The biggest loser from last week’s cruise-missile strikes on a Syrian air base wasn’t “President” Bashar al-Assad. It was Vladimir Putin.

The Syrian leader was punished, but Russia’s new czar was humiliated.

Even with an hour’s warning of the attacks, Putin’s military in Syria did nothing to defend its ally. For all of the Russian bluster in recent years, Putin couldn’t stop our strikes.

His military lacked the means to do so. And any attempt to interfere with our operation would only have revealed the inferior quality of Russian armaments — including their much-ballyhooed air defense systems.

This is vitally important, because Putin used his military leap into Syria to show that Russia was a reliable ally at a time when US policy was timid, incompetent and flighty under President Barack Obama. Russia looked strong. We didn’t.

But the wave of cruise missiles unleashed on Syria called Putin’s bluff. And Russia didn’t dare to lift a finger.

It gets better.

Lake Como, Italy.  The world's leading currency institute is bracing for a dramatic rise in the US dollar as the Federal Reserve rushes to tighten monetary policy, setting the stage for a protectionist showdown and a fresh debt crisis in emerging markets.

Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says investors have badly misjudged the confluence of forces at work in Washington.

They wrongly assume that fiscal stimulus will come to little under Donald Trump, and are equally wrong that Janet Yellen Fed's will remain dovish as the US nears full employment.

"We expect the dollar to rise by another 10% to 15%. The concern is that this will suck capital out of the more fragile emerging markets and lead to fresh capital outflows from China," Mr. Posen said in his speech at the Como Forum for international economists.  It will greatly exacerbate the already massive problems that are sucking the life-blood out of the Chinese economy.

Obama is a coward.  He is very careful to launch dirty attacks without getting any on his hands. The insults are anonymously sourced. The retaliation comes out of the bowels of the bureaucracy. And he only finds out about it from the media. That allows him to retain what he cares about most: his popularity.

After Trump won, Obama put on his best imitation of decency while his people went on preparing to undermine Trump at every turn by smearing him, wiretapping him and doing everything possible, legally and illegally, to bring him down.

It was the same phony act that he had pulled for eight years, bemoaning the lack of bipartisanship while ruling unilaterally as a dictator, destroying the Constitution while hectoring us about our values, denouncing racism while organizing race riots, complaining about the echo chamber while constructing one and lecturing us on civility while smearing anyone who disagreed.

Trump’s killer instinct lies in understanding that hypocrisy conceals weakness. That is what powered him through the primaries and then through an election. His instinct is to grapple directly with a target. That is also the source of his popularity.

We risk gradually having an offence of blasphemy imposed on the west

"It is wrong to describe this as Islamic terrorism. It is Islamist terrorism. It is a perversion of a great faith.”

This is what the prime minister said in parliament after the attack on Westminster Bridge that killed three tourists and a policeman. While I completely accept that the sins of extremists should never be visited on the vast majority of moderate believers, I am increasingly uneasy about how we handle the connection between religion and extremism. The ideology to which Khalid Masood was converted in prison may indeed be a perversion of Islam, but it is a version of it. We should not shy away from saying so.

After Nice, Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation wrote that saying such terrorism has nothing to do with Islam (as some do) is as dangerous as stating that it has everything to do with Islam.

On March 25, 1957, six European countries signed the Treaty of Rome, which eventually became the European Union.

As people celebrate the Treaty’s 60^th anniversary and the longest period in European history without a major war, there is no doubt that it has been hugely successful in that particular objective.

Yet, the celebrations have been subdued to say the least, as Great Britain has now officially asked to leave the Union and doubts as to its very survival abound. What happened?

The original ideas of the founders of the European idea, people like Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi and Robert Shumann, who believed in individual freedom and competition, were gradually replaced by an administrative state run by the unelected bureaucrats of the European Commission that is progressively less democratic.

This is what has caused a popular revulsion about the European project among its citizens and not populists like Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders and Victor Orban.

Here are just some of the problems that must be urgently solved if the EU is to have a life-span much beyond age 60.

His Holiness Dalai Lama’s visit today (4/06) to  Tawang, in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, has created great consternation in China. In a veiled threat, the Chinese foreign ministry has warned India not to facilitate the Tibetan spiritual leader’s visit to Tawang, saying the visit may severely impact India-China relations.

Tawang is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the world – for although the Potala in Tibet is larger, it is no longer a monastery having been converted into a tourist attraction by the Chinese Communists.  Tawang is also the monastery to which the Dalai Lama fled in his escape route from Chinese Occupied Tibet in 1959:

Ever since His Holiness and his tens of thousands of disciples escaped Chinese oppression by fleeing to India in 1959, China has been closely monitoring his movements in India and abroad.

China views him as a “splittist” (or separatist) who has consistently refused to accept Chinese control over Tibet. In reality, the Dalai Lama has accepted Tibet is a part of China, but has only demanded autonomy for Tibet, a predominately Buddhist region with a distinct language, ethnic group, and culture.

So why are the Beijing Communists coming unglued now over his visit to this almost inaccessible monastery?

For the past eight years, the Obama administration did everything in its power to empower Iran.  That included enabling Russia to became the leading member and the protector of the Iranian regime and its nuclear program.

This has created President Trump’s most urgent foreign policy challenge.  To face it, he has three basic options – the best of which is to cut a deal with Russia to ditch Iran.

The problem is that since Trump’s election, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1950s. 

That Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole, while the Clinton Foundation making hundreds of millions with corrupt Russian allies of Putin is ignored. 

How will Trump overcome this to make his greatest deal?

Iran is once again capturing headlines following more provocative ballistic missile tests in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf in recent weeks.

At the core of these tests, which violate the UN Security Council resolution, stands Tehran regime’s elite force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or Pasdaran.

The IRGC was and is an instrumental tool for the clerical regime to preserve its survival and maintain power at home for the last 38 years by domestic repression complemented with sponsoring terrorism and fundamentalism under the banner of exporting “the Islamic Revolution” abroad.  This elite force reports directly to the Supreme Leader.

In a new book, Iran: The Rise of the Revolutionary Guards’ Financial Empire, published earlier this month (March), the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), documents a major corporate and money grab by  the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC.  Thus the book’s subtitle:  How the Supreme Leader and the IRGC Rob the People to Fund International Terror.

It maps the vast business holdings and wealth amassed by the IRGC and the Supreme Leader.  It’s time to take that terrorist-sponsoring wealth away from them.