September 11, 2015 | Quote

The Putin Solution

A photograph of a drowned 3-year-old boy washed up on a Turkish beach after his family failed to find refuge from the war in Syria seems to have finally gotten the world’s attention. The conflict has been an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe for more than four years. A quarter of a million are dead, and millions have been driven from their homes, either displaced within Syria or moved to flee abroad, where they take their chances on reaching shelter. The Europeans don’t want the refugees, but they also don’t want images of more dead children washing up on their shores.

Still, there’s no end in sight, and that’s largely because the leader of the free world has sat on the sidelines since March 2011, when the Syrian opposition first took to the streets in peaceful protest and the regime hunted them like animals. Thus the Syrian conflict has also become a strategic catastrophe for the United States and its allies. It threatens to unravel the state system of the Middle East, jeopardizes America’s half-century-old regional security architecture, and has put a terror-sponsoring soon-to-be nuclear Iran on the border of three longtime U.S. allies—Israel, Jordan, and Turkey.

And now Russia has thrown down its gauntlet. Last week, Obama administration officials expressed concerns about Russia’s military build-up in Syria, comparing it to Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Crimea. In recent weeks, Moscow has sent ships, planes, drones, and portable housing units for an expeditionary force of up to 3,000 men, including special forces units. The Russian president’s immediate goal is to help Bashar al-Assad regain Idlib—a strategically vital city on the corridor connecting Damascus to the regime’s stronghold on the Mediterranean coast. The presence of Russian troops may well attract more Sunni foreign fighters—especially Central Asians—but contrary to the assessments of many analysts, Russia’s campaign has little to do with ISIS, which doesn’t even have a presence in Idlib. Russia’s long-term goal, as evidenced by the engineers dispatched to build, among other things, an air base in Lattakia, is a military presence in the Mediterranean, for the first time since the Soviet era. 

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Putin is making his move in Syria now, says Tony Badran, research fellow at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “because he understands not only that Obama would never intervene militarily in Syria, but also because the [deal with Iran] means that the White House wouldn’t challenge Iranian, and by extension Russian, holdings in the region. Moreover, Putin saw that Obama continued to disregard the concerns of his traditional allies, both on the Iranian nuclear program and Syria, when they sought a more active policy to bring down Assad.”

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Issues:

Russia Syria