Syria is the price America must pay for underestimating Russian power

Breaking what was quickly becoming a deafening silence on the whole issue in light of its recent dramatic turn for the worse, Obama openly admits that the Syrian civil war "haunts" him as he prepares to wrap up his eight-year presidency.

With no end to the five-and-a-half-year conflict in sight, even as fatalities approach up to half a million, such an acknowledgement from a leader known for reservation and lack of hyperbole underscores just what a disaster Syria has become for US foreign policy.

Obviously, Obama's immediate interest is to defend his own decision-making against the storm of criticism that's sure to intensify in his final months in office; this indicates that with Kerry's diplomacy having failed, he's essentially checking out of the Syrian crisis altogether.

Kerry's latest proposal that both Russia and Syria ground their warplanes in the wake of the ceasefire's collapse was nothing short of ludicrous desperation: his plea's spectacular failure has forced the poor Pentagon chiefs to yet again clarify to Congress that such a US-imposed no-fly zone amounts to a declaration of war against both Assad and Putin. A war that was already off the table against Syria alone back in 2013, and which has become sheer fantasy since Russia's intervention a year ago.

The Obama administration is now confronted with its most obvious shortcoming of the entire Syrian morass: namely, that while it's stopped pursuing regime change in Damascus, it simply can't renounce it either.

America's halfhearted commitment to this maximalist goal - removing Assad - was already plainly exposed by Obama's backtrack on the "red line" of chemical weapons use three years ago, which initially opened the door to Russia's upending of the US role in Syria. Thereafter, Washington fanned the flames of the Syrian insurgency with monetary and arms assistance via its Gulf and Turkish allies, in the ultimately accurate calculation that this would out-escalate the intensified Iranian and Hezbollah support for the Syrian regime. But everyone in Washington from Obama on down severely underestimated Putin's Russia: not only Moscow's resolve to retain its strategic outpost on the eastern Mediterranean, but even more so the raw power it would bring to bear (pun intended) to do so.

So Syria is the price America must pay to learn this lesson - except don't hold your breath that we'll actually learn it. Unless Trump first upsets Hillary and then effectively fires the entire defense-intelligence Beltway brass, we can only fall back to more halfhearted (even quarter-hearted) measures to try to achieve even more outlandish goals (i.e. booting Russia out of Ukraine); we will suffer ever more humiliating defeats that make Russia and Putin specifically look even bigger.