As the Syrian ceasefire rapidly dissolves into little more than a diplomatic facade, a cornered Barack Obama has resorted to reminding the world that there simply isn't a plausible military solution to the Syrian conflict, as if merely pleading with the Russians, Iranians, and Syrian regime about how long and tough the fighting ahead will be can deter them now, despite having failed to do so in the past.
The problem is, this is the same Obama who confidently proclaimed a year ago that the Russians were stumbling into a quagmire like the US fiasco in Iraq by entering the already protracted Syrian civil war on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad. As it is, a year later the situation is anything but a quagmire from Moscow's perspective.
The Kremlin has achieved its primary goal: militarily stabilizing the core areas of the Assad regime in western Syria, including the capital of Damascus in the southwest, the major cities of Homs and Hama in the west-central region, and the entire Mediterranean coast to include the largest port, Latakia in the northwest, as well as the important Russian naval installation at Tartus further south. Between these key urban areas, their interconnecting supply routes and substantial surrounding control buffers, the pro-regime coalition has essentially secured nearly two-thirds of the remaining Syrian population.
Should the shattered commercial center of Aleppo in the far north fall as well, this will jump to about three-quarters; it is recognized by all parties to the conflict that an Assad victory in Aleppo - a distinct possibility in the coming weeks - will be a potentially lethal blow to the non-ISIS insurgency trying to force him to abdicate.
With a contiguous stretch of territory from Aleppo all the way down to Damascus, the regime will have locked down the lion's share of "useful Syria" - the best farmland, the traditional centers of industry and commerce, and most especially all access to the sea. Even though ISIS will still physically control much of Syria's oil and gas reserves in the desert hinterland, whilst the rebels will retain their enclave in northwestern Idlib province and part of neighboring Aleppo province, the extent of this military victory will be such that Assad will no longer be under pressure to enact a political transition that incorporates the Syrian opposition.
At that point, the combination of military and political advantage at the disposal of the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian backers will be formidable: the government-held sector will be wealthier and more populous than the rebel, Kurdish, and ISIS sectors put together. It will further be aided by the fact that each of these three rival statelets will be hostile to one another, perhaps even more so than any will be to Damascus; tensions between the Kurds and the non-ISIS rebels will prove especially useful for Assad to stoke to "divide and rule" the northwestern and north-central region near the Turkish frontier.
Realistically, unless the new goal of Assad's enemies becomes outright partition, the war will essentially be over - the Russia-Iran-Syrian regime alliance will have won, the US-Turkey-Saudi-Syrian opposition coalition will have lost. Fighting will continue, but the political contest which the whole war was all about will have been decided. ISIS meanwhile will have become practically a sideshow.
Indeed, this militarily driven political conclusion to the Syrian conflict may be much closer than Obama thinks or admits. If he's still betting on a diplomatic peace process, even he should realize by now that it will largely be on Assad's, Putin's, and Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's terms - in other words, practically impossible. But if there's anything his administration has demonstrated when it comes to foreign policy, it's that when all else fails, hope alone apparently becomes the fallback strategy.
So the US is now reduced to pretending that it's not losing - quite badly, to be honest - in Syria. And it will probably be all the worse precisely because its official hopeful statements are set to become ever more divorced from harsh realities on the ground.
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