A Vultures’ Peace in Syria wall Street Jrnl Dec 31 16
Russia and Turkey divide up the spoils amid U.S. irrelevance.
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as they attend a press conference in Istanbul on Oct. 10. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Turkey and Russia announced Thursday that they have brokered a cease-fire between the Syrian regime and the non-radical opposition, with a peace conference to follow next month in Kazakhstan. This is a vultures’ peace, with the two authoritarian powers and Iran preparing to negotiate over the bloody carcass of Syria as they advance their strategic interests in the Middle East.
The truce took effect on Friday at midnight, albeit in shaky fashion. One opposition group supposedly among the signers claimed it hadn’t agreed, and cease-fires in the nearly six-year-old civil war have a history of collapsing.
The announcement is nonetheless a sign of diminishing U.S. influence and the first major consequence from the Syrian regime’s victory in Aleppo and the entente between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The strongmen were at each other’s throats in 2015 after the Turks shot down a Russian plane. But they appear to have decided they can achieve more by dividing the spoils in Syria rather than fighting over them.
For the Turks, this probably means Russian acquiescence in squeezing Syria’s Kurds in a post-civil war agreement. Thousands of U.S.-backed Kurdish ground troops have been fighting Islamic State in eastern Syria, and the Kurds control chunks of Syrian territory along the Turkish border.
Mr. Erdogan wants to prevent an independent Kurdish enclave or self-governing region in Syria that might align with the Kurdish part of Iraq. Mr. Erdogan loathes Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, but he has concluded that if the Americans won’t help him oust Mr. Assad, at least the Russians will help him sit on the Kurds.
Mr. Putin can boast that he is on the path to rescuing his Syrian client, showing others that Russia stands by its friends—unlike the Americans. Russia also enhances its growing status as a Middle Eastern power, further pushing America to the sidelines and reversing the strategic gains that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon achieved in the 1970s. Mr. Putin will get military bases too.
The news is another insult to President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, who have become irrelevant. Mr. Kerry invested what is left of his prestige in United Nations-backed Syrian peace talks in Geneva, but the Russians dumped him like an old romance. The U.S. was left to plead this week that it doesn’t object to the Kazakhstan talks as long as U.N. resolutions are honored. No doubt the Russians will make that a priority.
Iran also gets credit for rescuing Mr. Assad, in return for stretching Shiite Islamic influence further west to the Mediterranean. Mr. Assad can continue to target non-Islamist Sunni opponents, with arrests and assassinations if not barrel bombs, no matter the truce. Those opponents will have to accept the terms they’re offered, as foes defeated on the battlefield usually do. So much for Mr. Kerry’s claim that “there is no military solution in Syria,” as he tweeted as recently as Oct. 16.
The wild cards in all of this are the radical Islamists of Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra al-Sham (the former Nusra Front). They are not party to the truce or peace talks, and they will fight on. But Mr. Assad and the Russians can focus on Jabhat al-Nusra knowing that the Americans and Kurds are doing the dirty work against Islamic State and its capital, Raqqa.
With all of these facts established on the ground as Mr. Obama leaves office, the vultures may even extend an invitation to the new Trump Administration to bless their brutal peace in exchange for more help in fighting Islamic State. Mr. Putin would love to trade some occasional bombing runs against ISIS for the lifting of Western sanctions and concessions to his proxies in eastern Ukraine. His ostentatious decision on Friday to overrule his advisers and not expel American diplomats in Moscow in response to Mr. Obama’s new sanctions on Russia is part of that calculation.
Mr. Obama’s foreign policy of American retreat has left the world’s authoritarians advancing more aggressively than at any time since the 1970s. The tragic lesson of Syria is that when the eagle flies away, the vultures move in.
