10 September, 2013

Russia urges Syria to give up chemical weapons. Game changer or a shrewd bluff?

Russia urges Syria to give up chemical weapons. Game changer or a shrewd bluff?: Syria isn’t a Russian client state, exactly, but President Bashar al-Assad is existentially reliant on Russian support. In many ways, Russia’s willingness to negotiate matters even more than Syria’s – the road to peace almost surely runs through Moscow. So when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced Monday that Syria should surrender its massive stockpile of chemical weapons to the international community, apparently endorsing U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s call for the same, it was a big deal, and not just because Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem quickly announced that he “welcomed” the plan.

This certainly looks like a potential game-changer for the Syria crisis. But whether for the better or the worse depends on whether Russia really wants Assad to give up his weapons or is just bluffing. Either way, the announcement is a telling moment in the international stand-off over possible U.S. strikes on Syria – and a sign that the threat of strikes might actually be working better than we think.