Globe Trot: Aleppo reveals a deadly ‘high-minded and cold-hearted’ U.S. policy

SYRIA: Convoys of evacuees from eastern Aleppo have again been halted today, reportedly after an explosion at a checkpoint. There also are reports of a bombing in Damascus.

With Syria, the Obama administration reveals “you cannot be both high-minded and cold-hearted at the same time,” writes Leon Wieseltier, and its policy has transformed the United States into “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time”:

“[I]t is a shameful and incontrovertible fact of our history that during the past eight years the values of rescue, assistance, protection, humanitarianism and democracy have been demoted in our foreign policy and in many instances banished altogether. The ruins of the finest traditions of American internationalism, of American leadership in a darkening world, may be found in the ruins of Aleppo.”

Russian special forces have been on the ground in Aleppo for weeks.

One of the most experienced aid heads I know said that efforts in Aleppo and nearby right now amount to “a suicide mission,” and I know of only one group, Barnabas Fund (also known as Barnabas Aid), which continues to partner through church clergy in the area.

IRAQ: Samaritan’s Purse, I learned this morning, will build a hospital in Bartella, a Nineveh town recently liberated from ISIS control just outside Mosul.

My take on ways to help in this conflict, plus a list of organizations working in Syria and Iraq to aid Christians but also others.

Great Britain has denied visas to prominent Iraqi clergy, including the Syriac archbishop of Mosul, Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf, one of the last to flee ISIS in Mosul in 2014.

CONGO: President Joseph Kabila’s second term ends Dec. 19, and he’s saying he won’t step down.

UNITED STATES: Long-time and widely respected national security observers are okay with Trump picks—Thomas Ricks on Gen. Michael Flynn and Michael Gerson on Rex Tillerson.

Stereotypes are poisoning American politics, writes development expert William Easterly.

KENYA: The latest bid to end a crippling doctors’ strike has collapsed.

GERMANY: The last surviving prosecutor from Nuremberg is still making it his mission to end war, and he just gave $1 million to the U.S. Holocaust Museum to that end.

Ice swimming is going from extreme ritual to competitive sport.

NOTE: Globe Trot is taking an end-of-year break, until Jan. 2. See you then.