Syria, Iran and the Risks of Tactical Geopolitics

The problem with current US policy or it’s advocates is not target selection. Syria, Iran, Libya and various other states have nasty, disruptive and anti-Western regimes. Giving them the heave-ho, in the abstract, makes sense if advancing American interests  (or basic decency in governance) is the objective. However, unlike the aforementioned apothecary cabinet drawers, states and their regimes do not exist in the abstract, moving according to arid principles of conduct, but in the real world with a society of states which constantly are evaluating and re-evaluating each other’s conduct in light of interest. Which means, as with many things, in foreign policy, timing matters.

The West recently dispatched over the objections of two great powers, Colonel Gaddafi, a ruler who was also an unpopular and violent lunatic with a long pedigree of terrorism and cruelty.  That in itself was tolerable and comprehensible, if not welcome, to Moscow and Beijing, but we rubbed salt in the wound in two ways. First, simply stomping on the Realpolitik economic interests of Russia and China in Libya, as Walter Russell Meade eloquently put it:

….Russia has some specific grievances connected to Libya.  What seems to really enrage the Russians is less the overthrow of the Great Loon than the cancellation of his many contracts with Russia and the refusal of the new government to give Russia a slice of the Libyan pie.  Russia always thought the west’s democratic agenda in Libya was a laugh — and the antics of the thuggish new regime and the array of torturers and thieves now running rampant in that country has done little to dispel that view. (Again, the Putin/KGB worldview would suggest that the hard realists at the core of Washington’s power structure released the ninnies to dance themselves into a frenzy of humanitarian and democratic ecstasy while the cold purposes of the DC machine were advanced.)

But what Russia thought it expected and deserved in return for its abstention on the Libya vote was due consideration for its commercial interests in Libya.  France, Britain and Qatar seem to be dividing that pie enthusiastically among themselves and nobody is thinking about Russia’s share and Russia’s price.

Secondly, was icing Gaddafi under the moral banner of R2P, which would seem – in theory of course – to be applicable to governments very much like those run by the allies of….Moscow and Beijing. To say nothing of , Moscow and Beijing themselves, which already see the “color revolutions” as subversive Western elite sock puppets with a democracy stage show kit.  To be frank, Russian and Chinese leaders see R2P as a doctrine or policy that potentially can be used not only against their nation’s interests, but their own hold on power, which they view, accurately, as a violation of sovereignty.

So it can hardly be reassuring to Moscow or Beijing that when the dust has yet to settle in Libya, that the United States and it’s NATO allies are now pressing for new UN resolutions designed to justify military intervention in Syria to overthrow Bashar Assad. Like the late and unlamented Colonel Gaddafi, Bashar Assad is a cold-blooded murderer, but unlike the crazy Colonel, Assad is a client of Russia and close Syrian ties to Moscow go way back to the earliest days of his father’s dictatorship. There’s no way, in such a short amount of time, that an American effort to topple Assad – however justified morally – that Vladimir Putin and to be truthful, many ordinary Russians, would not view that as a Western attempt to humiliate Russia. And R2P would indicate still more humiliations to come! As Dan Trombly wrote:

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