In November last year, John Kerry, the tireless US secretary of state, predicted that Syria was a few weeks away from a big transition. The transition he was talking about was due to take place at peace talks scheduled for last week at which the Assad regime and the rebels were due to discuss a ceasefire.
Those peace talks never got under way. Instead there is another big transition taking place: a Russian-backed regime onslaught looks set to drive the rebel forces in northern Syria – some of them backed by Washington and its allies – from the battlefield.
It has been a constant of diplomatic discourse that no military solution to the conflict is possible. That may be true. But the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, is showing that external military force is the way to change the facts on the ground.
Until last summer, the regime forces were ragged and in retreat, incapable of mustering enough soldiers to hold ground, let alone launch a successful offensive. Only the presence of Iranian soldiers and their allies from Lebanon and Iraq saved the regime from what looked to be a strategic retreat to defend Damascus.
Since Mr Putin threw his air force behind the regime, the tables have turned. The rebels look as if they will lose control of their part of Aleppo. After the rebel withdrawal from Homs in December, that would leave the regime in control of Syria’s three biggest cities.
How has this happened? It has a lot to do with the different relationships that US president Barack Obama and Mr Putin have to power, which is turn stems from the very different history and geography of America and Russia.
Mr Obama has been roundly criticised for behaving like a professor who looks at the available options and rules them all out. Given that Mr Obama felt he was elected to end American involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fact that toppling Muammar Qaddafi in Libya led to state collapse, ruling out military intervention makes sense.
But the charge that Mr Obama cannot escape is that having decided not to invade Syria, he still declared that Bashar Al Assad had to go – without putting in place any means to ensure this goal was met. His 2011 statement that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside” was resonant but divorced from the power game.
Since then, Mr Kerry has been delicately climbing down from that position to allow a peace process, inevitably involving the regime, to take place. At the same time, Russia has worked to boost the Syrian leader as the linchpin of stability, first by twisting his arm to give up chemical weapons and then promoting him as the only viable alternative to ISIL.
Mr Obama is not the first president to shy away from foreign entanglements. It took Bill Clinton three years to be persuaded to intervene in Kosovo, but in the end he did. In Mr Obama’s world view, Syria is a distant conflict, and despite Republican hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz crying out for carpet bombing of ISIL, it is not a serious threat to the US homeland. Most Americans probably would not thank Mr Obama for shedding blood there.
Mr Putin sees the use of power as the test of a politician. As a well-connected Russian observer remarked this week: “Putin can only have the deepest disrespect for Obama, because he is not a power player.”
For Mr Putin, fighting battles abroad, in Ukraine and Syria, is about staying in power at home. He is not about to leave the Kremlin at the end of his current term. He has to keep fighting. Having seized a part of Ukraine, he has now established his forces in Syria. In the words of the Ukrainian foreign minister, Pavlo Klimkin, Putin’s message to the world is: “The only way you can sort these problems out is with me.”
Mr Putin learnt an early lesson in the 1980s when he witnessed at first hand the collapse of East Germany and then the Soviet army’s retreat from the countries of central Europe it had controlled since 1945. For hundreds of years Russia has sought to expand south and west, occasionally being rolled back before it resumed the outward march. Mr Putin’s predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, presided over a retreat; Mr Putin is expanding Russia’s footprint.
Ultimately for Mr Putin, the Syrian crisis is one of domestic politics. Having set out to challenge the US, and earned high popularity ratings in Russia for doing so, his obvious choice must be to keep pushing – even if in the longer term his overstretch may weaken the Kremlin.
For Mr Obama there are no easy choices. The adage that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” does not apply in Syria. Indeed, the identification of friends and enemies gets harder by the day. The gap between America’s interests and those of its regional allies could be bridged only if the US did most of the heavy lifting in terms of men and weapons, in which case the allies would have to tag along. As Washington is not doing that, Russia and the regional players are all vying for leadership.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, this week denounced the US for relying on the Kurdish PYD militia – seen by Ankara as a terrorist outfit – as its strike force in northern Syria. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, bowed out of his job on Wednesday with an undiplomatic broadside aimed at Mr Obama. He said American policy had been “ambiguous” and Mr Obama had not shown a strong commitment.
In effect, Mr Erdogan wants the Americans to commit to toppling the Assad regime and to restrain the Kurds. The French, having lost 130 people in the ISIL-inspired attacks in Paris in November, seem to be tempted by the Russian solution to curbing the terrorist threat. The big transition could be years away.
Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs
On Twitter: @aphilps
