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MEMRI: While The [Obama] Administration Slept,
December 23, 2016 MEMRI Daily Brief No.114
While The Administration Slept, Others Plotted
By: Alberto M. Fernandez
https://www.memri.org/reports/while-administration-slept-others-plotted
Asked recently about the absence of the United States from talks by Russia,
Turkey and Iran on the future of Syria, the State Department spokesman
dismissed its importance, saying: “The Secretary is perfectly fine not being
in the room” if the result is “a cessation of hostilities that can actually
matter over a period of time.”
The spokesman’s words sought to put the best spin possible in what was a
singular event, part of a larger global trend, which is the marginalization
of American influence in the region and the aggressive attempt by other
powers to curtail the Americans further and expand their own spheres of
influence. The spokesman’s words also glossed over a greater truth – that
these talks are about more than recent events in Syria.
This is not to minimize the importance of the taking of Aleppo in energizing
diplomatic contacts. The city’s fall has caused great consternation in the
Sunni Arab Muslim world and in Turkey. It has also been a great military
victory for both Iran and Russia, even if it does not represent a definitive
end to this bloody conflict.
But all three powers bring many more equities and issues to the table beyond
the fall of one city, no matter how storied or famous or how great the human
tragedy of tens of thousands of Syrians.
For Turkey, it is about trying to save lives of people in East Aleppo and
about trying to find some accommodation for its Sunni Arab allies in
Northern Syria, but also about the Erdogan government’s confrontation with
Kurdish nationalist rebels both inside Turkey and in Syria. Turkey now sees
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s survival as the price to pay for the
curtailing of Kurdish aspirations.
In Syria (and at least politically in Iraq), Turkey is burnishing its
credentials as the protector of Sunni Muslims, a role which has given it a
regional and even international dimension as far as Africa and Central Asia,
while it pursues a punitive campaign against its domestic enemies.
Engagement with Russia for the sake of saving Syrians is politically
popular, while there are nationalist elements in Turkey, including in the
military, who look with some favor at a tilt towards Moscow.
Iran is unique in that neither Turkey nor Russia have made the investment in
blood and treasure in Syria to advance their interests that Iran has made to
protect its client state in Damascus. More than a thousand Iranians,
including high-ranking officers, have fallen in the service of the Iranian
revolutionary empire in the Levant. Iran’s principal non-state proxy,
Lebanese Hizbullah, has incurred even greater losses.
Iran’s regional ambitions are expansive, and it is on the march in the Gulf,
in Yemen, and seemingly in places where there are very few or no Shi’a
Muslims.
So Iran engages with Turkey and Russia to maximize its Levantine winnings
and ensure that those are protected, while the Russians pursue their own
broader interests with the Ankara government. Iran is like a wolf protecting
its hard-won prey, making sure that it is not snatched out of its mouth.
Clearly, the Iranians would like to pursue a harder line than even the
Russians, wiping out the remaining pockets of Sunni Arab rebel resistance.
Russia’s interests with Turkey and Iran also transcend Syria, where it has
been able to secure the upper hand – at least for now – with a relatively
minimal military investment. Indeed, Russia’s engagement with both those
countries can be seen as part of a much broader Russian grand strategy – one
that has scored some real successes – to project its power worldwide to seek
to leverage the best possible position for the Putin regime in the face of
Western sanctions and American hostility.
Syria is important to Russia, but Russia is even more important to Russia
and Syria. Turkey and Iran are key pieces in its efforts, in an astonishing
effort by Russia to practice a sort of international political jujitsu to
try to break out of an economic straitjacket imposed by the West. The
December 21 “Moscow Declaration” for joint action in Syria is only the
latest success of an economically weak and troubled country creatively using
unconventional hybrid war tactics – propaganda, military action, diplomacy –
across a range of physical and virtual battlefields.
Despite the State Department’s words, we will never know what the Obama
administration truly thinks about this latest development. Given its hubris,
it is entirely possible that senior officials would view it as a vindication
of years of Obama policy that sought to disengage from the region’s
conflicts and discounted concerns of America’s traditional allies while
seeking an opening with Iran. They may well think that this is good for
Washington, putting the onus of at least some of the region’s thorny
problems on others.
Others might say that it is the latest in a long line of fateful steps over
the past decade by this administration to unmoor America from a consensus
internationalist foreign policy implemented by an elite derided by a very
senior Obama official as “the Blob.” The result seems clear. American
influence in the Middle East region is at an all-time low. America’s word
and credibility are diminished. Still despised, it is also seen as weak and
feckless. The fallout of this policy will not only haunt the Trump
administration, but those beyond it. Indeed, the administration has been
able to pull off quite a feat: it has somehow found a way to empower and
embolden not one adversary but a whole raft of them.
*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice-President of MEMRI.
© 1998-2016, The Middle East Media Research Institute All Rights Reserved.
Materials may only be cited with proper attribution.
Source: http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=71932
