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.
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