The most important aspect of the reportedly somewhat frosty meeting between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the United Nations this week was that it dealt in part with the continuing civil war in Syria.
The sparring between Russia and the United States, the wary personal relationship between the two presidents, continuing American pressure on Russia’s approach to neighboring Ukraine and general sniping on who did what to whom were there, but it was important that the two leaders met, after a long gap.
What was really important was whatever common approach they could have determined with respect to Syria. Syria itself, after more than four years of war, is a bloody mess. The government of President Bashar Assad holds firmly perhaps only a quarter of the territory of the country of 22 million.
That picture is grim enough. What is really bad is that the country is bleeding thousands of refugees, not only into neighboring states Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, ill-equipped to take them, but also into Western Europe, flooding its capacities and creating divisions inside the European Union.
Russia has stolen a march on the United States in the region to help combat the Islamic State group by creating a new intelligence cooperation collective that includes not only Iraq and Syria but also Iran. The most painful membership in the new group is ostensible U.S. ally Iraq, an object of U.S. affections and aid since the American invasion there in 2003, although Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was linked to the old Soviet Union as an arms customer.
U.S. policy toward Iraq and Syria, as well as Afghanistan, is in tatters. A U.S. effort to train “moderate” Syrian forces has failed miserably in practice. Kunduz in Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban in the wreckage of U.S. efforts to train Afghan troops.
For humanitarian as well as regional political reasons, Americans and the world can hope that Obama and Putin reach some understanding on how to bring the Syrian civil war to an end, to stop the pointless carnage there.