Putin’s loss in Syria exposes Western failures

In microcosm, Syria revealed that Western foreign policy had lost its way. A blend of democratic idealism with hard-headed realpolitik was required to meet a series of complex post-Cold War challenges, but our best and brightest leaders were just not up to the job.

By Martin Ivens

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s “murderous regime” in Syria this week was celebrated with Churchillian bombast by Foreign Secretary David Lammy in the House of Commons: “The Lion of Damascus” was now “the rat of Damascus, fleeing to Moscow with its tail between its legs.”

“Assad is a dictator," thundered Lammy, “He is a criminal. He used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. He has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands.”

The ghosts of British imperialists past looked down on the foreign secretary approvingly - yet the UK had played no part in the downfall of the dictator.

In 2013, it might have been a different story. At that time, Lammy voted against bombing Assad’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, in line with Labour policy dictated by former leader Ed Miliband, now his colleague as energy secretary. When Tory party rebels joined the opposition, David Cameron’s government was left powerless to intervene.

The vote was a turning point. Within days, US President Barack Obama had seized on British paralysis as an excuse not to enforce his own “red line” against Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Two years later, Lammy also voted against bombing ISIS’s terror network in Syria, although on that occasion Labour lost. Today the foreign secretary rejoices and another colleague, Health Streeting Wes Streeting, opened old wounds on television by criticizing Miliband’s conduct.

Lammy’s confusion is hardly unique — although it didn’t help his credibility that he wrongly declared Syria and Libya to be geographical neighbors — and his earlier stance had some logic. Punishing Assad without inadvertently aiding the Islamist faction among his opponents was always going to be tricky. Previous Western military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had been botched.

In microcosm, however, Syria revealed that Western foreign policy had lost its way. A blend of democratic idealism with hard-headed realpolitik was required to meet a series of complex post-Cold War challenges, but our best and brightest leaders were just not up to the job.

After US President George W Bush and his Iraq war sidekick Tony Blair gave way to Obama, Cameron and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, the transatlantic foreign policy establishment rejoiced that the grownups were back in charge. Although Cameron soon revealed that he flew by the seat of his pants — the Anglo-French intervention in Libya in 2011, the Syria vote and the Brexit referendum were sketchily improvised — liberal Obama and Merkel appeared to be more weighty figures.

There is a fine line, however, between careful deliberation and chronic indecision, and both Obama and Merkel crossed it. Today, the West is paying the price.

Watching Obama dithering over Syria, Putin moved in smartly to become Assad’s protector in partnership with Iran’s ayatollahs. The Russian navy and air force won access to bases on the Mediterranean in return for military aid as Washington looked on impotently. In the same period, on a visit to Obama's White House President Xi Jinping disavowed any intention to build artificial islands in the South China Sea to extend his country’s maritime reach. On his return to Beijing, however, Xi broke his promise and yet faced no sanction from the administration. Thus encouraged, Xi became increasingly vocal in his claims on Taiwan.

Merkel’s tenure looks even more feeble in retrospect. The chancellor had more meetings with Putin than any other Western leader, but much good did it do her. Brought up in Soviet-dominated East Germany, Merkel spoke fluent Russian (and Putin, as a former KGB spy based in Dresden, could reply in German).

She also knew how vicious Putin could be from first hand experience - he deliberately let his large black labrador Koni off the leash at one of their summits, knowing her fear of dogs. But although she ran rings around most democratic politicians, Merkel never seems to have got the measure of this dictator or any others.

The chancellor’s temporizing proved fatal. She neither supported Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership, but nor would she veto it outright. At the Bucharest summit in 2008, her compromise formula that Ukraine should become a NATO member at some unspecified date offered that unfortunate country no security. It gave Putin, however, a huge incentive to invade before Ukraine could come under the Western umbrella.

After his interventions in Moldova and Georgia, Putin’s intentions were transparent. The Russian leader was notably frank with Merkel, “you won’t be chancellor forever, and then they’ll (the Ukrainians) become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.” She appears not to have got the message.

In her new memoir, Freedom, the former chancellor praises Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s because it allegedly gave Britain time to rearm. That didn’t work out so well, surely? But at least Chamberlain rearmed. After Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, there was no increase in German preparedness for war, no change of strategy.

Despite the urging of the US, UK, Poland and the Baltic States, German defense spending amounted to a pitiful 1.3% of gross domestic product in 2021, before the Russians came back to gobble up the rest of Ukraine. In the meantime, Merkel doubled down on Germany’s energy dependency on Russian gas and shut down her country’s nuclear power plants.

The liberal internationalists have failed, so now it’s the turn of the exponents of a rougher school of foreign policy. Israel’s astonishingly successful military campaign against Hezbollah, the catspaw of Iran, appears to have been the deciding factor in Assad’s fall. Western leaders sometimes decry Israel’s means, but for the moment they appear to have achieved their ends.

Soon, Donald Trump will be back in the White House too. Trump showed little appetite for military adventures in his first term and his approach to foreign policy was purely transactional. Perhaps he will succeed where the liberal internationalists failed, but realpolitik divorced from morality has its pitfalls too. If proof is needed, just look at the wreckage of Putin’s great power ambitions in Syria.