Assad Is Crossing the Red Line, but It’s a Big Mess

The Syrian conflict began in the context of the Arab uprisings in 2011, and it posed a serious challenge to President Obama’s ambition not to do stupid stuff. Early in the year the autocrats Zine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had fallen. Now, in the first week of March, the situation escalated in Syria. Schoolchildren in the provincial city of Daraa had spray-painted “Down with the regime” on a wall. The regime’s security forces arrested them. After attempting the children’s release for two weeks, their families took to the streets. Government forces fired on and killed several protesters. The next day the funeral procession brought out 20,000 demonstrators, who chanted antigovernment slogans and attacked government buildings. From that point on, all hell broke loose.

The fighting between government forces and the evolving opposition would intensify from month to month while casualty rates mounted tragically. Then, in the early hours of August 21, 2013, a catastrophe occurred. On this morning the Syrian military attacked the rebel-controlled Damascene suburb of Ghouta with missiles containing the chemical agent sarin. The offense killed nearly 1,500 civilians, more than 400 of whom were children. The international community watched with shock and horror. In President Obama’s administration the attack was described as a “moral obscenity” (Sterner, 2014, p. 411). “This brazen assault,” as one of the president’s senior aides wrote, “had clearly crossed the ‘red line’ that President Obama had drawn a year earlier—that if Assad would use chemical weapons, it would warrant U.S .military action” (Chollet, 2016b).

Possible U.S. military actions centered chiefly on two options. One was the arming of Syrian opposition fighters. The other one was direct U.S. engagement through missile strikes against the strategic sites of the Damascus regime or the establishment of no-fly zones. Yet as atrocious as the Ghouta attack was, for the president there were also good reasons to step back and be reluctant to pursue either of the options. Some of the questions on his mind, as he had explained in a January interview with the New Republic, were these: “In a situation like Syria . . . can we make a difference . . .? Would a military intervention have an impact?” (Foer & Hughes, 2013). President Obama was a realist. He understood that the situation was extremely ill-defined and also that it was strategically intractable. A military response held many dangers and posed many risks.

The option of arming opposition fighters was very problematic. As the Syrian government was cracking down on its civilian population, a broad opposition had been forming. At the end of 2013, it was believed that there were about 1,200 armed opposition groups in Syria with well over 100,000 fighters.⁶ It was a “panoply of forces aligned partly among sectarian lines but with often-competing approaches and interests” (Barnard, 2016; Lund, 2012). It received support from Turkey, from Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and, of course, also from the United States and its Western allies. Together they were all opposing Syrian President Assad, but they frequently backed different factions and thus contributed yet further to the opposition’s lack of unity. In fact, the rebels frequently fought each other (Abboud, 2015, p. 339; Byman, 2015, p. 31). Particularly problematic was also that some of these militias consisted of radicals such as the supporters of the Jahabat al-Nusra Front or the Islamic State (IS).

The president was thus wary about the plans to arm oppositionists. From the beginning he asked the right questions, about the identity of the rebels and whether the good ones could really be distinguished from the bad ones (Kaplan, 2016, p. 51). In a 2015 PBS Frontline production Deputy National Security Advisor and close confidant to the president Ben Rhodes explained further Obama’s hesitations at the time: “He [the president] wanted to make clear that we had to be very deliberate and careful when it comes to something like providing military assistance to an opposition group.”⁷ Rhodes followed up by reaffirming Obama’s questions: “Do we know that those arms aren’t going to fall into the wrong hands and end up in the custody of al Nusra Front or an ISIL, for instance?” “In a situation as chaotic as Syria’s,” said another official, “you don’t know where the weapons might end up, and what the consequences are if those weapons are used against civilians, against Israel, against American interests” (Landler & Gordon, 2013, p. A10).

The president’s hesitations about the integrity and reliability of the opposition groups were well-founded. Just one concrete case is the group known as the Syrian Revolutionaries Front. Early on in 2013 when it was founded, the group was considered to be more moderate. Later on, however, it dissolved, and many of its fighters defected to extremist brigades associated with Jahabat al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda. “Such fluidity,” as one observer wrote aptly, “characterizes the formation and transformation of networks of violence throughout Syria” (Abboud, 2015, p. 340).

By the fall of 2014 it also became public knowledge that the CIA had conducted a secret study on the prospects of success when arming rebels. One of the things that President Obama wanted to know from the investigators was whether such a move ever worked. A senior administration official acknowledged that the CIA report “was pretty dour in its conclusions” (Mazzetti, 2014, p. A1). Indeed, the Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s may well have represented the only successful attempt in arming rebels and achieving intended goals (Myers & Shane, 2012). Already some months earlier, Obama had made a veiled remark about the CIA study to The New Yorker: “Very early in this process,” the president said, “I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well.” Yet, the president continued, “they couldn’t come up with much” (Remnick, 2014).

Regarding the option of missile strikes from warships or aerial bombing, the president was also worried. One of his particular concerns was that Assad would place civilians as human shields around the intended targets. He was also very concerned about an underlying flaw in the proposed strikes: They could not be fired at chemical weapons depots, because such attacks could release poisonous plumes into the air, detrimental to the civilian population. Instead, the strikes would target military units that had delivered these weapons. The weapons themselves would remain, and Assad would be able to carry on (Goldberg, 2016). Another problem was that the chemical weapons arsenal was spread out over as many as 45 sites. According to the U.S. military’s Central Command and Joint Staff, it would take up to 75,000 troops to secure these sites (Chollet, 2016a, p. 12; Sanger & Schmitt, 2012).

The conflict theater was problematic in another regard. The war in Libya served as a reference point, and it was clear that the Syrian context was considerably less clear cut than Libya’s. In a National Security Council meeting President Obama spelled out his concern about the differences between the two theaters. On one hand, Libya’s fighting had taken place in an open desert, and this allowed for clear targeting. Syria, on the other hand, was enmeshed in urban warfare with civilians, rebels, and soldiers intermingled (Kaplan, 2016, p. 50). The U.S. campaign in Libya had failed, and the prospects for Syria were much worse. Finally, if airstrikes were to be conducted, they would bear dangers to American pilots, as the Assad regime possessed one of the world’s most sophisticated air defense systems (Chollet, 2016a, p. 2).

Regarding the proposal of no-fly zones, the president considered these to be “half-baked” (Jaffe, 2016). It is indeed the case that their impact is often exaggerated, as evidenced by the U.S.-operated no-fly zones over Iraq throughout the 1990s. Moreover, as Stephen Walt (2014) points out, “[T]he United States has flown thousands of sorties in Iran and Afghanistan over the past decade or so . . . and these efforts didn’t allow Washington to dictate the terms to those on the ground or shape their political futures in any predictable way.” Debilitating the Syrian air force would not have kept the Syrian regime from using other means to a greater extent. Very likely, it would not have unseated Assad quickly either. A no-fly zone, moreover, was the first step onto a slippery slope: “If air power had failed to dislodge Assad,” as critics warned at the time, “demands to do more would surely have increased” (Lynch, 2015, p. 25; Walt, 2014).

Arming the opposition, conducting airstrikes, or creating no-fly zones were not viable options for the president. The situation was simply so messy that none of the proposed tools had good prospects. Even though retired Defense Secretary Panetta criticized President Obama for not acting militarily, while still in office he did acknowledge that “there has been no single unifying military alternative that can be recognized, appointed or contacted” (Panetta, 2012). Similarly, although former Defense Secretary Robert Gates after retirement criticized the president for drawing a red line, he understood the president’s hesitancy. Firing missiles on Syria, Gates said “would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East.” He went further, saying: “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action once it’s launched?” (Shanker & D’Avolio, 2013, p. A12).

As the conflict was escalating within Syria, it was also expanding toward taking on regional dimensions. Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were strongly vying against the Syrian regime, but Iran and its ally Hezbollah were supporting it. With this geopolitical widening, the conflict also heightened the sectarian tensions in the region. Then there were, of course, Russian interests. Moscow was granted a naval base in the Syrian coastal city of Tartus in 1971, and this had remained the only strategic Russian asset with direct access to the Mediterranean. A senior administration official who was granted anonymity to discuss some internal White House deliberations described the situation as follows: “You can’t pretend you can go to war against Assad and not go to war against the Russians” (Jaffe, 2016). The same goes for Iran.

In sum, the situation was inherently ill-defined and strategically intractable. Even an approximation of any synoptic rationality in the decision-making process was out of the question. For President Obama to engage militarily may well have constituted a mistake of commission. It would be “daring too much” and it would likely have led to a false alarm failure. To be sure, there was reason for alarm, but had the president taken military action, the threat would likely have been exacerbated rather than abated.

Don’t Do Stupid Stuff; Make Small Steps Only

Despite this ill-defined and strategically intractable challenge in Syria, the pressure on President Obama to engage militarily had been on since the outbreak of the conflict and was ramping up following the Ghouta attack. The danger to do stupid stuff was ever present. The president, however, was very hesitant from the very beginning. In a rather surprising acknowledgment for an American president, he had explained early on in a New Republic interview: “I am more mindful probably than most of not only our incredible strength and capabilities, but also of our limitations” (Foer & Hughes, 2013). Although he would warn the Syrian regime that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus regarding intervention, it did not. Instead, he relied on a much more fundamental calculus. The New York Times (Myers & Shane, 2012) described this one as follows:

[American military operations] would make the conflict even worse. [It] would risk drawing in Syria’s patrons, principally Iran and Russia, at a much greater level than they already are involved. It would allow Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, to rally popular sentiment against the West and embolden Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups now fighting the Assad government to turn their attention to what they would see as another American crusade in the Arab world. (A6)

To be sure, the president was not categorically opposed to military action. Early in 2012, he did ask his military and intelligence chiefs to devise plans that would hasten the fall of the Assad regime. In the summer of 2012 then, CIA Director David Petraeus laid out a scheme to arm a group of so-called moderate Syrian rebels. This would put “pressure” on Assad, according to Petraeus. But he also acknowledged that these rebels could not oust the Syrian leader right away. The plan had the backing of notable figures in the administration, including Secretaries Hillary Clinton and Panetta. The plan also had support from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and from National Security Council member and later U.S. Representative to the United Nations Samantha Power (Kaplan, 2016, p. 50). President Obama, however, did not like it.

In a 2015 PBS Frontline production, the now-retired David Petraeus acknowledged that the president’s reservations were based on “very legitimate concerns.” Yet he also pressed ahead, arguing that “what one tries to do in a situation like that is . . . gather as much information as possible, but recognize that at the end of the day, there are always going to be risks. There are no guarantees. There are no certainties.” For the president there were too many uncertainties, and his hesitations were well-founded. On December 1, 2012, The New York Times editorialized (Sanger & Schmitt, 2012):

The administration is right to resist arming the rebels. Many have murky aims and some are extremist. Of late, they have received ample basic weapons from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and have also acquired antiaircraft weapons. . . . There is a risk that sending more such weapons into Syria could later end up in the hands of extremists, including in other countries. (A4)

However, as the conflict progressed; as the pressure on President Obama grew, he did feel compelled to provide some support to the opposition fighters. Yet in accordance with a disjointed incrementalism strategy, the support was rather measured. The U.S. actions toward Syria retrieved from the archives of The New York Times are listed in the event chronology found in Table 1.⁸ The period considered commences with President Obama’s “red line” warning and ends with the Ghouta attacks, almost exactly one year later.

Table 1. Event Chronology: US Actions toward Syria from August 21, 2012, to August 21, 2013.

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Instead of abating the conflict in any way, however, the president’s disjointed incrementalism seemed to allow the situation to worsen. On August 21, 2013, came the horrific chemical attack in Ghouta. In the days following the attack, the strong sentiment inside the White House Situation Room was that Assad must be punished. The Pentagon was staffed around the clock, and on January 27 Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel explained to the BBC: “We have moved assets in place to be able to fulfill and comply with whatever options the president wishes to take.” “We are ready to go,” he added.⁹ Indeed, on August 27, the United States deployed four destroyers near the Syrian coast equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

As the situation was building and as White House deliberations continued, it was the White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough who came to play an important role. He cautioned explicitly about the perils of intervention, and, with that, he fed into Obama’s existing hesitation. Thus, alongside the signs of military preparedness, there were then also immediate signs that nothing big would be forthcoming, that “any strikes [the Obama administration] executed would be small and generally inadequate to change the battlefield equation” (Sterner, 2014, p. 412). Already one day prior to Hagel’s pronouncement, The Washington Post reported: “President Obama is weighing a military strike against Syria that would be of limited scope and duration.” It was to be “a deterrent, while keeping the United States out of deeper involvement” in Syria’s civil war . . . The timing of such an attack would probably last no more than two days” (DeYoung & Gearan, 2013).

It was indeed the case that President Obama was focusing on small strikes. In a PBS Newshour interview on August 28, 2013, he told co-anchor Gwen Ifill that the U.S “can take limited, tailored approaches,” so the president would not get the United States “drawn into a long conflict.” Ever wary of U.S. failures in the Middle East, the president emphasized that it would not be “a repetition of . . . Iraq.” Instead, it would be “saying in a clear and decisive . . . way” to Bashar al-Assad, “stop doing this.” This limited approach, the president further explained, “can have a positive impact on our national security over the long term,” and it “may have a positive impact in the sense that chemical weapons are not used again on innocent civilians” (Lehrer, 2013).

On the morning of August 31, however, it became clear that it would not come to any U.S. strikes against the Assad regime. Some hours earlier the president had already “stunned” his staff that he “wanted to explore another option,” and now he ventured to the Rose Garden to explain to the American people that he had made the decisions to seek explicit authorization from Congress for strikes against Syria (Chollet, 2016b; Landler, 2014, p. A7). In his weekly address, on September 7, the president reiterated that what he had in mind was “not an open-ended intervention,” but instead “limited” military action “both in time and scope—designed to deter the Syrian government from gassing its own people again and degrade its ability to do so.”¹⁰

It was then happenstance diplomacy that led to a moment of success. On September 9, Secretary of State John Kerry was in London for discussions with his British counterpart, William Hague. During the news conference the secretary was asked whether there was anything Assad could do to avoid an attack. Kerry’s response was: “Sure, he could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week—turn it over, all of it without delay and allow the full and total accounting [of it], but he isn't about to do it.”¹¹ For the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, this was an opportunity. Russia could assert its interests diplomatically and, at the same time, demonstrate its relevance in matters of international security. Moscow thus moved to pressure Assad, and by September 14 the United States had announced a “deal” that was endorsed by the UN Security Council. International inspectors would be able to enter and destroy the Syrian chemical arsenal (Gearan & Wilson, 2013).

Yet after brief relief from this success of coercive diplomacy, the violence escalated anew. In the United States, politicians on both sides of the isle again advocated for more aggressive military intervention. Most prominently, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John McCain called for creating a no-fly zone (Erlich, 2014, p. 222). For the president such measures carried too many risks, and it was dubious whether they could achieve anything. The president also rejected the continuing calls for arming more opposition fighters. That had “always been a fantasy,” he said, elaborating that “there’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”¹² Speaking at a later occasion to reporters at the White House (qtd. in Baker, 2015), the president explained further his reservations about military means:

When I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions or trying to downplay the challenges involved in this situation, what I’d like to see people ask is specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do and how would you fund it and how would you sustain it? Typically what you get is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.

Thus, the United States would continue with a disjointed incrementalism strategy of small and reversible steps. In the event chronology in Table 2 are listed U.S. actions towards the Syrian regime. The time frame under consideration begins immediately after the Ghouta chemical attacks, when the pressure on President Obama to act militarily increased significantly. It concludes at the end of September 2015, when Russia started launching airstrikes on behalf of the Syrian regime.

Table 2. Event Chronology: US Actions toward Syria from August 22, 2013, to September 30, 2015.

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The situation was worsening, In February 2014, U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford retired from his post in protest. He was disappointed by the administration’s restraint in Syria. Talking freely and publically, he explained in a CNN interview: “There really is nothing we can point to that’s been very successful in our policy.” He continued: “It is not a conflict that we should ignore, either on moral or on national security grounds.”¹³ Writing just a few days later in the op-ed pages of The New York Times, he argued: “The Free Syrian Army must have more military hardware, including mortars and rockets to pound airfields to impede regime air supply operations and . . . surface-to-air missiles.” The ambassador acknowledged, “[W]e don’t have good choices on Syria anymore,” but he went on to say that “some are clearly worse than others.” In the mind of the ambassador, “more hesitation and unwillingness to commit to enabling the moderate opposition fighters to fight more effectively both the jihadists and the regime simply hasten the day when American forces will have to intervene against Al Qaeda in Syria” (Ford, 2014).

This type of criticism toward President Obama continued over the months. One example is the “dissent channel cable,” which was broken by The Wall Street Journal in mid-June 2016 (Abi-Habib, 2016). In this internal document more than 50 diplomats were calling for military strikes against the Syrian regime. Taking these and previous critics together, the critics argue that President Obama failed to show resolve and that he thereby committed a mistake of omission. For the sake of abating the conflict and maintaining U.S. credibility, the president should have used force after Assad had crossed the red line in August 2013. There is a near-unanimous verdict among observers that this episode was a failure. Even President Obama’s supporters, so Chollet (2016b), a senior aide to the president says, refer to his handling of the Syrian challenge as a “debacle,” an “amateurish improvisation,” or the administration’s “worst blunder.” In this sense, according to Chollet, a mythology has evolved; that is, if only the United States had used force, it could have moved the conflict toward a resolution early on.

It’s Bad, but There Were No Better Alternatives

The Syrian war is a tremendous catastrophe. The radicalization and bloodshed in the country and the regional destabilization it brought will haunt the Middle East for decades to come. During President Obama’s tenure few of his policies have been criticized more widely than his refusal to become involved militarily against the Assad regime (Lynch, 2015, p. 24). One of the most notable criticisms came from Hillary Clinton. In 2014, after she left office, she told The Atlantic: “Great nations need organizing principles and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle” (Goldberg, 2014). It can be argued, as here, that “don’t do stupid stuff” actually is an organizing principle, or more precisely it is a prudent strategy for the United States in Syria.

The strategy of disjointed incrementalism is often at odds with prevailing inclinations, especially in the face of a tragedy like that in Syria. This point is well illustrated by another criticism from Robert Ford when he stated that “there’s never been a great sense of urgency in the administration about doing something big” (McManus, 2015). This is indeed correct. President Obama permitted only small moves. He has been steadfast in his assertions that the United States can, in fact, do little militarily to influence the situation and that the United States will not use military force (Williams, 2016, p. 94). Of course, one cannot rule out the possibility that a “prompt, forceful and committed” response by the president would have led to a better situation in Syria than the one the world is witnessing now (Walt, 2015), but it is very doubtful.

Proponents of military action were calling for the arming of opposition fighters, for airstrikes, and for the establishment of no-fly zones in Syria. Regarding the plan of arming opposition fighters, initially President Obama rejected the plan devised by David Petraeus, but some months later he approved a similar one. What happened then was anticipated by the president. Tehran leaders increased their support for the Assad regime, and they also sent Quds forces (Kaplan, 2016, pp. 51–52). Missile strikes or aerial bombing were also not viable options. The chemical weapons storage facilities could not be hit directly, and they were also dispersed throughout the country. Securing them would have required tens of thousands of troops, as estimated by U.S. military planners (Chollet, 2016a, p. 12). Such a move was not only unthinkable on the U.S. side, but it would have triggered a much more direct confrontation with Russia and Iran. Regarding no-fly zones, Iraq serves as one example of their ineffectiveness. Moreover, they would likely become a slippery slope in a conflict in which the United States had no vital interests.

All of these plans—no matter how well intentioned—were, in the end, ill-founded and escalatory, and they would likely result in a deeper conflagration and a wider conflict. During a visit to Riyadh in the spring of 2016, the president was asked about military options in Syria. He responded: “None of the options are good” (Al Jazeera, 2016). This is an answer the American foreign policy establishment is neither accustomed to nor sympathetic toward. Yet it is just a fact, and, accordingly, prominent scholars have argued that there is “no viable military strategy for ending the conflict” in Syria (Bacevich, 2016; Mearsheimer, 2014, p. 21; Walt, 2015). The caution that President Obama has displayed throughout the conflict was warranted, and the policy of not getting involved in Syria has been correct (Byman, 2015, p. 30; Gupta, 2016, p. 34).

Although President Obama avoided making larger mistakes in regard to the Assad regime, one error that he did make, arguably, was to underestimate ISIS, and this challenge introduces a complication that is not often acknowledged in discussions about the Syrian conflict. When it comes to ISIS, the articulated goal was to downgrade and ultimately defeat it. Toward this goal, however, as Syria expert Joshua Landis explains, “Washington needs Assad.” He explains further: “We don’t want to ally with Assad, but . . . strategically, we’re allied with Assad.” The reason for this, Landis explains, is that Assad “is a bulwark against the spread of ISIS today.” America is “trying to destroy ISIS. But if America destroyed Assad and helped that agenda to come forward, who’s going to take Damascus? It’s going to be ISIS and Nusra” (Smith, 2015).

This is the lesson of Iraq and Libya: U.S. intervention could have created a vacuum, illustrating once again “that the only thing worse than a truly awful government is no government at all” (Walt, 2015). It often seems that the critics of Obama’s approach to Syria do not give consideration to this strategic conundrum. The actors involved in Syria are plentiful. The Assad regime is backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia. The oppositionists are backed by Turkey and various Arab and Western states. Many of the regional actors, including Russia, have much more significant interests in Syria than does the United States. Getting involved, in the words of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, “would be throwing gasoline on a very complex fire in the Middle East.” Worse, the United States would actually become part of the fire.

There Is No Military Solution; It Is Diplomatic

“Every time the U.S. touches the Middle East, it makes things worse,” international relations scholar Walt (2014) wrote. Nevertheless, in the Washington security policy establishment it is a long-standing belief that America has the capacity to fix the problems that plague the region. This belief persists despite the dismal record of U.S. interventions in the Middle East, and in 2011 it has asserted itself in Libya. What followed there after the military campaign is well known. In short, it was the empowerment of extremists and an ongoing and devastating civil war. And despite the U.S. failure in Libya, plentiful calls for more military involvement in Syria continued.

In the spring of 2015, President Obama invited various columnists to the White House for a roundtable discussion. Asked to reflect upon his foreign policy, the president responded: “In terms of decisions I make, I do think I have a better sense of how military action can result in unintended consequences” (Kaplan, 2016, p. 63). Of course, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya validate the concern for unintended consequences. It is for this reason that officials close to the president have often repeated, “[T]here is no military solution” in Syria (Humud, Blanchard, & Niktin, 2015). Exemplary is Ben Rhodes’s interview with The New York Times Magazine in the spring of 2016: He acknowledged that “[t]here’s a numbing element to Syria.” “But I will tell you this,” he continued, “I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we’re there—nearly a decade in Iraq” (Samuels, 2016).

More likely than not, and very unfortunately, the conflict in Syria will continue for the foreseeable future. Militarily, there has been and continues to be no path for the United States. With the direct entry of Russia into the conflict in September 2015, there is also no military path for the oppositionists. The odds are in favor of the Syrian regime. In order to gradually slow and eventually halt the mounting casualty rates, it is incumbent upon the United States and its Western allies to curtail their support for opposition fighters. Only when this starts to happen transparently could Moscow and Tehran be persuaded to stop supplying arms to the Assad regime and pressure it toward political solutions (Gupta, 2016, p. 38).

A next step would be to test Russian President Vladimir Putin on his pledges for collaboration. The condition he asks be met is one that should serve the interests of all the protagonists. To this effect, Putin said in October 2015: “Syria can become a model for partnership in the name of common interests, resolving problems that affect everyone.”¹⁴ Especially in the West, there is, of course, a lot of cynicism about Putin, but the fact is that diplomacy can be successful. One example is the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons in the fall of 2013. But Russia and the United States have also been able to cooperate on security issues in the past, for example, in the initial U.S. war in Afghanistan in the fall after 9/11.

It is also the case that in the long run neither Russia nor Iran is wedded to Bashar al-Assad as the Syrian president. Nonetheless, both Moscow and Tehran will want to have a decisive say in who rules the country so as to ensure their interests are safeguarded (Slim, 2016; Stent, 2016). The option of engaging with Russia and Iran and also with Turkey and Saudi Arabia remains open exactly because Obama didn’t do stupid stuff—he avoided a mistake of commission that very much bore the danger of a confrontation much beyond the tragedy we already see.