Another of Secretary of State John Kerry’s “Hail Mary” diplomatic deal is well on its way to collapsing, this time in Syria.
A seven-day cease-fire was supposed to start Monday across Syria, under an agreement signed last week by Kerry and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. Multiparty talks to end the war were to follow.
But fire is yet to cease, though attacks have diminished in parts of the country. The lull in the half-decade-old civil war wasn’t enough, however, to launch the main task of the week.
The United Nations was to start delivering humanitarian aid to civilians in long-besieged towns, like Aleppo. And “We made everything ready,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Wednesday. But aid convoys hadn’t yet moved because, as one UN source told me, “We’re still waiting for necessary approval from all sides.”
Neither the Russian-backed Syrian government (which is imposing the Aleppo siege) nor its opponents will guarantee aid workers’ safety while they deliver food, medicine and shelter to besieged women, children and the elderly. Those Syrians are yet to benefit from last week’s amicable Kerry-Lavrov handshake.
Even Kerry himself, reportedly, was skeptical the deal would work. But he signed it anyway because, well, you got to do something, right?
And while the first stage is off to an iffy start, the deal will get even wobblier next week. That’s when America and Russia are scheduled to start sharing intelligence on the fight against ISIS & Co. It’s a crucial part of the Kerry-Lavrov deal — and one the Pentagon strongly opposes.
The New York Times reports that Defense Secretary Ash Carter is unenthusiastic about handing the Kremlin details about the anti-regime rebels America supports. After all, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian patrons have never been that interested in fighting ISIS. Assad, in fact, is complicit in its growth.
Instead, the Russians and Assad’s other allies (mainly Iran and Hezbollah) are most interested in squashing any legitimate alternative to the Damascus butcher, including the groups America has tried to cultivate since the war began.
But like Kerry, President Obama is wedded to an old diplomatic cliché: “There’s no military solution” to the Syrian war. So the president backed Kerry over the Pentagon’s protest, and a diplomatic deal that deepens the Russian-Iranian stronghold on Syria was signed.
Except that, in reality, there’s no diplomatic solution for Syria. At least not at this stage.
As long as Assad remains in power, drawing the ire of the country’s Sunni majority, the fighting will go on. As Obama and Kerry used to say (before they capitulated to Moscow), Assad long ago lost legitimacy as Syria’s ruler.
Yet Assad won’t leave as long as major powers on the ground back him. Meanwhile, everyone insists Syria must remain a unified country.
Unless outsiders come up with a viable partition plan or, less drastically, a proposal to create a loose confederation among Syria’s factions, they’ll keep fighting each other, and their backers will egg them on. Just look at Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s op-ed in Wednesday’s New York Times, calling to “rid the world” of Saudi-backed extremism. (What did the pot call the kettle?)
Since 2011, when the Syrian civil war erupted, Obama has essentially acted as if it’s not our problem. In came Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s turning Syria into a Russian Mediterranean outpost.
Putin’s goals there are blatantly at odds with ours — indeed, one of his chief objectives is to stick it to America.
If America indeed has no skin in the Syrian game, as Obama seems to believe, we should steer clear of peacemaking there. As Russia learned in the 1990s, if you aren’t a real world power, you can’t play one on TV. And you can’t dictate peaceful solutions to a war from the sidelines.
In fact, we do have an interest in today’s most consequential Mideast contest. So the next president will have to walk away from Kerry’s futile deal-making, and listen to the hawks advocating a more muscular approach in Syria. There’s plenty of space between a large ground-force invasion and outsourcing the Syrian war to Putin.
This week, Obama chided Donald Trump, suggesting he’d do Putin’s bidding around the globe. Too bad John Kerry, in Syria at least, is already doing exactly that.