Putin
and Obama disagree on Syria? Think again
Behind
closed doors, Obama and Putin are closer on dealing with Assad than
they have been in years.
By MICHAEL HIRSH
9/30/15, 7:27 AM CET Updated 9/30/15, 7:40 AM CET
The bad blood
between Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin and their so-called dueling
speeches at the United Nations on Monday masks a deeper reality: The
two presidents are today in more alignment than they have been in
years on what to do about Syria. As a result, some sources suggest
that despite the tough rhetoric on the surface between the two
countries, there’s a much higher likelihood of an accommodation
with Moscow — an accommodation that will prolong Bashar al-Assad’s
regime and place the U.S. and Russia on the same side against the
so-called Islamic State (ISIL).
Secretary of State
John Kerry has scheduled several meetings on Syria in New York this
week with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov; the third is set
for Wednesday. Kerry also sat down with Assad’s other biggest ally,
Iran — specifically with Javad Zarif, Iran’s American-educated
foreign minister, with whom Kerry has grown much closer to in the
course of the Iran nuclear deal. (Zarif, for his part, made history
by shaking Obama’s hand in New York.) In a TV interview, Kerry
sketched out how “in exchange perhaps for something that we might
do,” he had discussed with his Russian and Iranian counterparts
putting pressure on Assad to keep him from dropping barrel bombs.
Meanwhile, President
Obama himself met with Putin for a longer-than-expected 90 minutes
and, in his own U.N. speech, edged back from his previous strident
calls for Assad to step down, saying that “realism dictates that
compromise is required,” and that this should mean “a managed
transition” rather than Assad’s immediate departure.
What “realism”
is Obama referring to? The European nations, which were largely
behind Obama in demanding Assad’s ouster a year ago, are beset with
a nightmarish Syrian refugee crisis. Absent any other credible
opposition to ISIL in Syria, it’s a crisis that would only grow far
worse if Assad were toppled any time soon. Obama, heading into his
final year in office, is facing a growing consensus that his failure
to do more to contain Syria’s horrific civil war could be the
single-biggest blot on his foreign-policy record. Even his former
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, criticized him over it this
week. Under pressure, the administration is casting about frenziedly
for a new approach. Now, in view of Putin’s fait accompli of
sending military aid to Assad, it may finally yield to the
inevitable.
A senior State
Department official told POLITICO Tuesday night that Kerry had called
a meeting of the major European allies and the Saudis, as well as
Qatr and the United Arab Emirates, to forge a united front before the
secretary of state’s meeting with Lavrov on Wednesday. The official
said that the United States was trying to find a way of cooperating
with the Russians against the Islamic State, including the use of
“kinetic operations,” without working with Assad. The official
said that the administration believes that the rebel coalition is
still providing the main military opposition to the Islamic State.
While Washingotn is still standing firm that Assad must go, “what
the political transition looks like and feels like is very much in
question right now,” the official said.
U.S. officials this
week notably backed away from opportunities to condemn the stepped-up
Russian military intervention in Syria. In his meeting with Putin,
Obama “made clear that we do not have — we are not opposed to
Russia playing a constructive role in the fight against ISIL,” a
senior administration official said in a telephone conference with
reporters on Monday. “We just want to make sure that, number one,
we are de-conflicting any activities within Syria, and number two, we
are working in tandem to address the political reality that is
fueling the conflict.”
“I think an
accommodation is possible,” says Atlantic Council director Frederic
Hof, who formerly served as the administration’s special adviser
for transition in Syria. “If people take a look at what’s already
been agreed by the [UN] P5, in terms of the Geneva Final Communique,
the formula’s there.”
The most tragic
irony of the new geopolitical landscape is that the U.S. and Russia
appear headed towards the same position on Assad where they were
three years and more than 150,000 lost lives ago — and before the
real rise of ISIL — when that communique was signed in Geneva and
opened the door to peace negotiations that never took off. “We
could have done this a long time ago,” says Joshua Landis, a Syria
expert at the University of Oklahoma who is sometimes consulted by
the administration.
Three years ago,
former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was a special UN envoy to
Syria who managed to get both Lavrov and then-Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton to sign the communique, which called for a political
“transition” in Syria. Afterward, Annan flew to Moscow and gained
what he believed to be Putin’s consent to begin to quietly push
Assad out. But suddenly both the U.S. and Britain issued public calls
for Assad’s ouster; Annan felt blindsided. Immediately afterward,
against his advice, then-UN Ambassador (now national security
advisor) Susan Rice offered up a “Chapter 7” resolution opening
the door to force against Assad, an effort that Annan felt was
premature. Annan resigned from his post a month later, privately
blaming the Obama administration for succumbing to fears of political
attacks from Mitt Romney and other Republicans during the 2012
presidential season. “He quit in frustration,” explains one
former close Annan aide. “I think it was clear that the White House
was very worried about seeming to do a deal with the Russians and
being soft on Putin during the campaign.”
Landis had advised —
long before such views became conventional wisdom — that Assad had
greater staying power than U.S. officials were saying back in 2012.
But, he says, “the price was too high a long time ago, because
Syria was not important. The French, the British, the Americans —
everybody was a coward. They hung the Syrian people out to dry
because it was too expensive domestically to make a deal with Assad.”
Hof, who was part of
the negotiating effort in 2012, agrees that the negotiations then
could have been better handled then and the harsh demand that “Assad
must go” voiced by Clinton and others was perhaps “gratuitous”
considering the need to compromise. Still, he says it’s far too
simplistic to suggest that Russia would have genuinely backed Assad’s
eventual departure then — and it’s less likely now, as Putin
declares frankly that only autocrats like Assad can save the Middle
East from total radicalization. By the same token, even if Obama
steps away from his calls for Assad’s ouster, it remains
politically difficult for him to deploy real force to help Putin’s
military effort in Syria. Launching air strikes in the newly
ISIL-held city of Palmyra, for example, will leave Obama open to
accusations that he’s become Assad’s air force.
Beyond that, the
political risk for Obama and the Democrats is that they are seen
welcoming the ostracized Putin back into the diplomatic fold — as
they’ve already done partially over the Iran nuclear deal — even
as he continues his partial occupation of Ukraine and declares openly
that he’s parting ways with the West on the basic issue of
democracy.
In his U.N. speech —
in stark contrast to Obama’s calls for democracy in his remarks
earlier in the day — Putin all but openly embraced autocracy as a
better form of government, at least in the Middle East, saying that
thanks to the West’s previous interference in the region , “instead
of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty
and social disaster.” Putin also took a shot at the American
Exceptionalist belief in the power of freedom and democracy,
taunting: “I cannot help asking those who have caused the
situation, do you realize now what you’ve done? But I am afraid no
one is going to answer that. Indeed, policies based on self-conceit
and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been
abandoned.”
Nonetheless, Kerry
appears to be pushing the new diplomatic effort with Moscow hard,
saying the United States and Russia agree on “some fundamental
principles” for Syria: “that Syria should be a unified country,
united, that it needs to be secular, that ISIL needs to be taken on,
and that there needs to be a managed transition,” Kerry told MSNBC.
Kerry himself, in
fact, is among the slew of former and current administration
officials who have criticized the president on this more than any
other issue. In 2013 he told a conference that the administration was
“late” in helping the once mostly secular rebels against Assad,
just as Hillary Clinton, now running for president, reminded viewers
this week that she’d advised more robust training, along with
former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint
Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey.
Kerry also told
Congress that “one of the reasons Assad has been using [chemical
weapons] is because they have, up until now, made the calculation
that the West writ large and the United States particularly are not
going to do anything about it.”
But now the
calculations have changed for the West writ large. Landis argues that
ever since millions of refugees broadsided Europe, turning the Syrian
war into a domestic crisis for government after government across the
continent, its leaders have backed down from their earlier hard-line
stances. “Now all the Europeans are climbing down from ‘Assad has
to go’ to ‘Assad’s got to go after the crisis is over,’” he
says. “There’s no alternative but to make that kind of
compromise.”
It was only two
years ago that Kerry and Lavrov worked closely together to resolve
the last major Syrian spillover. In the summer of 2013, when evidence
mounted that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons, Kerry
condemned Assad as a “thug and a murderer” who faced imminent
U.S. retaliation, only to find that an equivocating Obama was
undercutting and kicking the decision over to Congress. With help
from Lavrov, Kerry negotiated a deal with Assad that compelled the
Syrian dictator to surrender his chemical weapons.
Today the United
States — whether indirectly or not, and whether it is officially
admitting it or not — is working with Assad once again.
Authors:
Michael Hirsh
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