Profits and Losses

The latest episode of the Syrian crisis is worthy of being taught in the most prestigious schools of political science and the most famous diplomatic academies. It has allowed the world to witness firsthand a pitiless but calculated power struggle between two powers of international caliber, a confrontation underlined by an immeasurable number of internal, regional and continental factors, where the slightest faux pas could have caused a major global crisis.

It is certainly not our local players who will succeed in sorting out the delicate game that has been played these two last weeks. Because they are not personally involved, they are too passionate to be able to provide a logical explanation or to deliver an honest and objective analysis. They are already taking over the media to defend their protégés, by mixing fantasy, fiction and reality. Between “Assad has defeated Obama” or “the end of the Syrian regime is imminent,” the explanations proposed are reductive, whereas the reality is much more complex and, above all, nuanced.

However, there are some constants that are impossible to circumvent, one of them being that the America of today is no longer what she used to be. This isn’t the opinion of the author of this article, but of famous writers and American public figures, like, for example, the famous judge Jeanine Ferris Pirro (of Lebanese origin, by the way), who literally demolished Barack Obama during a remarkable television interview (the video is available on YouTube).

The signs of the declining influence of the United States have never been clearer. The hesitations, the quick changes of opinion, the confusion and the contradictions that characterized the remarks and actions of Barack Obama and his team were the clear proof of this. A strong America should have been determined, confident and coherent.

The U.S. president got off to a bad start in his military adventure. By drawing a “red line” for Bashar al-Assad not to cross, Obama was himself caught in a trap that ultimately closed on him on Aug. 21. American public opinion, bottle-fed for five years on the withdrawal from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, now suddenly finds itself invited to endorse military intervention in an unlikely conflict, where it is difficult to clearly distinguish the good guys from the bad. The more the campaign launched by Obama and his team to convince the Americans of the legitimacy of an engagement in Syria intensified, the more opponents it gained. On Sept. 9, 63 percent of Americans were against the war.

Deprived since the beginning of the Syrian crisis of the protection of international law thanks to the Sino-Russian veto at the Security Council, Barack Obama is discovering that he lacks the protection of public support too. He is therefore falling back on the support of the U.S. politicians in Congress, to whom he is appealing. But there too, the results are uncertain, especially in the House of Representatives. Asking representatives to support an unpopular war, within two months of the by-elections, was a serious error of judgment on the part of the administration.

Meanwhile, Obama had lost the support of his allies, after the disaffection of Great Britain and other European countries — with the exception of France — and the absenteeism of his traditional allies, Canada and Australia.

It was therefore a Barack Obama without legal, political or popular support and without a coalition who arrived on the battlefield. Even though he decided to bypass these limitations, other obstacles stood in his way — Russia, for a start. While advocating a diplomatic solution, Moscow assembled an increasingly large naval squadron against the U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean. Not even during the Cold War had the two international powers had a face-off of that kind. At the same time, Russia responded to the American arguments on Syria, one by one, by proposing its counterarguments. Whether political, diplomatic, media or military, none of the areas of confrontation with the U.S. was left unopposed by the Russians.

Another just as significant obstacle was Washington’s difficulty in measuring the nature and magnitude of the response of Syria and its allies.

For all these reasons, Barack Obama was quick to seize the opportunity presented to him by Russia’s initiative. Only history will tell us if it wasn’t the American president himself who whispered it in the ear of his Russian counterpart during their short interview in the wings of the G-20 summit.

Does that mean that Bashar al-Assad has defeated Obama? Certainly, the strike that could have threatened the Syrian president’s regime has been postponed. But the price he has paid is not insignificant: He will have to dismantle his chemical arsenal, which constitutes his principal weapon of strategic deterrence against the Israeli nuclear arsenal.

Russia, on the other hand, is reaping the benefits of this power struggle — it is now establishing itself as a powerful force on the international scene and a leading player in the eastern Mediterranean.