Email
It is no consolation at all to Syria's suffering people, stuck with Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime. But for Vladimir Putin, Russia's president and long-standing anti-western bogeyman, the decision to put military action on hold represents a signal diplomatic triumph with possible long-term strategic implications for Moscow's role in the Middle East and beyond.
Putin's unexpected proposal that Syria surrender its chemical weapons to the international community comprehensively snookered a politically cornered Barack Obama. The White House, not Assad, was disarmed; it simply did not see it coming.
Despite belated claims that the idea was under discussion for a year or more, the fact is Putin, with impeccable timing, made it his own – and won instant backing from Syria, Iran, the UN and relieved European allies.
Faced with overwhelming opposition to military intervention from the American public and a near certain defeat in Congress, Obama seized on the Russian démarche with almost embarrassing eagerness. That former UN inspectors say collecting chemical weapons in the midst of Syria's civil war may be unworkable, apparently mattered little to the US president at this moment of high angst – and even less in Putin's cynical world of great power gamesmanship.
"Putin's goal is to play for time, to push off the talk of strikes for as long as possible, because the longer he pushes them off the less likely they are," Philippe Moreau Defarges, of the French Institute of International Relations, in Paris, told Henry Meyer, of Bloomberg. "Hats off to the Russians, those guys are master diplomats. Putin and Assad have totally won this round."
For American conservatives keen on zapping Assad and supporting the rebels, the bailing out of Obama by the reviled Putin seems doubly offensive, amounting almost to a conspiracy to betray.
Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, was furious: "The proposal, he [Obama] must know, is absurd. Bashar Assad isn't going to give up all his hidden weapons in wartime … But it will take time, weeks, months, for the absurdity to become obvious. And it is time the president wants. Because with time … the Syria crisis can pass. It can dissipate into the air, like gas. The president will keep the possibility of force on the table, but really he's lunging for a lifeline he was lucky to be thrown."
The rightwing commentator Max Boot was scathing too: "This is not a serious alternative to military action … It is also a distraction from the real issue – which is not Assad's chemical weapons stockpile but the continuing existence of the Assad regime itself."
Some American liberals are equally appalled. Bill Keller, former editor of the New York Times, produced a list of the benefits accruing to Putin and Russia if his bid to head off US military intervention in Syria is ultimately successful.
"He has stalled and possibly ended the threat that his client thug, Assad, will be struck by American missiles for gassing his own people … He has diminished the already small prospect that the US will attempt to shift the balance in Syria's war. That sound you hear is John McCain's head exploding … He has further demoralised the Syrian resistance and strengthened the jihadi radicals among them, by demonstrating that American red lines mean little," Keller said.
Putin's deft intervention may achieve much more in advancing Russian interests. By forcing the Syrian crisis back to the UN security council, with the muddle-headed assistance of France's president, François Hollande, Putin can claim to be upholding the UN system and international law in the teeth of reckless American unilateralism.
This is truly ironic, given that for more than two years Russia has blocked effective UN action. But it will play well with China and the other Brics countries.
So, too, will Russia's apparent success in defending the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. After Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Moscow has been determined to prevent Syria falling prey to self-styled western liberators. This too is popular among developing world leaders, for obvious reasons.
Other benefits for Putin: Assad's Syria is Russia's main Arab ally, a bastion of Russian influence in the Middle East, and home to its only military base outside the former Soviet Union. He has now gone a long way, with Obama's unwitting collaboration, towards preserving this relationship. He has humbled an American president, always a good result for Russian nationalists. And if Putin pulls this off, Russia's revived pretensions as a superpower rival to the US will be enhanced, as will Putin's own claims to be a global statesman and not the oft portrayed mean-spirited autocrat overseeing Russia's repressive "managed democracy".
Obama famously tried to reset relations with Russia. Putin rebuffed him. Now Putin has engineered his own reset with the US, on his own terms; and for political favours received, payback will be expected. On a range of issues, from missile defence to Iran and human rights to energy supply, expect an emboldened Putin to be more bloody minded than ever.
;