As usual, Fred Hof was right when he commented that the crisis in Ukraine was inextricably linked to the one in Syria.
Putin’s takeover of Crimea and his continued efforts to arm and finance separatists in eastern and southern Ukraine – some of whom are avowed Russian nationals or Russian spies – has boosted Assad’s fortunes.
The Ukrainian port of Oktyabrsk has lately been sending regular shipments to Syria, according to maritime records. Bloomberg quotes Jeremy Binnie, a Middle East analyst for IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly, who says that these consignments likely consist of spare parts for T-72 tanks and Mi-24 attack helicopters, plus other military equipment.
One reason Putin wants control of eastern and southern Ukraine is that this is where crucial materiel for Russia’s own military-industrial complex comes from, and the Black Sea is the body of water through which Rosoboronexport, Russia’s state arms dealer, likes to ship weapons and hardware to any number of rogue regimes.
Moreover, Putin no longer even has to pretend that he’s interested in peace or compromise or reconciliation or boondoggles in Switzerland. Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow, believes that “Assad’s victory over insurgents will change everything in the Middle East for Russia.” And so it will, with America’s help.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been able to rely on the good word of US Secretary of State John Kerry that America will never, ever provide Syrian rebels with MANPADS, or surface-to-air missiles, which might actually tilt the war in their favor. And it scarcely matters that, as Syrian opposition member Mohammed Alaa Ghanem has written, there are ways to control these missiles remotely or that about 6,000 of them are currently in the hands of enemy non-state actors including Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabab, and Hezbollah. To Obama, the prospect of so much as 20 more going missing or winding up with jihadists outweighs the benefit of stopping the carnage of Assad’s barrel bombs.
The chutzpah with which this administration therefore declares “mission accomplished” even as the fucked-pooch nature of its Syria policy becomes undeniable to all but its most loyal apparatchiks raises an interesting question: is the United States simply incompetent or is it disingenuous?
By now I should think it’s obvious that the president has got one foreign policy objective for what remains of his second term in office: he seeks to ink, at almost any cost, a permanent agreement with Iran, the letter of which will relate to resolving a decades-long nuclear weapons program, but the spirit of which will represent so much more than that.
Facing an incipient second Cold War with Russia – which he denies exists – Obama wants to end the current one with the Islamic Republic as a prelude to reducing America’s overall involvement in a chaotic Middle East.
The chaotic Middle East has noticed, which is why Saudi Arabia is already adjusting its own foreign policy to keep up with America’s geostrategic volte-face. My colleague Tony Badran has spent well over a year using his column at NOW to painstakingly outline the myriad ways in which this pivot-toward-Iran hypothesis is proving empirically sound. And Obama himself has come close to saying that this is exactly his plan in a series of interviews with sympathetic liberal journalists.
If he is successful, so his reasoning must go, then he will have had his Nixon-in-China or Reagan-in-Helsinki moment – a legacy which will make all the embarrassing failures and all the grieving widows and mothers hitherto worthwhile. Not that he doesn’t face resistance even from within his own cabinet. His Secretary of State disagrees with him. And those nettlesome never-again types who continue to work for him (they never do resign, do they?) to provide him with plausible cover that he really is a humanitarian deep down can always take comfort in wringing their hands over Syria or advancing painful Rwanda analogies. Such daring may mildly antagonize the boss, but damned if it doesn’t also make for a great memoir pitch circa 2016.
Still, we have only ourselves to blame. Obama always promised his would be a “transformative” American presidency. He’s delivered.
