Polemicists Don’t Always Write Real Good

Formerly prominent publisher, peer and controversial businessman Conrad Black writes difficult prose. He enters every op-ed battlefield with his adjective bazooka blazing.

You can tell when he writes a sentence he thinks is brilliant. Like this one, which constitutes a one sentence paragraph:

“We will all pad somnolently through the 19 months to next inauguration day, when any of the prominent Republicans or Hillary Clinton will take the presidential oath with a more purposeful and presumably more precise definition of America’s place in the world than the whimsical, capricious, and feckless dilettantism that has afflicted American foreign policy and accelerated the dilution of the foreign policy of its nominal allies in the last 15 years.”

Here is a sentence from the same article whose syntactic sense escapes me. Can you help iron this out?

“The Russians and Chinese, who, although they have sometimes facilitated Iranian nuclear ambitions, presumably from an addiction to anti-Western mischief-making, should have some concerns, as countries with Muslim minorities, about the principal Muslim rabble-rousing country in the world adding nuclear weapons to its arsenal.”