America Falls Into Line With Russia on Syria

After years of calling for regime change, the Americans seem to have finally accepted that President Bashar Assad is still 'our man in Damascus.'

Anshel Pfeffer Dec 20, 2015 4:28 AM

Barack Obama’s remarks on Syria during his annual news conference Friday were by then little more than damage limitation. “I think that Assad is going to have to leave in order for the country to stop the bloodletting,” Obama said, but that was just his opinion. He then added that any solution in Syria will have to ensure that the “equities” of Russia and Iran are “respected.” At the top of the list of equities in Syria is of course President Bashar Assad. Not that Obama’s equivocation should be surprising. The scene was already set earlier this week — the week in which Obama’s U.S. fell in line with Putin’s Russia.

The key sentence came after John Kerry’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last Tuesday. “The United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change,” the U.S. secretary of state said at a press conference. Just like that, he confirmed what many had believed was an increasing erosion in America’s long-held position that President Bashar Assad must leave power for there to be any solution to the Syrian war.

Four and a half year ago, President Barack Obama announced that “Assad must go.” This week, though, it was left to White House press secretary Josh Earnest to subsequently insist that “our position hasn’t changed and I don’t think that’s what Secretary Kerry was trying to convey.” But even Earnest had little to say on how the United States would insist on Assad’s removal, simply stating the Americans’ “vigorous moral objection to his leadership.”

Overseas, Kerry was making things perfectly clear. Last Monday, in a meeting with ministers from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan in Paris, he said the demand by Syrian opposition groups that Assad’s departure be a precondition for any peaceful solution was a “nonstarting position, obviously.” And in Moscow, in preparation for another round of international talks on Syria’s future in New York this weekend, he said the United States and Russia are now focusing “not on our differences about what can or cannot be done immediately about Assad.” The meetings in New York have now taken place and the U.N. Security Council resolution is being prepared with a rare sense of U.S.-Russia agreement and of course no mention of Assad.

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