Amidst all the fulmination,
bluster and unhinged Russia, Russia Russia, Trump derangement syndrome,
something else happened this week that was bigger, much bigger than any
of that.
Five will get you ten you never heard anything about it. Basically for the first time in many, many decades, the Middle East has been entirely recast and Trump was central to it. Let’s
start with a permanent cease fire between Israel and Syria who have
been at each other’s throat and on a war footing since 1948 and go from
there.
“…Amid
the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion
over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed the most
tangible outcome of this week’s Helsinki summit. In the lead-up to his
face-to-face talk with Vladimir Putin, senior US and Russian diplomats —
in close coordination with leaders from mutual ally Israel — brokered a
deal among all the warring parties (bar the Islamist terrorists)
finally to end the devastating seven-year Syrian civil war. As is often
the case with Trump, the hype tends to drown out the message but it was
there for anyone paying close enough attention. The US, Russians and
Israelis have agreed on a solution to Syria. His name is Bashar
al-Assad.
The
summit agreed on the need for a permanent ceasefire between Syria and
Israel (the two countries have been in a state of war since 1948) and
the Syrian government will offer guarantees regarding the Jewish state’s
security. With Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates said to be
behind Israel, and Turkey scrambling to fall into line behind Russia,
it’s a done deal. Assad, in short, is here to stay — and the West must
now begin the process of coming to terms with the fact that it backed
the losing side in the Syrian civil war.
Given
America was close to going to war against Assad not so long ago, it’s
quite a shift — and one that has been some time in preparation. Last
month, Trump quietly abandoned the US-backed Islamist rebels in
south-western Syria. This was the birthplace of an uprising against
Assad that began as a peaceful student protest but quickly drew in every
major regional player, as well as key Nato members and Russia. Most of
the rebels surrendered, and have been given safe passage to their last
redoubt in the north. Those who remain now await what promises to be a
final, devastating onslaught from the Syrian army and their allies in
the Russian Air Force. And yes, we should expect the two to act in
tandem: Syria is now, to all intents and purposes, a Russian
protectorate.
The
Syrian rebels who spent so long begging for American help and arms can
now expect to be entirely abandoned. As part of the de-escalation
process, Trump is said to be eager to withdraw the 2,000 or so US
special forces still stationed in Syria. This way he could (rightly)
claim to be honouring his campaign pledge to keep US soldiers out of
interminable foreign conflicts whenever possible, while — in a ‘Mission
Accomplished’ photo op — announcing the defeat of Islamic State in
Syria. And all in time for US midterm elections in November.
None
of this would have been possible without the Israelis’ consent. Days
before the Helsinki summit, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped his own
diplomatic bombshell following yet another meeting with Putin in Moscow
(they have met at least nine times during the past 18 months). Israel,
he said, would have no problem working with an Assad regime in Syria in
the future. This is despite his repeated calls for regime change, and
the Israeli air force bombing military targets inside the country dozens
of times over the past few years.
So
why is Bibi now keen on Assad? Because his main concern is routing the
Iranian forces who have been settling down in Syria — often with Russian
connivance. Israel also wants fighters from Hezbollah to return to
Lebanon, and for Syria’s own forces to stay away from the border areas
with Israel. If Russia would agree to this, Israel would be content to
accept that Syria is under Russian management — and that the Kremlin has
its own naval base on the Mediterranean.
Putin
seems to have convinced Netanyahu that he would do everything in his
power to see off the Iranians, and keep everyone far from the Israeli
border. Given the almighty mess inside Syria, that is as much as Israel
should reasonably expect of Putin in the short term. And what do the
Iranians get in return? In what appears to be compensation for selling
them out, Putin announced $50 billion in direct Russian investment in
Iran’s oil and gas sectors — up from precisely nada the day before.
Hezbollah can now retreat to southern Lebanon and Iran can even save
face by saying its revolutionary guard has seen off Assad’s enemies.
Israel
seems rather impatient for this new deal to begin, and has been bombing
the bejesus out of Hezbollah and Iranian regime targets in Syria — even
as the summit was convening. No one in Moscow has said anything
significant about them publicly. And as a further concession, Putin has
shelved plans to sell Assad Russia’s formidable S-400 air-defence
systems, which would have been used to successfully repel further
Israeli strikes. Trump now has a new red line: getting Iran out of
Syria. ‘I made clear we will not allow Iran to benefit from our
successful campaign against Isis,’ he said in Helsinki.
And
as for Assad? The man Trump was calling a ‘monster’ as recently as
April? The President is now willing to look the other way. Trump’s
adviser John Bolton said that Assad’s continued rule in Syria is no
longer a ‘strategic issue’ for the US. As comebacks go, this is rather
extraordinary. Assad has gone from being the focus of western ire —with
the House of Commons even taking a vote on whether to bomb his army — to
being there for good.
As
one seasoned Middle Eastern observer has drily noted, the West and its
allies threw everything at him — but to no avail. Assad is now the first
Arab leader to survive an attempt at regime change coordinated by the
West, Gulf Arabs and Israel since Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdul Nasser
emerged unscathed from the Suez debacle back in 1956. Even his alleged
use of chemical weapons — punished by Trump himself in a missile strike
three months ago — has not derailed his campaign.
The
impotence of Assad’s enemies was almost comically illustrated when last
week Syria was given the rotating presidency of the UN-backed Conference
on Disarmament. Quite something for a leader judged by the UN to have
used chemical weapons as a routine weapon of war.
Far
more important for Assad is that, in the eyes of most of the Syrian
people, he is a hero — and not least for having saved their bacon by
wiping out Islamic State. An annual survey of Arab public opinion
published last week revealed that the US (84 per cent) and Israel (90
per cent) are still perceived by Arabs as the greatest threats to
regional security, ahead of Syrian allies Iran and Russia. More to the
point, according to the same survey an overwhelming majority of Arabs
(81 per cent) were also found to view US foreign policy towards Syria
negatively.
No
one is likely to congratulate Trump for having skilfully navigated the
Syrian minefield. But his decision to leave Syria’s fate to the Syrians
(and their new friends in Russia) is the bravest and most logical
decision by a US president when it comes to the Middle East since
Eisenhower ordered Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Suez. His
comments at the Helsinki press conference underlined how little
interest he has in the conflict: he sees it as someone else’s war. And
if American withdrawal means handing Russia a large sphere of influence
in the Middle East, another Mediterranean asset to go along with
Ukraine, then so be it.
We
had best get used to this American disinterest. Once, Washington policed
the Middle East because it thought it would always depend on the region
for its energy. Now America will soon be energy self-sufficient — and
the expectation of this is visibly shaping its foreign policy. Last year
the US produced 90 per cent of its domestic energy needs. So why should
the US continue to spend blood and treasure keeping peace in the Middle
East? Fracking means it can now finally leave, as long as the Saudis
remain willing to help control oil prices.
Under
Trump, Americans can now envisage a time when their country isn’t
directly involved in a military conflict in the combustible Arab world —
with all sides desperate to end the disastrous Saudi-led war on Yemen,
and US troops playing an ever more marginal role in Iraq — for the first
time in living memory. While it would be naive to hope that the terror
threat in the West has disappeared, it is true to say that Islamic State
is now effectively defeated and al-Qaeda is a shadow of its former
self. Thankfully, even war against Iran remains a distant neocon
fantasy, with Trump opting instead for economic sanctions as a way of
bringing about regime change in Tehran. (It won’t work, but that’s
another story.) He also achieved almost overnight what many had thought
impossible: getting the Saudis to abandon their hateful Wahhabi ideology
and to stop funding terror abroad.
The
result of the Helsinki summit Syrian peace initiative that Trump pulled
out of his hat, then, promises to be a win-win for everyone other than
the terrorists over there and the warmongers in our midst. Russia gets a
proxy in Syria and keeps its warm-water naval port on the Mediterranean
coast, as a reward for its brilliant military gamble and massive
financial investment in saving Assad. The US gets out of the quagmire.
The Gulf Arabs’ paranoia about Iranian expansionism is less acute.
Israel gets rid of the threat on its border posed by Iran and Hezbollah.
And even the latter can console themselves with the knowledge that
their sacrifices prevented a genocide against their fellow shia.
And
the West? Well, the West is proving itself to be a bit of an
irrelevance. But bearing in mind how much death and destruction our
reckless military interventions have caused in the region over the past
few decades — to those on the receiving end, most obviously, but to us
too, in the form of our soldiers’ deaths and the blowback from Islamist
terrorism and the migrant crisis — that is perhaps the best outcome of
all. Putin is filling the vacuum, but only the most unhinged anti-Putin
fanatic believes that Russia has plans to invade Europe.
And
come to think of it, the Putin–haters should be happiest of all. Having
to deal with the permanent headache that is trying to resolve the Arab
world’s intractable conflicts is something one really should wish on
one’s worst enemy.