wednesday, April 12 and in Moscow, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is all business.
After days of mounting tension following the first American air strike against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria — in response to the suspected poison gas attack on the town of Khan Sheikhun, which killed 87 civilians — America’s top diplomat has arrived to clear the air.
Earlier in the week he met British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and his G7 counterparts in Italy to discuss fresh sanctions if Russia persisted in its support of Assad’s brutal regime.
Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil who has famously close Russian contacts, is seen as the ideal man to calm growing antagonism between Moscow and Washington.
But even as he is shaking hands with the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, events are spiralling towards disaster.
Within days, relations between Russia and the U.S. have plunged to their worst depths since the Cuban Missile Crisis 55 years earlier.
Then, the world had stood briefly on the brink of Armageddon. At the last moment, the leaders of the two great superpowers stepped back from the edge. But in April 2017, the outcome is chillingly different.
SECOND U.S. AIRSTRIKE
Emboldened by Russia’s bellicose rhetoric after the first U.S. air strike in early April, Bashir al-Assad has no intention of scaling down his onslaught against dwindling resistance from the Free Syrian Army and Islamist rebels to claim victory in the six-year civil war.
On April 12 there is another chemical attack, this time targeting the rebel-held city of Idlib in north-western Syria, near the Turkish border. Once again, the West is horrified by claims it is Assad’s forces that have used sarin gas, with scores of women and children among the estimated 1,200 casualties, although independent confirmation is hard to come by.
The Rest…HERE
