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Russia-China victory in Syria a sign of declining US power
It sets an important precedent in international relations, and is perhaps the clearest sign of declining US power in the Middle East.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Russia and China have effectively thwarted the United States and its allies from pursuing its interests in a fiery Middle Eastern flashpoint, Syria.
The Russian-Chinese double veto at the UN Security Council - the last in February - signalled to the West that the two powers were drawing a red line on Syria. Notably, China's second veto on Syria was only its eighth in history, highlighting the importance of the matter to Beijing. The message was clear: UN-sponsored regime change, military intervention, or arming of Syrian rebels - as seen in Libya - would never pass.
Understanding the regional and global battle over Syria is to recognise that no external power in the world has Syrian democracy or human rights as the fundamental drive behind its policies on the crisis. Despite the fluff coming from Western capitals, no leader among them is truly concerned for the welfare of the Syrian people, as noted by the West's double standard silence to Bahrain's ongoing revolution. Likewise, calls for Syrian democracy emanating from the most repressive regime in the world in Saudi Arabia are laughable to say the least. And as we are so regularly told, Russia, China and Iran are the antithesis to the liberal democratic values the West espouses to represent.
What the West and its Gulf Arab proxies saw in Syria was an opportunity to either snatch the Arab world's influential outpost for Iran and Russia, or destroy its regional power altogether by way of a destructive civil war. The former seemed almost completely out of reach short of US military intervention. After spending his entire first term disengaging from wars in the Middle East, the last move president Barack Obama would make in an election year is committing a broke United States to yet another Middle East war.
Delegating intervention to its NATO allies was always going to be an unlikely option. Despite French and British eagerness to strike Moamar Gaddafi's forces in Libya last year, the US once again eventually assumed the bulk of the workload.
The threat of a civil war still beckons, as oil-rich Gulf states ponder arming rebels, but decisive military victories by the Syrian army in recent months have made it increasingly unlikely that president Bashar al-Assad will be dislodged by force, either from within or beyond.
The international wrangling does not delegitimise the legitimate demands of the Syrian people for democracy and an open society ruled by fairness and equal treatment. Rather, it highlights that for the majority of the Syrian revolution thus far, the battle for Syria has been mostly waged beyond its borders.
The Syrian revolution became no longer a question of the inalienable rights of the Syrian people, but - as so often in the Middle East - a pretence for an intense struggle for regional supremacy. The Saudis and Qataris threw all gloves off when Saudi King Abdullah openly declared his support for the revolt in August 2011. The king's call was not one of solidarity with the Syrian people, but a declaration of proxy war against its regional nemesis, Iran. Riyadh and Doha saw an opportunity to gain a strategic Arab ally on the simple calculation that the majority of Syrians are Sunni Muslims, and thus Assad - member of the minority Alawi sect - would meet the same fate of the fallen Arab dictators before him.
Turkey also hedged its bets on a quick Assad downfall, a strategic blunder that is now under sharp criticism from leading Turkish commentators and opposition leaders as the Syrian dictator appears to have held sway. Although it still hosts Syrian opposition groups and armed rebels, Turkey has notably toned down its harsh rhetoric of Assad in recent weeks. The US and Europe have also moved away from explicit calls for regime change, to endorsing - alongside Russia and China - UN envoy Kofi Annan's six-point plan for a political solution.
Annan's plan is a clear victory for Russia and China, as it reinforces their position on what it considers to be the sensible approach to resolving the Syrian crisis. Annan's peace plan suggests a "Syrian-led political process" echoing Moscow and Beijing's repeated calls for dialogue among Syrian parties and without external interference. It also calls for a cessation of violence "by all parties" without apportioning blame to either the regime or the opposition. Russia had previously drafted a UN Security Council resolution blaming both sides for the crisis, a move rejected at the time by France as "unacceptable" as it could not equate the crimes of rebels to the regime. And the only hint of foreign intervention in Annan's plan is a UN monitoring team to oversee a ceasefire.
This contrasts sharply with the two previous Western-backed UN resolutions that suggested a regime change via transition, and opened the door for further action without compliance, or as Russia and China interpreted, military action. Moscow and Beijing got the Annan plan they wanted, denying the West its traditional position of decision-maker in the Middle East.
Last week's "Friends of Syria" summit in Turkey, a gathering of Western and Arab states alongside a number of Syrian opposition groups, revealed only the lack of options available. The summit's pledge to aid the opposition was as hollow as the rhetorical statements issued in support of the revolution. The US promised communications equipment - certain to defeat a heavily-equipped and trained Syrian army - while Saudi Arabia and Qatar would use its oil-wealth to entice Syrian generals to defect - a strategy it has deployed largely unsuccessfully since mid-2011.
The most telling international meetings were the summits that preceded the "Friends of Syria" gathering. On March 29, Arab leaders met in Baghdad, while the BRICS summit of emerging powers was underway in Delhi. The Arab states, including Riyadh and Doha, had thrown its backing behind Annan's Russian-friendly plan.
The BRICS - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - showed its new global clout by rejecting military action and endorsing dialogue as the path to a solution. The BRICS have stood firm on Syria, and as testimony to its growing global influence, have forced the West to take a backward step. There will be no Libya-repeat in Syria, and there will not be a pro-Western proxy emerging in Damascus anytime soon. Civil war still remains a threat, albeit distant given the rebels' devastating defeats in Homs and Idlib, and its inferiority to the Syrian army.
The retreat of the West from Syria does not, however, signal complete doom for the Syrian revolution. Assad's forces may have won militarily, but large segments of the Syrian population have broken their silence, and will not return to the shadows. Indeed, overt Western and Gulf involvement in the Syrian crisis created more rifts among Syrian activists than resolved disputes. Many Syrian opposition activists and leaders that I met in Syria have been dismayed at what they perceived was the hijacking of the revolution by foreign powers for external interests.
But the threat of Western intervention seems to have subsided, for now. If Iraq was the catalyst for America's decline in the Middle East, Syria has sounded the death knell as a resurgent Russia and emerging China step up to the plate.
Antoun Issa is an Australian-based freelance political writer, blogger, Global Voices Online author, and commentator on international affairs, with a specific interest in Middle Eastern issues. View his full profile here.
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