A Realist View of the Syrian Compromise

The Russian proposal to work with Syria to get them to surrender their chemical weapons to international control has gained  immediate traction, and has a possibility of becoming the framework for resolving the immediate crisis, is because, as of September 10, 2013, all of the major players involved can plausibly see it as being in their power interests.

Focusing on power considerations is usually associated with the “realist” analysis of international relations.  It sometimes gets a bad name for trying to break down events in too mechanical and/or too amoral a fashion.

However, if you accept a notion of power broader than just military or economic strength — power that can include, for example, a moral component — then Hans Morgenthau’s “Six Principles of Political Realism” are a good starting point for trying to make sense of the interactions of a group of political actors who have no formal authority above them. The second of Morgenthau’s principles may be the most helpful reminder applicable to the situation today…

The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest in terms of power. This concept provides the link between reason trying to understand international politics and the facts to be understood…We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out.

With that in mind, consider the advantages of the Russian-brokered compromise to the major players involved in the Syrian crisis…

  • President Barack Obama made some serious power miscalculations about the level of domestic support for a Syrian intervention, putting his administration into a bind. If he loses a vote on military intervention, there will be a big hit to his “prestige” or “political capital”. He welcomes a way to “save face”. These are all roundabout ways of saying that the President’s best path for protecting his power as a democratic leader is find a compromise that doesn’t need the use of force, and lets him declare victory and move on to his next challenge (or what a realist would think of as his next application of power).
  • Vladimir Putin and Russia can gain substantially in longer-term soft power (to use Joseph Nye’s term) from brokering a deal.  Russia gains more from being able to stop military strikes against an ally than from protesting them after they occur. Going forward, Russian diplomats will have a concrete example of how an alliance with Russia can serve as a counterweight to US power when talking with governments worried that the United States might not always be friendly to them.
  • Given the international system as it currently exists (and that international elites have little interest in changing) Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also is in a position to gain. Assad cannot use chemical weapons again without substantially increasing the likelihood of some kind of collective international action against him. In return for renouncing weapons that can’t be used, Assad will gain the ability, at least in the short term, to be as brutal as he wants against his domestic enemies via conventional means, since liberal internationalists have continually reinforced that the only issue in Syria that justifies international military action is chemical weapons use, and the Obama administration has been worn down to a point where they are unlikely to move the goalposts on this.
  • Let’s not overlook the fact that neither Russia or Syria wants to risk activating the military power of the United States, a power which they have no control over.
  • Finally, the liberal internationalists (e.g. American Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power) can still manage to gain a little relative to their starting position. Not only do they avoid an outright defeat of losing a vote in Congress on intervention, but they get a precedent for the “international community” limiting the actions of a sovereign nation within its own borders. Though the precedent would apply only to very narrow circumstances, it would be a tad stronger than what exists now. The liberal internationalists can worry about moving the goalposts from chemical weapons to other kinds of atrocities later.

If these are roughly the calculations that the individual actors have made, it is in each of their interests not to make the resulting process overly contentious for any of the others — even if that means compromising on the actual effectiveness of transferring Syria’s chemical weapons to international control. This, of course, is a key problem with realist compromises (arrived at consciously or not): they tend not to make underlying problems go away.

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