Monday’s speeches at the UN General Assembly meeting revealed the true desires of Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama.

The US president wants to end his time in office without another war and without having to send more US troops to fight on foreign land.

He doesn’t want to resolve conflicts but to prevent them by diplomatic means, and if he can’t prevent them – he’d like to handle them in a way that minimizes the damage. He sees the US as a world leader and its number one superpower – for one, because it’s military is the largest and most advanced in the world, but mostly because its recovering economically, while rivals Russia and China are slowly deteriorating.

Putin has totally different goals. Besides his known ambition to return Russia to its tsar-glory days, an ambition held by communist leaders in their time, he also wants to gerrymander the world into spheres of influence. For instance, eastern Ukraine is mine – western Ukraine is yours, Syria is mine – Saudi Arabia is yours, and so on.

In order to realize this idea, Putin has recently increased his involvement in Syria. Bashar Assad gave the Russians what his father Hafez refused to his last breath. The Russians used to have one dock in the port of Tartus in Syria’s Alawite enclave, and now they have the entire port, as well as an air base north of Latakia.

Read the article in full at Ynet.