Remember when I said that President Obama was going to receive severe criticism for standing up to his own foreign policy establishment? The neo-cons are honing their critiques. William Kristol was on CSPAN this morning blasting the president, and Charles Krauthammer is using the same arguments in this morning’s Washington Post. Let’s take a look at part of Krauthammer’s argument:
Putin doesn’t care one way or the other about chemical weapons. Nor about dead Syrian children. Nor about international norms, parchment treaties and the other niceties of the liberal imagination.
He cares about power and he cares about keeping Bashar al-Assad in power. Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean — on which sits Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. This axis frontally challenges the pro-American Sunni Arab Middle East (Jordan, Yemen, the Gulf Arabs, even the North African states), already terrified at the imminent emergence of a nuclear Iran.
At which point the Iran axis and its Russian patron would achieve dominance over the moderate Arab states, allowing Russia to supplant America as regional hegemon for the first time since Egypt switched to our side in the Cold War in 1972.
The hinge of the entire Russian strategy is saving the Assad regime. That’s the very purpose of the “Russian proposal.”
That’s one way of looking at the world, but it’s a deeply delusional one. I don’t think Vladimir Putin is a humanitarian, but he isn’t totally indifferent to the site of gassed children. But let’s stipulate that Putin is primarily concerned with Russian equities in Syria. He’s also concerned with Islamic extremism on his southern border. What he’s not interested in is supporting radical Islamists in Iran. He isn’t pro-Shiite or anti-Sunni.
And we shouldn’t be either. In fact, this idea that the Sunnis are pro-western or pro-American is completely inaccurate. It’s true that we have longstanding working relationships with Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and some of the emirates in the Gulf. But we didn’t establish those relationships because we have some kind of preference for Sunnis over Shiites. In fact, the anchor of our Middle Eastern policy in the post-war era was Iran under the Shah. Because the Shah was a thug, we’ve suffered an enduring backlash from Shiites, but that doesn’t mean that the Sunnis like us much better. Certainly the al-Qaeda-aligned rebels in Syria have no love for America, but Arab public opinion is anti-American regardless of sectarian affiliation. Even the Christians are anti-American.
Krauthammer implies that Vladimir Putin wants a nuclear Iran which he believes will allow Russia to reemerge as a dominant force in the Middle East. He also thinks that preserving the crippled and morally compromised Assad regime will further Putin’s plan for regional dominance. Neither allegation is true or even modestly tethered to reality.
The simplest way of understanding why the U.S. and Russia have reached a point where they have enough mutual self-interest to work together on Syria is that neither side wants the Assad regime to fall to Sunni extremists. The U.S. and Russia have slightly different reasons for wanting to avoid that outcome, but since they share it it makes sense to avoid escalating the fight.
If the Assad regime falls completely, the resulting government will consider Russia an enemy and they will probably kick Russia out of its naval base and stop buying their weapons. Russia may also see an uptick in civil war veterans traveling to parts of the former Soviet Union to make trouble, as happened in the aftermath of the Russian-Afghan War of the 1980s.
America would welcome at least part of those consequences, but doesn’t want there to be a genocidal bloodbath carried out on religious minorities (particularly the ruling Alawaites, but also Christians and Druze) by battle-hardened Sunni extremists.
It’s hard to get your head around, but since the Assad regime has no prospect of ending the civil war and restoring order, the options available to the U.S. and the Russians align around a negotiated settlement that would preserve Russian influence in Syria and protect the Alawites from genocide, but that would remove the top regime officials and create some kind of power-sharing arrangement, perhaps on the Lebanese model.
If you insist on seeing this as a zero-sum game where either we win or the Russians win, and where we are aligned with pro-western Sunnis against anti-western Shiites, and that it all involves some dramatic game of dominoes in which what happens in Syria determines the outcome of the game, then you are going be wrong about everything.
But that’s kind of the neo-con brand, it is not?
