WAR IN SYRIA

Syrians walk through the former rebel-held Zebdiye district in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on December 23, 2016.

Intro: The real victory, however, belongs to Russia, which has become another force to be reckoned with in the Middle East

SOME CITIES have made history by being destroyed. Grozny, Dresden and Guernica, for instance, were reduced to rubble in the face of a massive onslaught. Aleppo, once Syria’s largest metropolis, will soon join their ranks. The city is on the verge of annihilation. Its 1,000-year-old Muslim heritage has turned to dust; Russian aircraft have targeted its hospitals and schools; its citizens have been under constant bombardment ever since Mr Putin lent his weight to Bashar al-Assad’s cause, many of whom have been starved and gassed. Nobody knows for sure how many of the tens of thousands who remain in the last Sunni Arab enclave will perish inside the ruins where they are sheltering. But even if they receive the safe passage they have been promised from the United Nations, their four-year deal in Aleppo has blown apart the principle that innocent people should be spared the ravages of war. Rather, a noxious and fiercely unpleasant and brutish reality has taken hold – and it threatens a more dangerous and unstable world.

To be insightful or to gauge the depth of Aleppo’s tragedy, we should return first to the initial protests in 2011 against Syria’s president. Many Sunnis marched cheerfully alongside Shias, Christians and Kurds. From the start, with extensive help from Iran, Assad set out to destroy the scope for peaceful resistance by using violence and intimidation to radicalise his people. Early on, his iniquitous claim that all rebels were “terrorists” was brazen.

There were turning points in this war when the West might have stepped in. It could have established a no-fly-zone, say, or provided a haven by which civilians could shelter. It might even have offered a full-scale programme of arming the rebels. But, paralysed by the legacy of military failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the West held back. As the fighting escalated into entrenched internecine warfare, the need for Western intervention grew, month by bloody month. The West may offer reasons as to why it refrained from becoming involved, such as how the risk and complexity of intervening grew faster by the week. As Syria’s tyrant was about to topple, Russia joined the fray, acting without conscience and to devastating effect. Mr Putin’s deliberate and timely act of helping with military force strengthened and recalibrated Assad’s hand once more. Aleppo’s fall is proof that Assad has prevailed and of Iran’s influence. The real victory, however, belongs to Russia, which has become another force to be reckoned with in the Middle East.

Similarly, the defeat is not just a striking blow to Assad’s opponents, but also to the Western conviction, particularly in foreign affairs, that values matter as well as interests. After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when Tutsis were slaughtered as the world turned its back, countries recognised that they have a duty to constrain brute force. When the UN accepted responsibility to protect the victims of war crimes, wherever they might be, conventions against the use of chemical weapons and the reckless killing of civilians took on a new relevance. The desire to then promote freedom and democracy was not far behind.

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This notion of liberal intervention has suffered grievously. The U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq has clearly demonstrated that not even the powerfullest country in history can impose democracy by force alone. The tragedy of Aleppo maybe less conspicuous, but the battle there is just as significant. Directly confronted with the Syrian president’s atrocities, the West has done no more than offering rephrased diplomatic utterances. By failing to stand up for what it is supposed to believe in, it has shown that its values are just words, and ones that can be ignored with impunity.

Plenty of others are culpable of blame. After Assad drenched his people in nerve gas, crossing an ‘American red line’, Britain’s parliament voted against taking even limited military action. As millions of displaced people fled to the borders that Syria shares with its neighbours – including Lebanon and Jordan – most European countries looked the other way. Barriers were put up by many EU countries to stem the tide of refugees.

Blame might also be attributed to Barack Obama. America has treated Syria as a trap to be avoided. The self-satisfied and priggish prediction by Washington that Russia would be bogged down in a ‘quagmire’ there has proved a historic misjudgement. It has been noticeable that, throughout Mr Obama’s presidency, the U.S. has sought to move the world from a system where America often acted alone to defend its values, with a few countries like Britain acting in concert, to one where the job of protecting international norms fell to all countries – because everyone benefited from the rules. Aleppo is a measure of how that policy has failed. Yet, as America has stepped back, the vacuum has been filled not by responsible countries that support the status quo, but by the likes of Russia and Iran which perceives the promotion of Western values as an insidious plot to bring about regime change in Moscow and Tehran.

The next American president could seek to reverse this. The difficulty, though, is that liberal intervention is not a stance likely to be supported by Donald Trump. Mr Trump’s appointment of Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, as his secretary of state, reinforces the point of his campaign message that will dishearten many – of notching up deals, not shoring up values.

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Striking deals is an essential part of diplomacy, especially with adversaries like Russia and Iran and competitors like China. Any foreign policy that lurches from deal to deal without a coherent strategy or of being anchored in values poses grave risks. Allies might become bargaining chips. Mr Trump has already stoked the flames by offering his support for democratic Taiwan as something to be traded in exchange for helping to cut America’s trade deficit with China. Beijing has declared Taiwan as a renegade province. Any grand bargain, too, that Mr Tillerson brokers with his friends in Russia which might result in American troops being pulled back from NATO’s front-line states in exchange for concerted diplomatic action against Iran or China would leave the Baltic States exposed to Russian aggression. One of America’s great strengths is its unparalleled network of alliances. Mr Trump must treat his allies with care, not freely trade them away.

Any emerging new order that is based purely on deals also risks being unpredictable and unstable. If Mr Trump fails to strike his much-anticipated deal with Russia, the two countries could rapidly fall out. In such an eventuality, never would Mr Obama’s cool and rational head be more missed. When might is right, small countries tend to be locked out or are forced to accept poor and meagre terms while the great powers of the world strut their stuff. Without a proper framework to bind them in, deals require frequent renegotiation, with uncertain outcomes. Complex, trans-border issues such as climate change become even harder to solve.

The world is witnessing what happens when values cannot hold back the chaos and anarchy of geopolitics. Aleppo has been abandoned in tragic circumstances amid the fighting which has been merciless. The people who have suffered the most at the hands of Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin are the poor and the innocent.