My latest piece for DIPLOMAT is up, this one on Syria. A subject about which I know nothing at all, not that that stops me saying something about it, and failing that Yugoslavia:

Back in 1980 I attended my first event at Wilton Park, the FCO country house conference centre near Brighton, an in-house gathering to brief youthful British diplomats on the Menace of Communism. In those days I was a fat-headed idealist bent on achieving a world peace within which the communist tendency would play a glorious role. Stern warnings about the malevolence and inefficiency of Soviet communism did not impress.

One presentation nonetheless did make an impression, namely the late Chris Cvii? (a British journalist of Croatian extraction) explaining communist Yugoslavia. He befuddled us on Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Bosnians and Muslims. He explained the fine constitutional distinction between narod and narodnosti, Yugoslavia’s impenetrable socialist self-management ideology and the ekavski, kajkavski and ijekavski dialects of the even more impenetrable ‘Serbo-Croat’ language. We all reeled away stunned that anyone could hold so much bizarre information in his head. 

Yugoslavia later crashed under the weight of its internal contradictions and is now six or seven small countries (depending on who’s including Kosovo, or not). Could the same fate befall Syria?

To an ignorant outsider such as myself, Syria too is impossibly complicated. Wikipedia assures me that most Syrians are Arabs with the rest comprising Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Circassians and Syrian Turkmen. 90 per cent of Syrians are Muslims, mostly Sunni but with sizeable Shia, Alawi, Ismaili and Druze communities. The ruling Assad family are supposedly secular Alawites whose Ba’ath Party traces its ghastly intellectual roots back deep into Nazi and Communist ideology.

Decades of incompetent Ba’athist socialist authoritarianism have held back normal economic growth. Before the civil war started, Syria’s GDP per capita was a pathetic US$5,000. The ‘opportunity cost’ to Syria of the civil war is said to be US$100 billion and rising, as the economy slumps, infrastructure is wrecked and hundreds of thousands of Syrians flee the carnage. Even if peace and harmony break out tomorrow, it will take Syria long decades to recover – if it ever does…

… Washington and Moscow have now decided that they cannot do anything useful together about the layer of the Syria onion that is mainly about Syria. Instead they are focusing on the layer that is mainly about their own relationship and trying to cooperate on a specific layer of the Syria problem (namely chemical weapons) that has little if anything to do directly with the wider calamity.

The cruel genius of the Russian plan thereby reveals itself. The fact that the Assad regime has a heavy case to answer for war crimes is brushed aside by both factions. Global media attention shifts from the misery of the situation in Syria to statements from US and Russian diplomats poring over detailed chemical weapons texts under United Nations auspices.

Back in real life, the painstakingly complex task of controlling and destroying chemical weapons can happen in war-torn Syria, if at all, only with the full, generous and sustained cooperation of the Assad system. The political dynamic has in effect been flipped, from ‘Assad must go!’ to ‘Assad must stay!’

As for Syria itself? The misery drags on. Maybe the time is coming when the rival internal forces and their sundry external sponsors decide that a costly stalemate is bad for business, so a new peace process must start. But how can that happen without a massively expensive international intervention to monitor a ceasefire that ends up legitimising the current facts on the ground and so presages the informal partitioning of the country? Some diplomatic onions are just too big to be digestible.

Fascinating how ever since the US/Russia ‘understanding’ on Syria the world seems to be a lot more muted about what is happening there. But as I predicted, one big effect of that major move is to re-legitimise the Assad regime:

The question is whether President Obama and his advisers have fully examined the implications of rejecting a strike and endorsing a political settlement under Russian auspices to dismantle Syria’s military chemical capabilities.

In practice, this has caused a fundamental and dramatic change in the nature of the conflict in Syria – the collapse of the framework uniting the opposition; the acceleration of the process of Syria’s disintegration into areas controlled by Assad’s forces, al-Qaeda groups, and radical Islamic organizations; and the establishment of Islamic territories based on sharia rule in some 50 percent of Syrian territory.

This creates exotic problems for the world’s diplomats trying to work out how to achieve a ceasefire then some sort of political process at Geneva II: the problem is now so fragmented that it is next to impossible to work out whom to invite, as there are too many factions and many of the stronger ones are insane Islamists.

Plus we see the usual paradox as any negotiations loom when conflict is raging – the closer they get to sitting down to talk, the greater the inventive to grab more territory and so reduce whatever small trust may be building. See eg how the Kurds in Syria are busy establishing ‘their’ space.

And the trickiest of all: how to empower moderates, when it’s the extremists who are defining the problem?

If anything is certain in this horrendous mess, it is that no one tendency is strong enough to deliver a knock-out blow to the others. And that it will now suit external meddlers of all shapes and sizes to keep it that way. So the agony drags on indefintely?