F William Engdahl: Putin's Geopolitical Chess Game with Washington

Since reassuming his post as Russias President, Vladimir Putin has lost no minute in addressing the most urgent geopolitical threats to Russia internationally. Not surprisingly, at the center of his agenda is the explosive situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable means of preventing a further deterioration of the situation into what easily could become another world war by miscalculation. His activities in recent weeks involve active personal diplomacy with Syria's government as well as the so-called opposition Syrian National Council. It involves intense diplomacy with Erdogan's Turkey regime. It involves closed door diplomacy with Obama. It involves direct diplomacy with Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu. Syria itself, contrary to what most western media portray, is a long standing multi ethnic and religiously tolerant secular state with an Alawite Muslim President Bashar Al-Assad, married to a Sunni wife. The Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shia Islam, which doesn't force their women to wear head scarves, and are liberal by Sunni standards, especially in the fundamentalist places like Saudi Arabia, where women are forbidden to even hold a drivers license. The overall Syrian population is a diverse mix of Alawites, Druze and Kurds, Sunnis, and Armenian Orthodox Christians. Were the minority regime of Al-Assad to fall, experts estimate that, like in Egypt, the murky Sunni, as in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood organization would emerge as the dominant organized political force, something certainly not welcome in Tel Aviv and certainly not in either Russia or China.