On the anniversary of Russia's entry into the Syrian civil war, and little more than half a year since Moscow announced the end of its initial mission, it appears increasingly likely that this whole operation in the shattered country is actually just beginning.
With additional Russian warplanes heading back to Syria, it probably won't be long before the previous peak of Russian aerial bombardment over the course of the last year is reached or even exceeded.
The key difference now is that the political process to end the war is all but dead in the wake of the collapse of ceasefire talks with the US, leaving the Kremlin with no choice but military re-escalation. Contrary to the popular Western narrative, Vladimir Putin intervened in Syria out of perceived vital interest, not some vain desire to reassert Russian power or make up for the supposed Russian quagmire in Ukraine. And it is out of this same vital interest - preventing the fall of the Syrian regime to an insurgency increasingly dominated by radical jihadists - that he will now double down for a longer fight.
The West has never understood or appreciated the Russian view that even if a so-called "moderate opposition" takes center stage in a new Syrian government after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, it will very likely be muscled out within months by extremists with whom it was joined in a marriage of convenience so long as both still had a common foe in Damascus. Moscow entered the conflict with few illusions about what had to be done: these "moderates" had to be brought to heel first, so as to be forced into a choice between reconciliation with the regime and a continued devil's bargain with their jihadist bedfellows.
If there's any miscalculation Putin has made, it has been to underestimate the extent to which the whole Syrian crisis had long since become a strategic red line for Saudi Arabia in its deteriorating proxy war with Iran. To the former, any settlement short of Assad's removal was and still is considered a major blow to the millennial Sunni Arab supremacy over Shi'ism in the heart of the Islamic world. As such, Riyadh has taken great care to steer the exiled Syrian opposition in the direction of a blatantly sectarian goal of Sunni Arab majoritarianism in a post-Assad government, with few if any explicit concessions to minority rights in one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse pieces of real estate in the region.
Had the Syrian peace process been driven primarily by feuding Syrians, it would have been a rather simple affair for Russia to mediate: in exchange for the regime's granting of full amnesty for rebels and dissidents and some limited posts in government (including more federalized local administrations) for their leaders, the insurgency would turn its guns away from Damascus and towards Al Nusra Front and especially ISIS.
But the Saudis would have none of this. Knowing full well that those rebel groups with the most leverage over Damascus and Moscow were the very ones it supported most fervently in an uncompromising stance against Assad, Riyadh corralled the Syrian nationalists into its maximalist straitjacket, such that by the time the opposition entered the Geneva peace process last winter, it was effectively little more than a front for the Gulf kingdom's regional agenda.
Clearly the Saudis wanted to keep the pressure on Assad at a very high level and retain a sense of escalation capacity; their new crown prince, the hotheaded young Muhammad bin Salman, was keen on acquiring the credentials of a tough military leader capable of duking it out with Iran (especially in Yemen) increasingly independently of the US. He seems to have pushed his father, the more circumspect King Salman himself, into an overall more hawkish stance vis-à-vis the Russo-Iranian axis than would have been advisable; his confidence, however, was apparently founded on an outdated perception of the depth of American involvement in the region generally and the resolve of the Obama administration to enforce the Iran nuclear deal specifically.
It has finally gradually emerged over the course of 2016 - in the wake of the final cutoff of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in January - just how much of US-Saudi policy since mid-2015 has been predicated on a false assessment of leverage over Tehran with regards to sanctions over the Islamic republic's nuclear weapons program. When the nuclear deal was secured with Russian brokership at the UN in July 2015 - at virtually the same time that Iran was coordinating with Moscow's planned foray into Syria - it was widely thought in Washington that Tehran's desire for renewed access to international markets and investment would outweigh its interest in Assad's survival in Syria (a point on which even Ayatollah Khamenei was expected to be flexible if it came to it).
This has turned out to be the central blunder of the Obama administration - one that it seems to have tried to hide or downplay with its own media and its Mideast allies alike, but which has become increasingly hard to do so.
As Saudi-Iranian relations nosedived over the execution of Saudi Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr around new year's, an enraged Tehran saw fit to test the limits of US resolve to ward off the creeping Russo-Iranian usurpation of the longstanding American-Saudi "power couple" status in the region. The campaign to prop up Assad noticeably intensified and scored key successes against the rebels in the following weeks, culminating in the first US-Russian ceasefire agreement of late February; in the meantime the Iranians brazenly stepped up their provocations against US naval personnel and vessels in the Gulf, kidnapping a group of American sailors who were then released in negotiations that involved a secret reimbursement of $400 million of previously frozen Iranian funds.
Since then, through two failed Syrian ceasefires, the Russo-Iranian position has gradually but undeniably further improved at the expense of the American-Saudi one, both in the Levant and more broadly across western Eurasia as a whole. The tectonic paradigm shift is not military or political but socioeconomic: as Europe grapples with the double whammy of a creaky financial system and an unassimilable mass of Muslim refugees fueling a nativist-populist backlash, a resilient Russia's expanding commercial ties with upstart giants China and India make it far less isolated than Western sanctions purport to make it; Moscow has matched Saudi-led OPEC tit-for-tat in the production and market-share battle, notably stealing critical Chinese business from Riyadh since 2014. Iran, too, is increasingly in cahoots with Delhi and Beijing as well as Moscow: the great Eurasian powers are collectively becoming so self-sufficient in their economic and geopolitical heft that it's actually the stagnant and confused West which is beginning to look isolated.
This has enormous implications for Saudi Arabia and its junior Gulf Sunni monarchies: their principal livelihood having been decimated by none other than their great ally and protector (the shale-fracking revolution in the US), whose public has turned increasingly hostile (the US Congress' overriding of Obama's veto of JASTA against the Saudi government), they could soon feel hung out to dry by Washington so badly that they'll have to reconsider the entire basis of their foreign and security policy.
All this means that the Russian operation in Syria, now ramping up once more after a brief halt in March, has far more potential sustainability than the West and especially the US assumes to be the case. The combination of Russian and Iranian austerity and zeal in the face of American fecklessness, halfheartedness, and confusion on top of Saudi exposure and vulnerability in a chronically cheap-oil environment marked by dramatically elevated Western Islamophobia - to say nothing of the badly frayed US-Turkish relationship in the wake of the failed July putsch against president Recep Tayyip Erdogan - points to an irreversible decline of the regional power structure which has enthroned Washington atop the Middle East for four decades. Perhaps the bigger question already is how badly these developments will harm US influence further afield, in both Europe and further eastern Asia.
Russia for its part (and Putin specifically) has little cause for sudden dramatic escalation of any considerable magnitude; its airpower and other support of the Syrian regime's war effort (to include a ground presence of advisers and limited deployment of combat personnel) has the wherewithal to be incrementally upgraded and augmented in such a way that the political and diplomatic aspects of an intensifying "great game" between regional and global powers - founded ultimately upon socioeconomic factors across vast lands and habitats - will predetermine and undergird the actual military strokes and strikes (and counterstrokes and counterstrikes).
In that regard, it's probably little wonder that Obama and Kerry have been reduced to the proverbial chickens running around with their heads cut off when it comes to the Syrian problem: having long ago been dealt bad cards in the poker match, at long last their bluffs are being called by their opposing numbers who are ever more confident of holding the winning hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment