Category: Aggregated

The Washington Times reported Tuesday that President-elect Donald  Trump is considering resurrecting the plan for joint military operations with Russia against the Al Nusra terrorist group. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had worked out the agreement last September, after months of negotiations, but it was almost immediately sabotaged by Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s Pentagon with the bombing of Syrian troops in eastern Syria less than a week after the agreement went into effect.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a top national security advisor to Trump, is said to be advising Trump to push for a new era of U.S.-Russian military cooperation.

“We were ready to go, and we can be ready to go again,” one U.S. defense official said.

A State Department official said on background that the “Obama plan” (actually the Kerry-Lavrov plan), which in September called for the creation of a Geneva-based Joint Integration Center staffed by Russian and U.S. military officials, likely would be presented to the incoming administration. The State Department has, in fact, confirmed at least twice in the past week, that discussions between U.S. and Russian officers have been ongoing in Geneva despite the failure of the agreement, itself. The official stressed to the Times, however, that no one knows whether Trump and his yet-to-be named national security team will embrace the plan.

“It’s all speculation at this point,” said the official, adding that it was unclear “whether they’re going to keep the strategy as it is, tweak it, revise it, or do away with it completely.”