If you know your Russian history, and who doesn’t love Russian history, you must remember Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s many lovers and a powerful 18th Century Russian statesman. His name is forever enshrined, in apocryphal metaphor, for his masterful conduct of Catherine’s Grand Tour of her Southern realms in 1787. He famously concealed, from the Empress’s view, any sign of any of the manifold and manifest deficiencies, in his performance of his duties as the administrator of vast Russian territories. Thence came the idea of the Potemkin Village, an image of a false front, a “pretentious facade designed to cover up a shabby or undesirable condition.”
As we learn more details of how the Commander in Chief conducted his widely praised and panned Syrian airbase attack, the idea of a Potemkin Airstrike seems inescapable. The Russians (ergo the Syrians), received advance warning of the strike; the base remained operational; the base’s Russian defenses were stood down to allow our slow missiles to hit designated targets and allow Trump a claim of success; and no Syrian capability was at all degraded etc. etc. That part is the image of the false front — that Trump actually attacked Syria and actually risked picking a fight with Russia, i.e. V. Putin. But it’s all phony. Trump spent mucho megabucks to demolish some Syrian concrete as a mere demonstration, and for the sole purpose of distracting from the scandal of his Administration’s Russian entanglements.
But the Russia scandal isn’t the only “shabby or undesirable condition” addressed by this Potemkin airstrike. The attack also serves to district from the fact that our new “leader” doesn’t actually have any of the following: i) a Syria policy; ii) a strategy for defeating ISIS; or iii) a serious and functioning foreign policy of any kind.
Sham, shabby and shoddy. That’s a damned sad way to run a country.