It’s hard to take back anything you say. We’ve all done it; let a simple word or phrase just slip out, and then have a sudden, horrible realization of what you’ve done.
Secretary of State John Kerry had one of those moments last week.
In a press briefing Sept. 9, Kerry made the off-the-cuff comment that if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were to give up his chemical weapons to the international community within a week’s time, an attack by the United States could be avoided.
It seemed reasonable enough. After all, the only reason the U.S. was even contemplating an attack was due to Assad’s purported use of chemical weapons like sarin gas. If we were to remove them from the equation altogether, Western involvement in the Syrian Civil War would never happen.
The problem, however, is that Kerry was not authorized to broker such a deal, and the State Department almost immediately retracted the statement. It was the administration’s goal to severely punish Assad for using his deadliest toys and possibly turn the tide in favor of the Syrian opposition, not to just take them away.
To make matters worse, Russian President Vladimir Putin has jumped on Kerry’s slip-up and has proposed to the Syrian regime that they do in fact give up their sarin stockpiles. Reports indicate Assad is open to the idea, with his government declaring it a victory for Syria.
That’s bad news for a government seeking a punitive military action against a dictator for violating international norms.
Putin is only backing such a plan to stifle the West’s diplomatic and military goals of intervention and possible regime change in Syria. Despite the Cold War ending, U.S.-Russian power politics are alive and well.
This is a continuing theme of relations between the two countries ever since the infamous “reset,” a clean-slate approach forwarded by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, where an actual button was pushed with the misspelled Russian word for “reset” emblazoned on it.
It seems we’ve gone all the way back to the 1950s.
This isn’t the first time Putin has undermined the Obama administration. With the help of the People’s Republic of China — or, as I will always know them, Red China — Russia has vetoed three United Nations Security Council resolutions on the Syria matter, citing disbelief that Assad’s government had carried out the sarin attacks.
Outside of the UN, Putin is using his lapdog Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, to push the idea that it was the opposition who used the sarin, all in an attempt to incur a military response from the West against Assad.
If the deal goes forward as planned, Obama’s “red line” and moral outrage over the use of sarin will have been for naught, and it will be yet another failure in this administration’s attempt at a neoconservative-style interventionist foreign policy.
By going off script, Kerry single-handedly undermined the administration’s policy goals for Syria, and gave the Russians a veritable get-out-of-jail-free card for Assad.
It would behoove Kerry, and the administration at large, to remember that although Putin is a product of Marxist-Leninism and the KGB, he does not fancy himself the new Joseph Stalin. He would much prefer the title Tsar Vladimir I, and he will take any opportunity to challenge the West, all with the aim of furthering his imperialist agenda.