Just a few days after Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart reached an agreement calling on the Assad regime to turn over its chemical weapons to the international community, Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be already undermining that agreement. Putin said yesterday that he can’t guarantee Syria will give up all their chemical weapons as part of a U.S.-Russian deal and suggested that Israel could help the situation improve by giving up its nuclear weapons. “Syria came into possession of chemical weapons as an alternative to Israel’s nuclear weapons,” Putin said at a gathering of political analysts. “The technological superiority of Israel in the region is so obvious that it doesn’t require nuclear weapons, which makes it a target and creates a special problem for it.”

This seems to me to be an attempt by Putin to pressure Obama into cooling the U.S. policy toward Israel’s nuclear program. Since Israel first acquired a nuclear reactor about […] → Keep reading