There is no silence like an embarrassed silence. It’s the kind of thing you can feel hanging over everyone’s head at a social occasion, only mildly dented by the squeak of a chair or the light clatter of cutlery as people feign interest in their dinner.
Sometimes you can hear a throat being cleared, although that always seems to be coming from someone out of your field of vision. No one likes it.
That kind of silence is now settling over the spreading carnage in Syria. The people who were more than happy some months ago to point to Syria as a triumph of American diplomacy and old-fashioned deterrence are now rearranging their napkins in their laps and twirling their wine glasses as the bloodshed continues unabated.
The fact of the matter is that Syria is a disaster, and our policy there is a failure. We can stop pretending otherwise now. We can acknowledge our failure, not only because it is irretrievable, but because there is no danger of American involvement, which may well have been all that some people cared about in the first place. But the consequences will go far beyond Syria.
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Remember last fall, when we reached a deal with Russian “help” to avert a conflict with Syria? Supporters of that policy gleefully and loudly proclaimed it a win for the White House and America, and a loss for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his pet ghoul, Syrian President Bashar Assad.
We’d threatened military force, you see, and now the Syrians would have to toe the line and hand over their chemicals. They were afraid of us, and Putin was desperate to save his pal, and there’d be no messing with the United States this time, and…
Well. All of that turned out to be nonsense.
Outsourcing our foreign policy to Vladimir Putin was supposed to strip Assad of his chemical weapons, bring Syria to the table, slow the slaughter, and show that the United States was watching everything with a squinted eye and a finger on the trigger. These fantasies evaporated in a matter of weeks.
Instead, the worst nightmares — save for a subsequent use of chems — have come to pass, as John Schindler and I predicted back in September:
The United States has now effectively abandoned its previous policy on Assad….with a de facto acknowledgment of Assad as the leader of Syria and a pledge to leave him alone under his strengthened Russian protection. The opposite of “regime change” need not be “regime recognition,” but that is in effect the deal the Russians have wrested from us [and] Islamists who have argued all along that America is Osama bin Laden’s “weak horse” will not fail to note our retreat.
If we could not take a stand against Assad, why should the Iranian regime, or its armorers in Moscow, care about any further Western objections to Iran’s nuclear programs? And why shouldn’t the Israelis conclude not only that they are alone in the region, but also that their enemies can count on strong backing from Moscow?
The situation in Syria is probably, at this point, unrecoverable. Assad has used WMD, and will remain in power unless Moscow thinks he should not.
Assad, far from being intimidated, has plowed ahead with greater violence and barbarity, including the rape and torture of children. And why not? The Syrian dictator knows what Russia and anyone else with an ounce of sense knows: that once President Obama retreated from his own “red line,” force was forever off the table. The Americans have made it clear they have no interest in ever punishing Assad, period, and he is now free to do as he wishes.
For months, the President’s supporters have crowed that the threat of U.S. military action had brought Assad to heel, but this was never more than a noxious cocktail of denial and wishful thinking.
From the moment the nimble Russians seized on Secretary of State John Kerry’s off-the-cuff comment, Assad was out of danger from the West. (By the way, for those who still think, against all logic, that the Kerry comment was planted, let’s remember that the second part of the Secretary’s condition was that Assad had to give up all his chemical arms in a week.)
Once the President kicked the decision down Pennsylvania Avenue and Congress rapidly kicked it back, Assad and his Russian patrons realized that the Americans were never going to use force against Damascus.
The U.S. deal with Russia was a de facto promise to leave Assad alone and let him run wild under Moscow’s protection, and run wild he has. It is a small comfort that he has not used chemical weapons again, but given the obscene brutality of his subsequent actions, it may not make much difference to the innocent people trapped in the Syrian abattoir.
And what about those chemical weapons? The Nobel Peace Prize committee, ever the hopeful psychics, bestowed its blessing on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for the work it assumed was soon to be underway.
History, as is the case so often lately, has humiliated the laureates. As many of us predicted, Syria has now missed an important deadline; worse, less than five percent of Syrian chemical capacity has been removed.
But who cares? Certainly not the Americans, who are mired in a box-check mentality that approaches foreign policy as a menu of public-relations problems to be solved in sequence rather than as a global span of commitments to honor and challenges to manage.
From Ukraine to China, from Olympic security to North Korean hostages, we issue pronouncements, hope for the best, and declare that we’re on it. Check, check, check. Next?
Nowhere is this more evident than in our approach to Iran’s nuclear program. We’ve inked a “deal” with Iran and our “partners” in the P5+1. (It’s a good thing, given the careful circumlocutions in our foreign policy, that we cannot run out of air quotes.)
It doesn’t do much, and the Iranians are having a good laugh out of it. But we did something, right? We had to make a deal with Iran, so we did. Check. Problem averted — or at least off the front pages — for six months.
In part, that’s what made the drama over possible additional sanctions in the Senate such a farce. Opponents of more sanctions claimed that any undermining of the White House would mean “war” with Iran. This was pure silliness: if we could not bring ourselves to strike Syria, we were certainly not going to get into a shooting war with Iran.
As in Syria, we’ll soon see our Iran policy in ashes. The Iranians, like the Russians, play a long game, not the crisis-to-crisis firefighting that has characterized our current foreign policy. The mullahs watched what happened in Syria, and they’ve drawn the appropriate conclusions: the Americans will not go to war in the Middle East again anytime soon.
The Iranians know this because they’ve watched the Syrians get away, literally, with murder. As Will Tobey, a former NSC staff member and nonproliferation expert at the National Nuclear Security Administration now at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote on February 7:
Syria’s compliance has been belated, incomplete, and grudging. Worse, while the agreement to remove Syria’s chemical weapons has stalled, it has also effectively halted international efforts to remove Assad.
The obvious lesson for Tehran: Reach an interim agreement that deflates international pressure for action, drag your feet on implementation, and keep your illicit weapons program as the world dithers.
If the Obama administration cannot compel a weakened Assad government, beset by civil war and subject to international opprobrium for using chemical weapons, to comply with its disarmament obligations, it is unlikely to succeed in dealing with a much stronger Iranian regime. The price of failure in Syria could be a doomed nuclear deal with Iran.
It is too late to reverse the disengagement from Syria. Our credibility is shot and our willingness to restore it is non-existent. Secretary Kerry said this week that Assad is “not losing, but he’s also not winning.” Unfortunately, all that means is that Assad — whose goal is to stay in power — is, in fact, winning.
Assad and his regime will survive, his chemical arsenal will likely never be accounted for, and the Syrian opposition, unless assisted in some serious way, will be crushed under Russian-sponsored arms. Meanwhile, the Iranians — patient and undeterred — will refuse to dismantle their ability to sprint to a nuclear weapon.
People will die, atoms will be split, and we will declare these problems solved, at least until another day. Check, check, check.
SEE ALSO: Is Syria Now A Direct Threat To The US?