As the United States plans and executes a coordinated response with its allies to the latest chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria, it is already painfully apparent that no military strike against the regime of Bashar al-Assad will herald the start of a new effort to topple him in the seven-year-old civil war that has claimed over half a million lives. As such, the Trump administration is essentially gambling that it can come up with an attack that's at the same time crushing - even overwhelming - yet limited. Difficult as this would be in itself, the even greater risk is that it would trigger some kind of retaliation that would open the possibility of a wider and longer conflict - even if none of the nations involved actually want one.
That's because Iran, not Russia, is now the true swing factor behind the Assad regime in any US-led coalition action: and with the 2015 nuclear deal on the ropes since last fall, the US and its European and regional Mideast allies have already spent the entirety of 2018 clutching at straws for any kind of lever of remaining influence over Tehran's ambitions and behavior on the ground in Syria. They may thus find themselves with very little leverage and maneuver room to stop Iran from striking back on behalf of its client in Damascus in a way that Russia will not.
This is why the recent blowup of Western relations with Russia is so dangerous for the region: whilst Western capitals tend to see Moscow and Tehran as acting in tandem in boosting Assad and nefariously advancing the anti-liberal and anti-democratic agenda in the Levant, the facts have always been more nuanced. The Russian intervention in Syria in late 2015 was largely meant to prevent Damascus from becoming a Shiite-run satrap of the new Persian empire on the Mediterranean, but while Russia has clearly succeeded in saving Assad and even preventing a complete sectarian disintegration in the western core of the country, its diplomatic efforts to piece Syria back together whole have also flatly failed - with the result that a de facto partition is already occurring, even if highly favorable to the old Baathist regime.
Since late 2017, then, the situation both militarily on the ground and also diplomatically within the country has significantly tilted in Iran's favor at the expense of Russia's; while residual Russian airpower continues to give Assad his most important battlefield advantage over his rebel and jihadist adversaries, Iran has opportunistically rushed into the strategic gaps that Moscow has inevitably left as its deescalation-cum-peacemaking framework fell apart amidst renewed fighting on all fronts in tandem with a more general deterioration of its relations with the West and the US.
The critical turning point was in early February, when a massive US airstrike decimated a sizable detachment of Russian mercenaries in eastern Deir ez-Zor province along the middle Euphrates. In hindsight, the whole incident may have been deliberately engineered by Iran - whose advisers are typically in charge of pro-Assad forces in various sectors - to force Moscow to drastically toughen its Syrian stance against the US and Israel. The incident convinced Russia that the US planned to permanently occupy the eastern bank of the Euphrates with its Kurdish proxies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and hence there was a price Washington and Tel-Aviv had to pay: namely, they would have to get used to a beefed-up Iranian proxy presence south of Damascus, between the Syrian capital and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
Indeed, just days after the Deir ez-Zor fiasco, for the first time an advanced Iranian drone penetrated Israeli airspace, prompting an Israeli retaliatory airstrike that ended with an F-16 downed by Syrian antiaircraft fire after it had already crossed back over into friendly airspace; not only did this indicate a breach of earlier rules of engagement, it also unleashed a larger wave of Israeli strikes that inflicted substantial losses on Syrian air defenses and some Iranian assets, including an anti-US and anti-Zionist Shiite militia that had recently been brought in from Iraq.
It was later reported that only a direct intervention by Vladimir Putin stopped Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from ordering an even larger third wave of Israeli airstrikes which Moscow determined could have triggered a new Arab-Israeli war that would have sucked in Lebanese Shiite powerhouse Hezbollah in addition to the Syrian army and its allied, including other Iranian proxy, militias and paramilitaries. If so, that means Russia had laid down its red line for Israel: the Jewish state's air activities against the Syrian regime and its Iranian allies would only be allowed to reach a certain threshold before Russia could well turn its own formidable S-400 surface-to-air missile system on Israeli jets.
But in a broader sense, the aforementioned events of the first half of February both confirmed and further advanced the trends which by now have become ominously solidified, even if the US and its European allies now at the forefront of the threatened extraregional retaliation against Assad are blithely unaware of it. Namely, it is no longer Russia but Iran which holds the active retaliatory and escalatory cards against the US-led coalition still seeking to undermine Assad's rule even if it can't end it; this dangerously exposes Washington to Iranian options for tit-for-tat provocation and escalation when US leadership is wrongly focused far more intently on Russian reactions.
We cannot say whether Putin and the Kremlin were previously tipped off to the Syrian regime's - that is to say, Iran's - intent to shoot down an Israeli F-16 and trigger a risky cycle of escalation; but it's beyond doubt that once said cycle began, Russia was content to see Israel's desired level of punishment cut short. Thus Iran already has reason to think that should push come to shove, Russia will step in to block even the Americans from responding with overwhelmingly superior firepower to its counterpunches on behalf of Assad - after all, Moscow can in such a scenario absolve itself of any accusations of stirring the pot, because it would merely be intervening, even refereeing in a sense, a spiraling clash between Washington and Tehran.
Thus, the hour is late, and the chips are coming down: the grave danger now dangling over the Middle East and well beyond as Trump mulls his response for hitting Assad is that even short of intending to start a new phase of the Syrian war, it will force an Iranian retaliation against Israel. If the US ends up lobbing a few hundred as opposed to a few dozen cruise missiles at Syrian regime targets, the Ayatollahs may well determine that launching a few dozen rockets at Israel is a proportionate response - a warning that anything more will never at any point in the future be tolerated. All bets may then be off if Israel demands another round of more intensive US-led strikes: Trump will be loath to refuse an embattled Netanyahu, but neither will Iran back down because it may even double down on its rockets - not only in southern Syria but possibly Hezbollah's massive arsenal in Lebanon will by then come into play - in the knowledge that Russia will cap the American escalation with the threat of World War III.
Iran, not Russia, will make the US pay for hitting Syria hard in the mistaken belief that it can be done with impunity.
