Few changes in foreign policy have been as visible as the 180 degree U-turn carried out by President François Hollande in the wake of the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015. Though for months the French head of state and his foreign minister Laurent Fabius have been defending the line “Neither Bashar al-Assad nor Daesh” [editor's note, the Arabic acronym for Islamic State], it seems very likely that the new French position has become: “Everything against Daesh and we'll see about Assad later.”
Naturally, that is not exactly how the Elysée is describing their stance, and standing alongside US president Barack Obama this week the French head of state repeated his position that Assad had to go - though perhaps tellingly he declined to give a timetable. But every military action and all the diplomatic announcements made since November 15th indicate that France has indeed changed its position on Syria. Though French jets had only carried out three attacks in Syria since September, they took part in three over the nights of November 15th, 16th and 17th alone. Again this week Hollande has vowed to step up attacks on Islamic State in Syria. And while Russian involvement in the Syria conflict was once constantly criticized, François Hollande now has an important meeting with Vladimir Putin in Moscow this Thursday November 26th, the culmination of a hectic series of other key encounters, with British prime minister David Cameron on Monday in Paris, that meeting with US president Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and with German chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris again this Wednesday.
And according to what seems to be taking shape, the likely outcome will not be the setting up of joint US-Russian-French coalition bases, but rather France – and also the US which has already started moving in this direction in recent weeks – simply coming round to Russia's point of view. The Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov indicated this very clearly on Wednesday November 18th in declaring that Western countries should abandon their demands for the removal of Assad if they really wanted a global coalition against the Islamic State. He said: “In my opinion there can now be no doubts that it is simply unacceptable to put forward any preconditions in order to unite in the battle against so-called Islamic State terrorists.”
“It's obvious that Russians are not going to change their position while all the world is turning towards them,” said a French diplomat based in Eastern Europe. “At the most one might hope that the Russians stop bombarding Bashar al-Assad's other opponents to focus on Daesh forces.” For since Russia became militarily involved in the skies over Syria in the summer of 2015 its missiles have struck the different factions of the Free Syrian Army and groups of 'moderate' Islamist groups more than Islamic State's bases. The shooting down of a Russian jet by Turkey on Tuesday over an area of Syria not controlled by Islamic State suggests that Russia has still been targeting other groups. The incident will also make Hollande's task in Moscow no easier.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
For the United States a Washington-Moscow-Paris alliance would not represent a complete reversal of strategy. Obama finally abandoned the idea of bombarding Damascus after the “red line” over the use of chemical weapons had been crossed in the summer of 2013. There was then an agreement between US secretary of state John Kerry and Russia's Sergei Lavrov for a chemical disarmament of the Syrian state. The two top diplomats have been speaking for months in an attempt to make progress over the conflict and the recent talks in Vienna were along the same lines.
Moreover, since Russia started deploying jets and cruise missiles over Syria there has been military coordination with the Americans to avoid any risk of a mid-air collision or incident. Finally, while the two president do not have much time for each other, Obama judged it opportune to declare on Wednesday November 18th that Putin was a “constructive partner” in the Syrian crisis.
But for France the change of policy is rather spectacular. Just a month-and-a-half ago France had rejected the Russian proposal for an “anti-Islamic State” coalition put forward by Vladimir Putin at the United Nations general assembly. And during the talks in Vienna on the future of Syria, Paris continued to make Assad's departure a precondition for progress.
“It's never easy to eat humble pie, but that's what we've just done,” said the French diplomat based in Eastern Europe. “The Elysée's calculation was purely pragmatic. First, faced with two enemies one chooses the less threatening. Second, knowing that relations between the Americans and the Russians are improving, Paris did not want to be left out of the game.” Especially as France cannot do a great deal in Syria without Washington's help. Even France's attacks against Islamic State (IS) carried out since November 15th, which are without doubt reprisals for the Paris attacks, benefited from information and logistical support from the US.
However, even if an anti-Islamic State coalition between the US, Russia and France does emerge in the coming weeks, what will it be able to do? As the historian and Syria specialist Jean-Pierre Filiu told Mediapart recently “today there are no more good solutions”. Any weakening of IS will inevitably strengthen the position of Bashar al-Assad, even though he is the one who bears responsibility for the civil war that has been tearing his country apart for four years.
Aerial bombing will also inevitably lead to 'collateral damage' and the death of many civilians, contributing to a well-known reaction – seen in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq – of increased radicalisation among the population. The sending of Western (or Russian) troops has been ruled out by everyone, but who will be capable of dislodging IS soldiers from the land they occupy: the Kurds? The Iraqis? The Syrian army? Each of these three hypotheses raises as many problems as it solves.
In any case, the past 14 months of bombing by an international coalition led by the United States has neither pushed back Islamic State nor prevented them from overseeing terrorist attacks. “The Paris attacks have woken French and Western elites in general from a certain torpor that stems from the fact that they don't really have a policy in the region,” said Jean-Robert Raviot, a professor at the University of Nanterre near Paris and a specialist on Russian affairs. “On one side we sell arms to states who support Islamic State, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and on the other we carry out sporadic air strikes against Daesh, without great result up to now. All that is incoherent and erratic and you can see that.”
Professor Raviot contrasted the Western approach with that of Moscow which, he said, has been “following one line inflexibly and one line only: its support for the government in Damascus”. He added: “[Russia] is today the only country outside the region [editor's note, the Middle East] to have a policy, to announce it and to give itself the means to put it in operation by drawing on a regional power, Iran.”
In an interview with Le Monde, former president Nicolas Sarkozy made a surreal plea to repeat in Syria what had happened in Libya when he was the French head of state. “I'm in favour of an intervention with troops on the ground coming from Arab countries in the region, but certainly not Western. That's what we did in Libya and it worked perfectly.” Yet all the experts on Libya who have seen that country dismembered and the region destabilized after the 2011 war there insist that this is precisely what should not happen.
“Any military action has to be accompanied by political action that allows you to find a way out of the Syrian civil war that goes beyond the simple equation Bashar or Daesh,” said William McCants, an expert on jihadism at the Center for Middle East Policy. “Yet that's where things get complicated. Destroying Daesh, that can be done. Restoring peace to Syria seems much more difficult.”
A key problem is the impact that Russia's growing influence will have in relation to the fate of the current Syrian leadership. What motivation could Bashar al-Assad have to negotiate his own departure or removal at a time when his Russian ally is effectively running the show? Why would the other rebel Syrian groups want to lay down their arms when they would, once again, have the feeling of having been betrayed (and bombed) by Western countries? Myriam Benraad, of the Paris-based Centre for International Studies and a specialist on Iraq, said on a Mediapart broadcast last week: “There is a clear military impasse … but you also have to realise that politics is dead. Syrians today are worried about their survival more than anything else.”
The French U-turn on Syria will perhaps lead to Islamic State being pushed back or will at least mean the organisation is sufficiently destabilised that it is no longer able to export its deadly jihadism, as the invasion of Afghanistan weakened Al Qaeda. But, just as with the recent wars in Iraq and Libya, there is every reason to fear that military victory against Islamic State may well throw up new problems and new threats.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter