John Kerry does not give up easily. On Thursday in Munich the US secretary of state will promote a fresh diplomatic effort on Syrian peace talks. Yet for all his determination, events on the ground are not only working against a breakthrough, but raising increasingly profound doubts about the coherence of US and western strategy. For more than a week, the rebel-held city of Aleppo, once Syria’s largest, has been pounded by Russia’s air force, acting in support of Iranian-backed militias and Syrian government troops. If this annihilation strategy continues, the balance of forces in Syria’s civil war will change fundamentally. Mr Kerry’s proposed negotiated solution will be null and void, for there will be no Syrian opposition force left to be represented at any negotiating table.
The truth is that the humanitarian catastrophe in and around Aleppo ought to be enough to trigger a rethink anyway. Tens of thousands of Syrian civilians are already at the Turkish border in the winter cold. Now, according to the United Nations, an estimated 300,000 more could soon be running for their lives, as barrel bombs are dropped on their city. These inhabitants think they already know the fate that awaits them if Syrian government forces take the city. A recent UN report described the torture methods of the Assad regime as “extermination”. Aleppo, a symbol of the 2011 revolt against the regime, and a stronghold of opposition forces since 2012, is in imminent danger of being surrounded, starved and massacred.
The net result of Russia’s four-month-old military intervention in Syria may now be a major turning point in the war, but one that will bring more, not less, human suffering and one that will ultimately feed the so-called Islamic State. Indeed, the very groups that had successfully pushed Isis out of Aleppo in 2013 and 2014 are now themselves being targeted for destruction.
In one week alone, Syria has gone from bad to horribly worse. Mr Kerry is clearly well aware of this. It lies behind his desperate push for talks. Yet this cannot disguise the grim fact that the Obama administration is now contemplating the complete collapse of its strategy. The rebels whom the US and its allies have claimed to support all along are, in Aleppo, in need of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry, yet there is no indication they will be supplied with it. If nothing changes, their defeat may be just a question of time.
To fix US policy at such a critical stage of the conflict may well be impossible, but some proper public accounting for Washington’s errors is essential. In Syria, “red lines” have come and gone, with a huge human toll. By contrast, Moscow has proved to be much more consistent and radical in its support of the Assad regime than the west and its allies ever were in their assistance to the opposition. Nor is it clear what Mr Kerry has in mind when he claims, as he did this week, that if diplomacy fails, the US has “other leverage”. Russia has reportedly offered to put an end to its bombing on 1 March – but this is a cynical proposal which leaves three weeks for the assault on Aleppo to achieve many of its goals.
The large reality is that US options have been severely cut short by Russia’s military involvement in Syria. Any notion of a western-protected “no-fly zone” in northern Syria, aimed at creating a safe haven for civilians and rebels alike, has been made all but impossible. Such a thing could have made sense earlier in the war, but at this stage it would mean risking a wider military confrontation with Russia – which the Obama administration understandably cannot contemplate. What is unfolding in Aleppo may soon resemble the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s – only this time with no relief in sight, and with much wider refugee consequences, including in Europe. If ever there was a symbol of western failure in Syria, this is it. Aleppo is already a stain on the UN. Now it is a stain on the record of the US administration too, however well intentioned it wanted to appear.
