Tuesday night, Syrian autocrat Bashar al-Assad flew to Moscow to visit Russian Vladimir Putin to show solidarity and express gratitude for Russia’s help in Syria, CNN reported.
“Thank you for supporting Syria’s unity and independence,” Assad said.
Assad’s rhetoric of unity and independence demonstrates his and Putin’s strategy of eliminating all moderate rebel factions, including ones affiliated with the CIA, in order to pit the government against the extremist Islamic State and portray Assad as the lesser evil. This visit highlights Russia’s prioritizing propping up the Assad regime, which protects the assets it has in Syria, over the resolution the U.S. negotiated with Russia, to combat ISIS.
Putin’s revamped military enables him to prop up the government of Assad and engage the U.S. in a proxy war as it tries to combat the Islamic State and topple the incumbent regime. The military has made enough inroads in Syria against rebels (and ISIS to a certain extent) in such a short amount of time that the United States’ four years in the region looks ineffective in contrast.
The proxy war between fighting ISIS and protecting Assad is becoming a neo-Cold War between America and Russia, which Putin is using to reveal America’s impotency as a world power and assert Russia as the stronger country.
The Russo-Syrian alliance flies in the face of the negotiations of the 2012 Geneva I Conference on Syria, which Russia supported. The negotiations outline the need for a transitional government body with full executive powers to guide Syria to republican government‚ presumably without Assad. Russia repeatedly flouts this negotiation and its conversations with the U.S. on greater cooperation in the region.
The U.S. and Russia are again in a Cold War state of mind. Syria has replaced Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and violation of the Geneva agreement has replaced the violation of the Warsaw Pact in Hungary.
The airstrikes reveal that the rebel factions that threaten the Assad regime are Russia’s only targets. Assad’s recent visit to Moscow nullifies all pretenses that Russia’s top priority is ISIS. In fact, combating ISIS is not even Sunni Saudi Arabia or Turkey’s first concern, both of whom primarily support the rebels and the removal of Assad. Only the U.S. is concerned first with destroying ISIS, and second with toppling Assad. The disparity of goals in the Mideast, with some entities benefiting from ISIS presence, has allowed Russia and the Islamic State to continue to gain ground.
In addition to diverging interests destabilizing the region, Obama’s strategy of keeping American troops out of Syria has limited American involvement to airstrikes, funds, and training rebels, a strategy which has failed so far. Russia’s “guns a-blazing” strategy has succeeded insofar as it plays upon the impotency of the U.S., props up the Assad regime by attacking rebels, and fights ISIS.
Former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued in The Wall Street Journal that the U.S. wanted to remove Assad but was unwilling to generate effective political or military leverage to achieve that aim, or to put forward an alternative political structure to replace him. This has allowed Russia, Iran, Islamic State and other terrorist organisations to move into the vacuum. And Russia has stepped in with never-before-seen planes and state-of-the art weapons, courtesy of Putin’s 1990’s military reforms.
The U.S. is in a disadvantaged position in this proxy war, with a strategy that the president himself has acknowledged has not worked and a power-hungry Russia ready and eager to assert itself as the new dominant world power. Assad’s visit only confirms Russia’s commitment to its interests in the Middle East and the lengths it will go to to ensure that the Assad regime stays in power and its bases are protected. If Russia continues its airstrikes in support of Assad, the war will be between Assad and the extremists: a recipe for an aggravated refugee crisis and heinous human rights violations.
