A Turning Point for Syrian War, and U.S. Credibility

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/europe/laurent-fabius-obama-syria-war.html

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PARIS — In case anyone missed it, Laurent Fabius, who was the French foreign minister as recently as two weeks ago, accused President Obama of letting down not just Syria but the whole world in 2013.

Mr. Fabius said as much as he was leaving office in early February, when he alluded to the dangerous “ambiguities” on the part of the “principal pilot” in the Western alliance.

He returned to the theme in a radio interview on Europe 1 last Tuesday, with broader strokes and in greater detail, criticizing the United States’ decision not to launch airstrikes in August 2013 after it was determined that the Syrian government had crossed Mr. Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons.

It was, Mr. Fabius said, “a turning point, not only for the crisis in the Middle East, but also for Ukraine, Crimea and the world.”

That is a heavy accusation to make against a crucial ally in a war that is far from over, but the harsh tone reflects the bitterness in Paris over Mr. Obama’s decision, made hours before French warplanes were due to join the bombing mission over Syria.

Charges of American “passivity” have been a common theme of late at international conferences, where diplomats, foreign policy analysts and journalists play what the French newspaper Le Monde called the “blame game” for the catastrophic situation in Syria.

For his part, Mr. Fabius, a former prime minister who left the Foreign Ministry to head the French Constitutional Council, hasn’t hesitated to point the finger at various targets. He has accused Mr. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria of “brutality,” Iran and Russia of “complicity,” and the United States of “ambiguity.”

Criticism of Mr. Obama’s perceived lack of follow-through in Syria is oft-repeated in Paris; what’s new is that a former foreign minister, among others, is calling the United States’ decision in 2013 a world-changing event.

François Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank based in London, compared the moment to the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, an event seen in hindsight as helping to set the stage for World War I.

Similarly, Mr. Obama’s reversal in 2013 “is one of those turning points in history where you see the power shift,” Mr. Heisbourg said in an interview.

By refusing to enforce the red line, Mr. Obama did “enormous, perhaps irretrievable” damage to American credibility, Mr. Heisbourg said.

“He did it because he didn’t want to do the strikes,” Mr. Heisbourg added. “He was caught in flagrante committing a supreme act of fecklessness.”

According to both Mr. Heisbourg and, it seems, Mr. Fabius, there were global consequences to Mr. Obama’s inaction, most notably in Russia’s annexation of Crimea the following year, even though Moscow in its public rhetoric continues to accuse Washington of throwing its weight around in an imperial manner.

Mr. Heisbourg said the “fecklessness” of 2013 had been recognized and interpreted in numerous capitals, not just Paris, as a low point for American power and influence.

“This is not just about the irritated French,” he said. “It goes much deeper.”

“The next U.S. president is going to have to demonstrate early on — in circumstances that he or she would have preferred to avoid — that this was an Obama moment, not an America moment,” he said.

Although Mr. Fabius expressed regret that “the world didn’t follow France’s position” and punish Mr. Assad for using chemical weapons, others are unconvinced that intervention would have changed the course of the Syrian civil war. In fact, it has been noted in the press that Mr. Fabius’s parting shot at the United States may have been an attempt to deflect criticism of France’s own diplomatic failures in the region.

Western intervention in Libya, led by France and Britain, has created only greater instability there, while the war in Yemen, waged by Middle Eastern proxies with no overt Western involvement, continues unabated, suggesting no easy answers anywhere in the region.

The question is not whether the outcome in Syria would have been different if the United States had led airstrikes in 2013, though it is hard to imagine it could have been any worse. Instead, the issue is the damage to the expectations Paris and other capitals still have for Washington’s role in the world.