WATERSHED MOMENT

The G20 summit that ended in St Petersburg yesterday failed to produce any kind of agreement on the Syrian crisis. The chasm and bridge separating the United States and Russia on Syria is as wide as it has ever been. Yet, few such gatherings in recent years have offered a truer picture of how and where the real balance of global power lies. A genuine watershed in international affairs may at last have arrived; replacing a vestige of what has been referred to of late as the ‘Arab Spring’ – a term synonymous with upheaval and chaos spreading through many Islamic states.

Related:

• President Obama’s ‘red-lines’ and America’s moving goal posts…
• Syria: America’s change of political tack…
• History is littered with examples of chemical and biological attacks…
• U.S. and France prepare to strike Syria over chemical attack that killed 1,429…

The two-day gathering in St Petersburg have confirmed many things. It underscored, for example, just how determined Vladimir Putin is in reasserting Russia on the world stage. It displayed quite clearly, too, that a mercantilist China will do nothing to unsettle its economic interests, and in the process laid bare Europe’s total inability to act on its own.

A senior Kremlin official was reported to have said that no one pays any attention to Britain, a ‘small island’. But could the same not be said of the rest of the EU? Germany, for instance, Europe’s economic powerhouse, is notable only for its deafening silence. France, eager to push a military agenda in punishing the Assad regime for its alleged use of chemical weapons, is unwilling to do so without America’s lead. Other G20 participants wring their hands in aghast and disbelief at what is happening in Syria, but most are keen to shriek away from any involvement. At a moment of high international drama, it leads us back – as it invariably does – to the United States and its role in the world.

It shouldn’t have required a Kremlin official to point out Britain’s diminished influence in the world; the empire ended more than half-a-century ago. But, like it or not, with the United Nations no more than a fractious and divided talking shop, the U.S. is the closest thing we have to a global policeman. No country, it has been argued, has the right to behave as such, and America’s actual ability to change history, for all its military might and superpower status, is sometimes exaggerated – not least by itself. We need to look no further than the sorry state of Iraq, a decade after George W Bush’s invasion, to provide clarity to the argument. In any major crisis, however, all eyes turn to Washington, as they are now in Syria as the regime is accused of violating a ban on the use of chemical weapons. Syria is a signatory against the banned use of such weapons, and yet here we have a paralysed UN Security Council that is powerless to enforce an international binding treaty.

With a vote in Congress on the use of U.S. military force in Syria to be held on the 9th September, the next few days will be decisive. Britain’s role on the world stage has been diminished given the veto in the House of Commons last week, but for President Obama the stakes are vastly higher. On Syria, Mr Obama’s approach has been feckless. First, he declared that Assad must go without saying how, and then laid down his ‘red lines’ over the use of chemical weapons. Later, he announced his decision to use force, and more recently has passed the buck to Congress on Capitol Hill. Deep down, many will suspect that he would prefer to stay well out of Syria given what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Syria is ablaze and arguably much more contentious than anything the United States has dealt with in the past 30-years. Mr Obama’s uncertainty in how to proceed in Syria is resonating in all corners of the world.

If present indications are anything to go on, the House of Representatives could well follow the House of Commons in opposing military action. If so, a definitive moment will have arrived. Unlike David Cameron, Obama will either defy his legislature and go ahead with strikes, or he will acquiesce, and there will be no military response. If military action is taken off the table, not only would Barack Obama’s presidency be gravely weakened at home, but in the eyes of the world so too would the credibility of America as a global policeman. Either way, a watershed is at hand.