How Putin wields his levers of power

Barack Obama, a foreign-affairs novice, came to a government in which America's foreign policy was a sphere of contest among different aides rather than a settled posture. He did not have a settled view on what to do with dictators and was a reluctant intervener in foreign morasses; he opposed the invasion of Iraq while still an Illinois state senator.

Crossing the 'red line'

Even when President Bashar al-Assad crossed Obama's "red line" by using chemical weapons in Syria, the U.S. president didn't deploy U.S. boots onto Syrian ground. In Libya, it was France and Britain who led military action in support of the groups seeking the removal of President Muammar Gadaffi in 2011. In Afghanistan, Obama has increased air strikes and kept nearly 9,000 U.S. troops, but largely because the country would likely fall again to the Taliban if they were removed.

Of the old Soviet KGB

Obama's approach brought joy to the Kremlin, where President Vladimir Putin routinely puts to use his training as an officer of the old Soviet KGB. Putin is an avid pupil of the realist school, which sees national interest as the lodestar of policy. Humanitarian considerations - such as saving the oppressed from their oppression - come second.
Putin's involvement in Syria is all about national interests. Assad is Moscow's closest ally in the Middle East; his fall would be a blow to Russia's prestige and Russian plans to expand its supply base in Syria's port city of Tartus. Russia was always in Syria as a pro-Assad combatant not, as it at times protested, to fight jihadist groups. If any confirmation were needed, Russia's indiscriminate bombing of all anti-Assad groups in the siege of Aleppo made it crystalline clear. "I begin to despair," Michael Fallon, the United Kingdom defense secretary said on Wednesday, "that Russia wants any kind of settlement at all, other than to see three-quarters of Syria destroyed."

He's our tyrant

This is foreign policy realism in action. For Russia, Assad may be a tyrant, a torturer, a killer of his people - but he's our tyrant. He needs us; we him. This stance has no anxious liberals gnawing at their consciences, no complicating demands that Assad must go before peace can be achieved. If Russia can give him victory - and as the war goes in Aleppo, it likely can - both win. The West loses. That's how realist foreign policies work.

Russia is back in the global game

Syria is the clearest demonstration yet that Russia is back in the global game, and that the United States' unipolar moment - from the end of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s to sometime in the mid-late 2000s - is gone. The masters of the universe are now three: Russia, economically weakened by lower oil prices and sanctions, but keeping up high military spending; China, its growth slowed but its military growing stronger even as it professes horror at the charge that it is aggressive in its intent, and the United States, still the most powerful economically and militarily but constrained by Russia in Syria and by China in the South China Sea.

Nation-state power is back

Note the absence of Europe. Its competitors believe its experiment in integration is finished. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in a speech on the 95th anniversary of the Communist Party in July, said that "we see how the EU is slowly crumbling." A former prime minister of an EU-friendly Anglophone country said, at an off-the-record gathering in Russia this week, that "Europe has become a seminar about itself." The European Union was conceived as a means to stop war on the continent, by transcending the nation-state: It was neither a national nor an imperial power. But nation-state power is back.
Russians are worse off materially, but their leaders believe in their economic stoicism. One senior minister, at the same off-the-record conference, said of the sanctions that "they are not good, not necessary, but we can live with them." For now, pride in Russia's newly deployed military power, in the retaking of Crimea and in the humbling of the West, does seem to compensate, polls tell us, for cutting out the luxuries.

 "Democratic" or not

Russia believes that support for Assad is better for everyone than support for the various groups, "democratic" or not, that oppose him. That means either not intervening or helping put down the rebels - a dirty business, but less bloody, Putin can argue, than a prolonged war and the destruction of the state. Realism, Moscow can proclaim, isn't just more in tune with the way the world goes, its activities on the side of Assad are more merciful, as well.
Further down the track, it will look less encouraging. Putin, master of the tactical, has yet to win a stable, long-term strategic advantage - indeed, he may be destroying such a possibility by gathering opposition to the brilliance of his opportunism. What happens in Syria, after an Assad victory? Can the Syrian ruler, with Russian help, permanently suppress a country in which the majority of the population has much greater cause to hate him now than when some rose against him? Who will pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to repair a shattered state? Who will take in the millions of refugees? Russia has found a lever to raise its power to global levels. It has not also found a role that will help the world survive.

For Moscow

Beyond Syria, the three new masters of the universe need to find a way to cooperate to ensure its survival - to save its ecology, help and house its millions of migrants and refugees whose numbers can only grow, develop new ways of feeding its teeming billions, confront the coming revolution in technologies that are likely to swell the ranks of the workless, collaborate in bringing about settlements in the Middle East and seek nuclear weapon reduction. China may mean what it says, and be part of that; Hillary Clinton, if and when president, may have the savvy and the political strength to make it the basis of her foreign policy. Russia, exulting in its rediscovered power, seems the least likely to join in. But for Moscow, it's the only way real greatness lies. 

John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is senior research fellow. The opinions expressed here are his own.