The four month-old Arab League-United Nations diplomatic effort to try to bring an end to the increasingly horrific carnage unfolding in Syria has come to bear a striking resemblance, in at least one important respect, to Cold War diplomacy. The regime of President Bashar al-Assad remains, arguably, Moscow’s most important strategic ally in a region where the US holds uncompromising vital interests. The strategic importance of the Middle East to both countries, in evidence during the era of the Cold War, persists. Syria is by no means the first Middle East country that has triggered diplomatic clashes between the two superpowers.
At last week’s meeting in Geneva it was as much the diplomatic muscle-flexing of the Security Council heavyweights as the issue of finding a solution to the crisis in Syria that caught the attention of the global media as the major networks and newspapers focused unerringly on the differences between Washington and Moscow in the matter of regime change in Syria. What the Geneva meeting demonstrated was that a successful plan for ending the carnage in Syria will depend as much on a formula that meets with the approval of both Washington and Moscow, as it does on an appreciation of what Kofi Annan insists is a grave crisis in Syria that could trigger a wider regional conflict.
Annan himself, since February when he assumed the role of Arab League-United Nations Envoy to Syria, has had to advance his peace plan within the inhibiting limitations of the organization which he understands only too well, having only recently served as its Secretary General. His protracted exercise in shuttle diplomacy armed with a Syria peace plan which has appeared increasingly threadbare, has been frustrated, first, by the cynical indifference of the Assad regime (and, more recently by the now better-armed and better organized opposition forces) to his call for an end to hostilities and, since then, by differences between and among the superpowers as to just how regime change to a transitional government should be orchestrated in Damascus. Both inside and outside Syria the Kofi Annan peace plan has hit serious hurdles and while the Geneva meeting is being treated as at least a modest success, quite where the Annan peace plan goes from here remains decidedly unclear.
Leaving aside the widening and increasingly bloody conflict in Syria which, significantly, now seriously threatens to see the involvement of another country in that region, Turkey, the key remaining question is whether the UN can bring its differing superpowers to the same place as far as the creation of a post-al Assad transitional government is concerned before the crisis further worsens in Syria and even spreads beyond its borders.
At last week’s Geneva meeting which now appears to be a last ditch effort to salvage the Annan peace plan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in laying down Washington’s position that there can be no place for either Bashar al-Assad or any influential functionaries in his regime in a transitional government, a position that appears to be at odds with both the Annan plan but perhaps more significantly with what appears to be Moscow’s refusal to cut the al-Assad regime loose, at least at this juncture.
Geneva, in those circumstances, assumed some of the characteristics of Cold War diplomacy with both Secretary of State Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov finding “key phrases” in the text of the final document that left them satisfied with the outcome of the meeting. That having been said and, frankly, more than a trifle bewilderingly, the two appear to disagree on whether or not the Annan Plan requires the removal of Bashar al-Assad from power.
Counting the cost of violent conflict while diplomatic engagements seek to arrive at understandings that meet the approval of the superpowers has been a characteristic of Cold War diplomacy. More than a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War the situation appears to have changed little. At least that is how it seemed at the end of last week’s Geneva meeting.
