We need to hear more about how Tillerson sees Russia's clearly expansionist aims

Tom Rogan has an article at NRO that is worth your while. The overall gist is ostensibly the five results he foresees from the fall of Aleppo, and I'll enumerate them for you in a moment. But it seems to me that what he is really trying to impress upon the reader is how Putin views this development.

In fact, let's start with Rogan's prediction number five:

Finally, Putin will use Aleppo’s capture to damage U.S. foreign policy. His intentions are already clear. After all, in English-news propaganda outlets such as RT, the Russians are proudly rejecting American demands that Sunni rebels be given safe passage out of Aleppo. It’s Obama vs. Putin 101. Unwilling to pressure Russia, Obama is simply ignored by Putin. Through this public display of American impotence, Putin asserts his grand strategy in the Middle East. In the Middle East, where influence is defined by fear and by perceptions of power, Putin is seizing influence and control over American allies.

In early October 2015, President Obama claimed that “an attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work.”

Aleppo’s rubble has proved Obama wrong. His misjudgment has come at a heavy cost. In the lacerated lungs and starved stomachs of 200,000 Syrian civilians, American credibility has turned to ashes. In its place, Putin’s KGB phoenix is rising. 

Here are the others. I offer them because they all relate to this last one:

 First off, Syria’s Sunni-dominated rebellion will no longer be national campaign — it will become a collection of geographically limited ones. Apart from two sparsely populated central areas, the moderate rebels will hold only pockets of southeastern and northeastern Syria. At that point, unable to move between different battlefields, they’ll be highly vulnerable to axis operations . . . 

Second, al-Qaeda-linked organizations, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS), and other Salafi-Jihadist groups such as Ahrar al-Sham will grow stronger. The axis claim that capturing Aleppo will weaken extremist groups, but the opposite is true . . .

Third, and as an extension, when Aleppo falls, we’ll see expanded external support for the extremists, notably from the Sunni monarchies. Led by the House of Saud, the Sunni kingdoms view Assad thru the lens of sectarian hatred. That view is formed partly by Assad’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunnis, but also by his alliance with Shia-revolutionary Iran. After Aleppo, expect the monarchies to increase funding, perhaps through proxies, for groups such as JFS and al-Qaeda . . . 

Fourth, the Assad axis will escalate operations in Syria’s western, rebel-held Idlib governate. Idlib is critical to the rebellion’s existence because the rebels control areas along a roughly 50-mile border with Turkey. That border is the rebels supply aorta. But after Aleppo falls, the axis will push hard against Idlib border settlements, such as Ad Dana in the east, and Jisr ash-Shugur in the west. They know that as the border goes, so goes the rebellion . . . 

So the Russian bear sees a great strategic advantage shaping up on the Syrian chessboard.

Which brings us to the subject of DJT's likely choice of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State. The reasoning seems, to seasoned observers, to be that, as the head of not only the world's biggest energy company, one with world-wide reach, but a business organization with annual revenues exceeding those of many nation-states,  he has developed a great deal of savvy in terms of dealing with the heads of state in all regions of the world.

Russia gets mentioned a lot in this regard. Tillers and Putin have been negotiating partners since 1999. 

In the late 1990s, when serving as a vice president for Exxon’s Russian unit, Tillerson helped revive a $17 billion oil development in a remote region east of Moscow that’d been stalled by bureaucratic inaction for most of a decade.

The project, which tapped a cluster of oil discoveries beneath the ice-choked seas off Russia’s Far East, became a crown jewel in Exxon’s global portfolio, pumping hundreds of millions of barrels of crude since the first wells came online in 2005. The achievement burnished a resume already chock-full of successes helping direct Exxon’s forays in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

“Russia made his career,” said Joseph Pratt, a University of Houston oil-industry historian, in a 2015 interview. Tillerson’s success in turbulent late ’90s Russia “really impressed” Exxon’s leadership team at corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas.

But is there a trail of position papers, any newspaper columns or pieces for major opinion journals from which we can glean just how he views Russia in recent years - say, since the seizure of Crimea, or the incursion into Ukraine, or rumblings of Russian government involvement in hacking misadventures?

Unlike the Trump cabinet picks so far, this one is being met with some reservation, particularly in the body that will have to sign on to the appointment:

Some senators, who must confirm Tillerson if he’s nominated, are balking. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said in an interview on Fox News that Tillerson’s past relationship with Putin “is a matter of concern to me.” Fellow Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, who sits on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, wrote on Twitter that “being a ‘friend of Vladimir’ is not an attribute I am hoping for” from a secretary of state.

Marco Rubio in particular is someone whose guiding principles, and his adherence to them, garner my respect. (McCain, not so much. Talk about hit-and-miss. In this case, though, he is on the side of prudence.)

I hope there's a lot of conversation about this today, given the speed at which President-elect Get-'Er-Done likes to move on these matters. The next Secretary of State's job is going to entail facing grave dangers, not just doing deals.