Juan Cole - The World after the Kerry-Lavrov accord on Syria

"The Kerry-Lavrov agreement may have been the moment when the world returned to a multilateral foreign policy and the US stopped being the sole superpower. We are back to the nineteenth century when there were multiple power centers and each had its sphere of influence."

The agreement reached by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry at Geneva on Saturday regarding the sequester of Syria’s chemical weapons is a little unlikely to shorten the civil war or save many lives in Syria. But it did signal winners and losers in the region and the world. The big losers were the anti-Baath Syria hawks, who were hoping that a US attack on Syria with cruise missiles would draw the Obama administration inexorably into the conflict on the side of the rebels.

Thus, the agreement deeply disappointed Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who wanted a US strike. In Europe, the French government had been hoping the US would go in with French help, allowing Paris to assert itself in its former Syrian colony and to insert itself into the center of world affairs again. The agreement likewise disappointed the hawks in Washington, including Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinin (R-FL) among the few US federal legislators who wants yet another war.

The winners were the Shanghai Cooperation Council and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which overlap somewhat. It is worth noting that Lavrov explicitly thanked this bloc, according to the translation of his news conference on Rossiya 24 TV:

“Today I would like to thank the BRICS countries and the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and many other countries for their principled support for the approach to settling the problem of chemical weapons in Syria exclusively by peaceful means. I hope that our meeting today will allow us to start working so these expectations are not dashed.

In conclusion, I will say that the resolution of the problem of chemical weapons in Syria will be a large step towards achieving the long-standing task of creating in the Middle East a zone free of weapons of mass destruction.”

The Putin government is backing the Syrian government in part because it sees that step as a way of protecting Syrian Christians, many of them, like many Russians, Eastern Orthodox. Ironically, at the same time the Russian government sees itself upholding the principle of secular rule against Muslim radical extremists. Syria’s Aleppo is only a 24-hour drive through Turkey from the Caucasus city of Grozny, where Russia faced substantial turmoil in the past two decades.

Russia won, the new military junta in Egypt won, Iran won, and India and Indonesia won.

The Syrian rebels complained bitterly about the accord, and declared they would go on attempting to overthrow the Baath regime. Turkey’s religious Justice and Development Party was also deeply disappointed, though over 70% of Turks say they don’t want to get involved with Syria. Saudi Arabia doesn’t typically convey its views in public, but surely Riyadh is little different from Ankara in its cold fury at the turn events have taken. The Saudis wanted the US to help overthrow the government of al-Assad.

The announcement in March of 2003 by the George W. Bush administration that the US would invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan regardless of what anyone else in the world thought was an announcement that the US was the sole superpower and the primary Middle East hegemon. The Kerry-Lavrov agreement may have been the moment when the world returned to a multilateral foreign policy and the US stopped being the sole superpower. We are back to the nineteenth century when there were multiple power centers and each had its sphere of influence.

http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/lavrov-accord-syria.html