Now that it seems all but certain that Obama will be unable to reach a grand accord with Putin, the window for a peaceful settlement of the crises in both Ukraine and Syria is steadily closing, opening up a small but growing possibility that both will explode in his final months in office.
By refusing to stand up to the deep state of the Beltway, which is furiously smarting from setbacks against Russia in the proxy wars of Ukraine and Syria, Obama may be sealing the fate of his legacy, at least in the short to medium term: instead of cutting its losses, the US is setting a firm course to lose even more hard-power influence in Europe and the Middle East.
In the coming days and weeks, as it becomes clear that Assad won't step down even as part of a political transition, his most implacable enemies - the CIA and the Saudis - will seriously consider launching a brand-new covert escalation of proxy warfare against Damascus and its allies Tehran and Moscow.
The problem? They've lost Turkey, since Erdogan has all but settled for his own sphere of influence in northern Syria at the Kurds' expense in return for backing off overthrowing Assad. And unless he can be convinced to risk an all-out war with Russian and Assad-backed Kurdish militants, he won't be swayed back into the regime-change-at-all-costs camp.
This puts Langley and Riyadh in a quandary: concede defeat, and their longstanding power-broking nexus in the region would suffer a seemingly fatal reputational blow with both allies and enemies; yet if they escalate with neither full buy-in from the Obama administration nor the critical cooperation of Ankara, they could bring an even worse reversal to overall American and Saudi interests than a mere loss of credibility. Unfortunately for Obama, he loses either way.
That's because the only sensible way forward at this point is to follow Turkey and get fully behind a deal with Russia: not only would it ensure the success of the main US objective of defeating ISIS, but it would give both the US and Saudi Arabia a similar opening to Turkey's to shape facts on the ground in that vast chunk of Syrian real estate that Assad has given up militarily recapturing.
Instead, caving to the sore losers inside the Beltway and their friends in Riyadh, the lame-duck president is reducing what little leverage America has left over the Syrian peace process to virtually nothing. This increases the chance that even he will finally get suckered into an ill-advised eleventh-hour military intervention against Assad, making a bad outcome for the US even worse. For one thing, such an act will give Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus a green light to mercilessly exterminate the remnants of the Syrian revolution from the face of the earth.
The inconvenient truth is that Mr. Assad enjoys far more support among the Syrian population than any one secular or Islamist opposition faction individually, and will thus retain enormous clout even in a future democratized and possibly federalized system. And because the long civil war has largely purged regime-dominated regions of dissent, even as it has also solidified Assad's standing as the most credible protector of its Christian, Druze, Shiite, and Alawite minorities, the Baath dictator probably has even more potential electoral support now than at any previous point of the conflict, when, before the Russian intervention, he perhaps would have acceded to Western demands to step down provided he be allowed to run for the presidency under a new constitution - which of course the CIA and its regional Sunni proxies have never considered an acceptable endgame.
Alas, if there's anything Obama should have learned by now about foreign policy, it's that unless he himself exercises decisive initiative on the world stage and as commander-in-chief, sooner or later he'll find himself dancing to someone else's tune. When he failed to enforce his infamous "red line" on Assad's use of chemical weapons in 2013, i.e. by following through on what was essentially a pledge to appease his own defense-intelligence establishment, he effectively allowed himself to be corralled into the present quandary by Putin and the Iranian ayatollahs instead. Yet now, having refused to wholeheartedly embrace the Russo-Iranian program for Syria, he's left himself vulnerable to being yanked violently back the other way by the Beltway apparatus.
This same dynamic is no less true of Ukraine - a crisis which from the get-go has been intricately intertwined with the one in the Middle East.
There can now be little doubt that the unusually aggressive US effort to topple the democratically elected pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych in late 2013 - even despite its slide into police-state repression - was a direct consequence of the Washington establishment's desire for revenge against Moscow for one-upping it on the Syrian chemical weapons issue, which had thrown US-Saudi designs in the Levant haywire. When this new intervention, which offended Russian interests far more directly, predictably backfired, too, Obama was caught off guard yet again: it was as though he sleepwalked right into the bear's claws because he let the neocon war party operate his defense and foreign policy apparatus on virtual autopilot with regards to the ex-Soviet space.
Unsurprisingly, given how little stomach the American public has for expending blood or even treasure on places they can't even find on a map, Ukraine like Syria became another halfhearted interventionist quagmire for the White House in 2014, as the Kremlin punished American insolence in its frontyard by annexing Crimea and then taking a bite of eastern Ukraine proper.
The two Minsk accords - the first in September 2014 and the second in February 2015 - have thus far held a tenuous overall truce despite chronic spikes of violence between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region, on top of the occasional flareup of tensions around Crimea and over ethnic Russian strongholds like Odessa and the neighboring Russian-Moldovan enclave of Transnistria. But this uneasy draw may now be drawing to a close.
Having thoroughly - though hardly surprisingly - disappointed its Western sponsors with its essentially unreformed corrupt patronage system, the "pro-Europe" post-Maidan government in Kiev is standing on its last legs of legitimacy with both its own people and its foreign backers. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has now unilaterally essentially withdrawn from Minsk II by demanding that Russia relinquish control of the Donbas border even before any political concession is made with regards to the separatists' autonomy in a new federation. This follows a sharp increase in daily violence along the Ukrainian-separatist front lines that has held up all summer.
Yet more activity involving "ceasefires" or "truces" and international "monitors" is being reported with every passing week, and although Russia and Ukraine have thankfully moved back from the brink yet again after the latter's alleged sabotage incursion into Crimea last month, the overarching geopolitical situation which underpins the localized violence has only worsened, especially from Kiev's perspective.
The way things are going, by 2018 or 2019 at the latest, without an implementation of Minsk II, the breakaway Donbas People's Republic (DPR) will de facto have either set up a completely independent full-fledged government recognized by the Kremlin, or worse, Moscow will have finally said "to hell with you" to Kiev and annexed the region outright.
Poroshenko and Putin alike both see that the West's resolve in upholding its sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict is fraying at the seams, despite yet another renewal this summer; the true storm cloud which is gathering over the former, however, is that the clock is ticking on his powerful Western and American political support.
Should Donald Trump win the US presidency, it would embolden already-surging populists in France, Germany, and Italy in their 2017 and 2018 elections - and this on top of Brexit. Like Trump, these continental European neo-nationalists in particular are strongly opposed to the whole confrontation with Moscow, and in fact the Kremlin has for years cultivated ties with them to blunt Anglo-American leverage over the EU that's largely behind the anti-Russian tilt of the bloc.
The danger for Obama, then, is that if and when Trump appears to gain such traction over Hillary Clinton between now and November 8 that the bombastic billionaire's non-enmity towards or even admiration of Putin suddenly goes mainstream in America, Washington will be dealing with a badly cornered Ukrainian client and ally. Poroshenko won't be the problem: as an oligarch with political authority as well, he has far too much to lose making hay of a deteriorating situation vis-à-vis Moscow, and judging by his recent statements, has already come to terms with far weaker Western support in the near future. The problem rather will be the embattled Ukrainian leader's own increasingly restive right flank: a Putinist tilt on either side of the Atlantic could drive these nationalists (including fringe neo-fascists) into such a tizzy that they'll make it utterly impossible for Kiev to work with Moscow on Minsk II from a position of weakness; indeed, it's probably for this very reason that Poroshenko has already preempted them by shifting rightwards on Minsk II and demanded full Ukrainian sovereignty be returned unconditionally at the outset.
We can only speculate just how far Kiev will push the envelope, and in fact even the possibility of such a dire accommodation of Russian interests by a newly confrontation-weary Washington may be farfetched or premature; but again for Obama, the underlying tension and contradiction here is deeply rooted and solidly structured, giving him far less leeway or wiggle room to find any common ground or bridge to the opposing side than his idealistic view of how the world should work has steeled him for.
But alternately, it could well be Obama himself who, feeling hemmed in by the alleged Trump-Putin nexus so darkly promulgated by the Democratic party establishment, sees fit to double down on a new uncompromising stance on Ukraine: since the US isn't even party to Minsk II anyway, all this would take is an intransigent insistence from the White House that its French and German allies go along with Kiev's new hard line regarding the Russia-Donbas frontier.
And that's when all hell could break loose. Once certain that the West's treachery on Minsk II has been given the final certification from Obama personally, Putin will then have no reason to remain in an arrangement so utterly twisted to harm Russian security. Being ever careful, the ex-KGB spook won't be one to escalate beyond the necessary precautions, and in fact will exhaust all back channels to dial down the elevated tensions inevitably triggered by a Minsk meltdown; but at such a juncture, it's Barack Obama who will be strictly at the mercy of Providence.
Should the spark of some armed incident ignite, the outgoing 44th president of history's exceptional free and democratic society will be trapped into a fateful decision whether or not to enforce yet another awful "red line" well outside the bounds of vital American interests. Only this time, having been burned by everything that's transpired since the last "red line" retreat gave his archrival an opening to challenge American credibility in the first place, Obama will be doubly trapped into actually pulling the trigger for a change: inasmuch as he believes that American credibility is a vital national interest, and inasmuch as that credibility is tied to his own legacy as an effective leader of the free world, he may have no recourse but to charge head-on into the Russian ambush.
We can only hope and pray that even if Obama truly allows himself to be dragged into such an unmitigated disaster, that the effective powers-that-be over him will be governed by far sounder realpolitik and common strategic sense, so as to be on every lookout to give him (if not his successor) the easiest and quickest way out. Perhaps it will take a tragedy, but Putin won't miss such an opportunity to endear himself with the American elite and the American people alike.
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