Reason #23 Why I Love To Blog -- May 28, 2016

From today's Wall Street Journal: Russia's Long Road to the Middle East.

Over at "The Big Stories" (linked at the sidebar at the right), I have a link to: Putin: Re-Establishing The "Old" Soviet Union.

From today's WSJ story, which in the print edition takes up the entire front page of the "Review" section and the entire second page (with the exception of a regular columnist's essay on the sidebar). Early in the article:

Russia’s long history of involvement—and warfare—in the [Middle East] is largely unknown to Westerners, but it helps to explain President Vladimir Putin’s decision last fall to intervene in Syria’s civil war. Mr. Putin’s gambit on behalf of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad caught many in the West by surprise. Critics have assailed it as a miscalculated bid to replace the U.S. as the dominant outside power in the region.

But when viewed from Moscow, Mr. Putin’s Middle Eastern adventure looks like something very different: an overdue return to geopolitical aspirations that stretch back not only to the Soviet era but to centuries of czarist rule. “The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, which advises the Kremlin and other government institutions.