If he has any sense of honor, Rex Tillerson will resign upon returning home from Moscow and leave Trump holding the bag of filth

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

Moscow today is awaiting the long expected visit of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a visit that was supposed to prepare the way for a Trump-Putin summit, either as a self-standing event or on the sidelines of the next G-20 meeting in Germany. And that summit would consolidate the turn to normalization of relations as Trump had promised in his electoral campaign.

 However, the 180 degree turn in the foreign policy of the Trump administration marked by the launch of a missile strike on Syria last Thursday, 7 April  changed the expectations for Tillerson's visit dramatically, to the point where one of the most widely respected political observers, Director of the Near East Institute Yevgeny Satanovsky, declared on prime time television Sunday:

It is not clear why Tillerson is coming. There is no reason at all for him to be received by Putin. Maybe it's enough for him to talk to Maria Zakharova [spokeswoman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs], perhaps with Lavrov.

I believe that determination of what Russians know in advance of Tillerson's visit and how they feel about what they know is very important if we are to make sense of the reception the U.S. Secretary of State is about to receive, and what he may or may not achieve in Moscow.

My observations below on the changing evaluation of the missile attack by official Russia and of the formulation of recommendations on how their President should respond between the seventh and today come from watching the premier news, analysis and political talk shows on the state channel Rossiya 1.

 In the following essay, I will take the opportunity as well to share some important facts…and speculations….about the whole episode in Syria which come out of the Russian programming but seem not to have been covered at all by Western media.  These begin with the nature of the chemical gas event in Idlib which the United States alleges was perpetrated by the Assad government and which served as the justification for the U.S. strike. From there the facts reach out in various directions, including the lines of US-Russian military cooperation that the Russians have now suspended.

The programs I monitored for the purposes of this report are the talk shows Sixty Minutes, Evening and Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov, News on Saturday with Sergey Brillyov, and News of the Week with Dmitry Kiselyov.  Always popular with their Russian audiences on live television, these shows drew in remarkably high visitor rates on the internet as posted on youtube.com, by which I mean between a quarter and half a million visits each.

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When I wrote about the U.S. attack on Syria within hours of the event on the seventh, I remarked that this would put enormous pressure on Vladimir Putin to respond in kind, that we might enter a very difficult period of muscle-flexing by both sides.  To be sure, the immediate response of the Kremlin was very restrained. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs simply announced the suspension of the 2015 Memorandum of Understanding with the United States on deconfliction. That agreement put in place communications channels within the region and rules for conduct meant to prevent and/or resolve incidents between the Russian and US-led coalition forces operating in Syria.  But as I mused when I wrote that essay, revenge is a dish best served cold and a more definitive Russian response to the first U.S. attack on Syrian government forces would be forthcoming at some time before the end of the month.

In fact, by the evening of the seventh, official Russian perceptions of the seriousness of the challenge posed by the American strike removed that likelihood of escalation.  

Already in the early evening of 7 April, the popular Russian state television talk show Sixty Minutes informed its audience about two essential facts regarding the U.S. missile strike.  First, that the level of damage inflicted on the Syrian air base at Shayrat turned out to be minimal, totally out of keeping with what one might have anticipated from 59 Tomahawks launched by US naval vessels in the Mediterranean.