The Syrian conflict globalised

In last week’s editorial on the continuing interchanges between the major powers, in particular the United States and Russia, we noted that both powers had come to realize that Syria’s civil war was forcing an increasingly direct diplomatic confrontation between them.

Then, the statements of Presidents Putin and Obama at the United Nations during the course of the week, indicated that there was little possibility of positive interchange between them. President Putin in particular made allusions to previous Western or Nato behaviour in the area. He referred not only to the Syrian conflict, but to their intervention in Libya that saw the overthrow of President Gaddafi; and, in his view, the disorder left by the United States in Iraq, including a virtual political dismemberment of the country.

As is now well known, even before the week was over, Putin indicated the extent of his dissatisfaction with a direct physical intervention by Western powers in Syria, who would have justified such intervention as forcing a democratization or a widening of the circle of rule in the country.

From the perspective of the countries of the developing world, this turn to Middle East-Great Power politics at the UN, overshadowed what was in their view a session intended to initiate and publicise new UN initiatives towards economic development, the so-called effort at attaining Sustainable Development Goals, and new commitments towards ensuring effective management of global climate change.

It is nevertheless true, however, that although the commitments to these initiatives were formally made by developed and developing powers, a brutal realism dawned on the developing countries as major power global geopolitics took over the stage, and the majority of developing countries at the General Assembly were constrained to witness the predominance of the traditional power plays of the major powers.

For this Assembly was, indeed, a session that was intermediated by the presence of Pope Francis, and the Assembly’s formal sanctification of two agreements recently arrived at, the first between the major powers and Iran for inhibition of nuclear weapons development in that country; and the other for the normalisation of relations between the United States and Cuba after sixty years of hostility. Yet it came to be overshadowed by the traditional jostling of the major powers.

In that context, much speculation would have been in order, as an explanation has been sought of the initiative taken by President Putin to directly, militarily, intervene in Syria in order to protect an apparently deteriorating situation of President Assad’s regime. But it was preceded, of course, by the increasing Western alerts about the massive migrations of Syrian refugees, mainly towards the countries of the European Union, a situation that was beginning to cause domestic concern among the smaller EU countries in particular, more proximate to the Middle East, or accessible to the refugees.

It appears also that this was a situation that, apparently from Putin’s perspective, was inducing the Nato powers to consider ending the source of the trouble by eliminating Assad, seen as the source of the Europeans’ new problem. In addition, it would appear that Putin had come to the view that the US government would be increasingly unable to resist appeals for dealing with the migration problem, not as a humanitarian one, but at its source – deemed to be the presence of Assad.

Public analysis in the Western world has seemed to be indicating that Putin will therefore have felt that a certain degree of pressure would have come on President Obama to take steps to organize some form of Nato attempt to secure a change of regime in Syria itself, acceptable to the anti-Assad forces in the country. In that context, some analysts have argued that Putin would have felt that a Nato initiative, not dissimilar, though not as drastic as the one that removed President Gaddafi of Libya from power, might have been on the cards.

Though this was probably unlikely, it was obvious that the European Nato powers, in the face of an issue which was causing them major difficulty, were not averse to some form of regime change, necessitating the removal of Assad from leadership.

At the other end of the issue, however, it seems to be the case that to Putin, however Assad was removed, a replacement personality and a replacement regime would hardly be one favourable to Russia, under the protection as it would be, of some form of Nato military cover and preservation.

Such a geopolitical turn of events seems to have been anathema to Putin, who has decided to place his bets on what might be called a protective intervention, as he no doubt anticipated that simply in the course of time, Assad would be unable to resist Western pressure. Russia would then be without an influence in a part of the world where, as in Egypt, the Nato powers have accepted a political regime, by no means less authoritarian, or less hostile to opposing forces than Assad’s.

Geopolitics has dominated Russian thinking, and Putin has decided to support the political regime which was an ally long before the outbreak of the civil war.