There were so many thinkpieces spawned yesterday about the big Putin-Obama UNGA meeting (OMG PUTIN AND OBAMA TALKED TO EACH OTHER) that I gave up reading them after about 4 or 5. Add in the detailed analyses of their dueling speeches to the General Assembly (OMG DUELING SPEECHES) and the whole news and analysis thing got a little out of control if you ask me. The air was so thick with #content that we were even picking apart a single photo of the two presidents together at a luncheon like it was the Zapruder Film, I guess looking for some sign that either of them was about to push the button. Which, if they’d been reading the coverage of their own plans for the day, would probably have been understandable.
Supposedly Obama and Putin spent half of their talk on Syria and half on Ukraine, though that’s probably the White House’s description and they’ve got reason to maybe exaggerate the amount of time spent on Ukraine just a bit. Anyway nobody seems to be talking much about the substance of that part of the conversation, so we don’t know if they had a productive conversation, or if both men aired their grievances, or if Obama did all the talking while Putin rolled his eyes and made JO motions with his hand, or what.
Both of them talked about Ukraine in their UNGA addresses, though; Obama described “Russia’s annexation of Crimea and further aggression in eastern Ukraine” as a threat to global order, while Putin blamed the whole affair on continued NATO expansion and called for a recognition of the rights and wishes of the Donbas people (he, ah, didn’t mention Crimea). They both have a point but are also telling half the story; Obama is pretending that Russia’s aggressive moves to slice Ukraine up weren’t precipitated by a genuine reaction against the Euromaidan revolt/coup in both Crimea and Donbas, while Putin is still pushing the conspiracy theory that Euromaidan was orchestrated by “The West” and insisting, absent any evidence so far, that his only concern is for the well-being of those poor folks in Donbas (and he’s also, ah, not talking about Crimea).
It’s really much the same on Syria, which is why yesterday’s big meeting probably didn’t accomplish much despite all the hubbub. As Juan Cole suggests, Putin is at a slight advantage when talking about Syria right now, because his policy makes superficial sense: ISIS is fighting Assad, and therefore to fight ISIS the rest of the world needs to support Assad. Once ISIS is out of commission, then we can talk about Syria’s future. Obama can’t articulate a simple Syria policy because he doesn’t have one. America’s biggest concern is ISIS, but we don’t want to help Assad because he’s also bad, but he’s also not bad enough (relatively) that we want to do much to get rid of him. We’re arming rebels to fight ISIS, but the rebels all want to be fighting Assad instead. We want to end the slaughter of Syrian civilians and the exodus of Syrian refugees to Turkey, Lebanon, and beyond, but we won’t target Assad’s air power, which is by far the biggest generator of both. There’s no policy here; it’s mostly a wish list at this point.
But while Putin makes superficial sense when he frames Syria as a binary choice (Assad or ISIS), if you scratch an inch below the surface you can see that he’s being incredibly misleading. Are ISIS and Assad at odds with each other? Sure, in a technical sense, but for supposed adversaries they sure have done a bang-up job of pretending each other doesn’t exist. Yeah, there’s the occasional major ISIS advance against a government-held area, but there’s also the occasional ISIS advance against the Syrian rebels under the cover of Assad’s air force, and beyond that the only consistent contact between ISIS and Assad over the course of the war has been when ISIS sells oil to Assad. That doesn’t even get into the fact that it’s Assad’s brutality that drives ISIS’s recruitment and that Assad’s continued presence only makes Syria more unstable (and that instability is ISIS’s lifeblood). I’m assuming here that Putin gives a shit how many Syrians die at Assad’s hands, which may be assuming too much, and that he’s genuinely looking for a way to destroy ISIS, which is at least an open question.
There was, of course, some vague talk about Syria’s need for a “transition,” but that’s become a talking point over the past month. Until there’s some agreement (involving all the players, not just the two self-appointed Great Powers) on what that transition should be and when it should be undertaken and who should be involved, it’s all just empty words.
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