Don’t criticize Syrian ceasefire deal — just everything before it

The funny thing about diplomacy is that it’s usually wise to pursue it when it’s fruitless. Whether you’re aiming to stall, look good or feel out your negotiating partner’s weak points and red lines, there’s plenty to accomplish even when a formal agreement is out of reach — or undesirable. So the Obama administration doesn’t merit reflexive criticism over its protracted talks with Russia over the latticework of proxy wars roiling Syria. But when diplomacy is a messy cleanup effort in response to a sequence of foreign policy failures, the results are apt to reflect it. And the administration’s fresh deal with Moscow on the Syrian battlefield should call forth a serious round of renewed skepticism.

To begin with, the agreement, which applies U.S. and Russian force to jihadist groups while ceasing broader hostilities and opening civilians to humanitarian aid, demonstrates just how shortsighted the administration’s goals have become. Although the outsized Russian military presence in Syria is itself a policy failure that needs to be mitigated, Russia isn’t exactly the root cause behind the rest of America’s struggles. The other key players making a mockery of U.S. goals — Iran, its proxies and Turkey, our authoritarian NATO ally — have powerful agendas of their own that they’ll keep right on pursuing no matter how Russia figures into the equation. Hezbollah, especially, has gotten off scot-free. Unlike ISIS and Syria’s al-Qaida affiliates, that terrorist organization won’t be targeted by the joint military push promised by the deal. But because the White House is scrambling to compensate for the costs of its weak and reactive posture toward adversarial Russian moves worldwide, it hasn’t made the decisive players in Syria a priority.

That’s not to say that Russia’s influence hasn’t been a painful game changer in at least one important instance. Moscow insists that its sustained backing for the Assad regime, which the U.S. maintains must be replaced, has more to do with the threat of state failure in its absence than with its own selfish calculations of national interest. But last spring, when Syrian opposition leaders came together with key representatives of the Syrian military and the Assad regime to form a national unity government in waiting, Russia failed to back the effort, focusing instead on side negotiations that contributed to the nascent transition group’s dissolution. U.S. negotiators have good reason to believe that their Russian counterparts are the only combatants on Assad’s side who could tolerate his phase-out from power. But recent history does not suggest that Russia wishes to pursue that course of action in good faith. They have put forth no proposal that takes the Syrian rebels seriously as a partner in a new post-war regime, and, at a critical moment, they withheld support for the country’s best chance at beginning to leave the bloody Assad era behind.

To make matters worse, the administration’s new deal is all but unenforceable and has, in fact, already been grievously violated. Beleaguered rebels in Aleppo reported that regime troops have once again dropped barrel bombs on the city and were fighting to cut off humanitarian aid. The regime launched its own allegations against the rebels. But because the deal lacks any enforcement mechanism, Assad’s forces are free to dominate the air war without consequence — and, despite being reduced to a shadow of their former strength, to thereby dominate rebel forces.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who has worked hardest on the U.S. side and has the most at stake as a negotiator, has done his level best to insist that such violations are little more than speed bumps on the path toward a manageable peace. Unfortunately, the fog of war tolerated by the agreement has produced a cloudy haze within the deal itself. As the Washington Post recently reported, Kerry had to walk back his embarrassing claim that U.S.-Russian cooperation would go so far as to include joint approval for the very kinds of airstrikes that the Assad regime has used to flout the deal. “To clarify,” the State Department had to note in a statement, “the arrangement announced last week makes no provision whatsoever for the U.S. and Russia to approve strikes by the Syrian regime, and this is not something we could ever envision doing.” Putin must not have known whether to laugh or shake his head. Perhaps he did both.

The time has long since passed to secure U.S. national interests around Syria in an ideal fashion. At least the Obama administration recognizes that it is too late to fully achieve what should have been America’s goals in the country and the surrounding region. That is little excuse, however, for trudging down the humbling road of agreements made and broken without any firmer policy unfolding along another vector of power. American efforts against ISIS and the region’s al-Qaida offshoots are better than nothing, but they are still inadequate, constrained not only by the pro-Assad coalition in Syria but also by the geopolitical rat’s nest in Iraq, where Iran is also making great gains. It is hard to resist the impression that the administration has been reduced to running out the clock on its time in office. Thanks, in part — but only in part — to Russia, President Obama has managed to hand off to his successor just the sort of sprawling, open-ended war he was elected to end.

James Poulos is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.