Five Steps to Amend the US Path in Syria

Before 2015, Russia was a largely inconsequential actor in the Middle East – seemingly lacking the means or credibility to exert a meaningful influence on individual countries, let alone the region as a whole. However, everything changed when the Kremlin militarily intervened in Syria in September 2015 in an operation it claimed at the time was intended to combat terrorism. Russia’s intervention was launched in close coordination with Iran, at the express invitation of Damascus, and at a time when Bashar al-Assad’s regime was at the edge of implosion. Within a year, Russia had turned the tide of Syria’s crisis, creating conditions in which an initially subtle Western fatigue was becoming increasingly evident.