Extremism

President Obama called on world leaders to fight extremism with ideas, jobs and good governance, a strategy he has long advocated, but it did not elicit much enthusiasm

Vladimir Putin is back -- and stealing Barack Obama's thunder.

The Russian president showed up at the United Nations on Monday for the first time in a decade, proposing a coup against U.S. global leadership and seeking to wrest control of a coalition battling ISIS away from America's grip.

And he wasn't the only leader of a country challenging the United States to effectively upstage Obama at the annual global meeting, which a U.S. president traditionally uses to command the spotlight.

Speeches by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the 70th anniversary of the creation of the world body also left Obama defending not only his personal foreign policy legacy, which is already under assault at home from Republican presidential candidates, but the entire concept of a world order based on seven decades of U.S. global leadership

Putin's stance has forced the West to choose between a rock and a hard place in the Syrian crisis. He wants the US and Europe to accept Assad as an actual partner in the fight against "Islamic State" terrorists. This would not only stabilize the Syrian ruler's regime, but also clearly boost Russia's role as a global player on the world political scene. The Western isolation of Russia, intended to sanction Russia's interference in neighboring Ukraine, would then be broken.
Or business as usual
Without an agreement with Putin, the current situation in Syria would continue unabated, with the murderous war in the Middle East driving millions more from their homes, primarily toward Central Europe.
And, thus far, the third option - a risky mission of massive Western armed forces, with ground troops in Syria lacking a UN mandate - has not been openly considered by anyone.

The meeting also highlighted Putin's ability to command attention and shift it away from the Ukraine. A fragile peace plan in the former Soviet republic remains shaky at best, yet the crisis was largely a footnote at the U.N. gathering.

Instead, attention was riveted on what Putin would say about Syria and Assad as he arrived in New York for his first U.N. meeting in a decade. In the weeks leading up to his arrival, Putin ratcheted up his country's military presence in Syria and struck an intelligence-sharing agreement with Iran, Syria and Iraq, another nation fighting the Islamic State.

Both developments caught U.S. officials off guard.

As a promised counterattack appeared to fall apart, President Ashraf Ghani’s government sought to assure the Afghan public that the effort to retake the city from the Taliban would succeed.