Russia Redraws Lines of Diplomacy

Russia Redraws Lines of Diplomacy

By ALAN COWELL

Moscow's maneuvers in the negotiations over Syria set up a rivalry with Washington, while leaving Europe largely sidelined in the region.

Letter From Europe

By ALAN COWELL

Published: October 3, 2013

PARIS — For decades, the protagonists of the Cold War held much of the world in place, tamping local brush fires lest they become the spark of conflagration between two mighty nuclear powers. And when that icy era ended with the implosion of the Soviet Union, many spoke of a suddenly monopolar world in thrall to a surging America.

In recent days, with the still untested rapprochement between Russia and the Obama administration over Syria — coupled with Washington’s equally abrupt and equally uncertain warming toward Iran — the familiar calculations have shifted.

While no one is talking about a return to the perilous standoff of the Cold War, Russia has gone some way toward re-establishing itself as a counterweight to the United States, reflecting President Vladmir V. Putin’s longstanding desire to restore his nation’s clout.

Moscow’s deft footwork in crafting a deal with Washington to rid Syria of its chemical weapons stocks, moreover, has sidelined some of the United States’ European partners, while President Obama’s nascent courtship of the new Iranian leadership has unsettled traditional allies in the Arab world and in Israel, long used to trading off the mutual hostility between the United States and Iran.

“There is no doubt that the Russians regard themselves as having pulled off quite a victory,” said Ian Bond, a foreign policy specialist with the Center for European Reform, a research organization in London. “We have become quite used to a negative international agenda” from Moscow, he said.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had been seen in the West as “Mr. Nyet,” Mr. Bond said, persistently standing in the way of Western efforts to pressure President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Moscow’s main regional ally.

“And suddenly,” he said, “you have some rather adept diplomacy,” deflecting the Obama administration’s preparations for a punitive military strike in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.

Often enough, diplomacy is a game of shadows and nuances, symbols and signals, and the Russian maneuvers seemed indeed to reshape at least the imagery of regional diplomacy since the Arab uprisings of early 2011.

In Libya’s turmoil, France and Britain took a lead in an air campaign that hastened the demise of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. In Syria, France was the first Western power to recognize the rebels who were seeking to overthrow Mr. Assad, prodding the United States to follow suit. Preparing for a possible strike against Syria after the Aug. 21 chemical weapons attacks, the United States looked to Western Europe for support, even as Russia and China expressed opposition.

Then came the Russian initiative, raising a possibility of broader negotiations on Syria under Russian and American stewardship. It also left the Europeans, Mr. Bond said, “seemingly sidelined from the political process” in the conflict, a mere 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, from the closest outpost of the European Union in Cyprus.

Britain, of course, had largely dealt itself out of the military play when its Parliament refused to authorize participation in a strike, leaving France alone among the European powers to press for robust action.

But the French desire to maintain the threat of military action to bolster diplomacy “was marginalized by the entente of the two big powers,” said Pierre Haski, co-founder of the Rue89 news Web site in Paris. Without support from the rest of Europe, France’s voice had little resonance — “a painful awakening,” Mr. Haski concluded.

There is talk now of a renewed effort to convene Syrian peace talks in Geneva, but the regional chessboard has shifted in Mr. Assad’s favor.

As Western diplomats have long discovered in Damascus, Syrian negotiators rarely blink, flinch or tip their hands. They play a long game that seeks out every chink of advantage. “The only certainty” after the weeks of crisis, Mr. Haski said, is that Mr. Assad’s government, which had seemed so close to becoming the target of “destabilizing” American and French military strikes, “has rediscovered an unexpected margin of maneuver.”

At the same time, Washington risks being drawn into a process that, according to the columnist Andreas Ross in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “neither punishes nor weakens Assad but in fact elevates him to the position of a negotiating partner.”

If that were not enough to recast the equation, the stirrings of Washington’s putative new alignment with Iran inject further imponderables, especially because Tehran is Mr. Assad’s closest regional ally and sponsor of the Hezbollah Shiite Muslim militia in Lebanon in a nexus of increasingly toxic rivalries between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Regional Arab states may disagree publicly with Israel on the most fundamental of matters, but, in private, the traditional Sunni rulers seem to share some of Israel’s alarm at Mr. Obama’s diplomacy toward largely Shiite Iran, played out so far in an exchange of letters and a telephone call rather than any substantive discussions.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel traveled to Washington this week, his warnings to Mr. Obama about the perils of cozying up to Iran echoed the concerns of Tehran’s Arab neighbors across the Gulf.

Some Europeans, too, sensed vulnerabilities in Washington’s ability to piece together the redrawn jigsaw.

“The United States is no longer in a position to shape the Middle East alone. That became spectacularly clear in Syria,” Ulrich Ladurner, a political editor at the German weekly Die Zeit, wrote on the paper’s Web site. “Obama needed Russia’s help in the Syrian labyrinth. The United States needs partners.”

Russia’s readiness and ability to sustain the partnership, though, is unclear.

“Whether it lasts,” said Mr. Bond in London, “remains to be seen.”

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