The Syria Squeeze: What will US Involvement mean for US-Russian Relations?

This post is in response to a question from a friend on Facebook.  He asks:

Excuse me, Dr. Willardson, but I would be very interested to hear your opinion on Syria, their relationship with Russia, and the potential consequences if the US decides to take military action.

That is an excellent question, and one which bears thinking about in general.  Syrian intervention is not something that the US public is really pushing for.  There is a great interview with a scholar, Matthew Baum, about the public's reluctance to enter the conflict.  I recommend that you read the entire interview if you are interested in the effects of public policy on presidential decision-making in these cases.

Matt Baum: I think that the fact that the polls say Americans are wary in Syria does not mean all that much. If the Obama administration is able to do something that has a decisive effect, they will look like heroes. And if they look impotent in their use of military force, it will rebound against them. But the polling numbers showing American reticence, as of right now, doesn’t add up to much, because it’s really not a salient issue. It’s not enough to look at the numbers of people opposing intervention; you have to look at how much people care and at this point it isn’t very high on the list, as of today. That can change if things escalate and it starts to look like a “real” war, as opposed to Libya — which was obviously real if you were there — but from the United States the perspective was that no Americans were on the ground and no American planes were being shot down. If Syria looks like that, the pubic won’t get all that engaged. It would potentially be a foreign policy success for the Obama administration, though coming awfully late, after a lot of horrible things have happened there. But if it doesn’t go well and America is gradually sucked in — throwing good resources after bad — eventually it could become a big political liability, and you could get significant public engagement. This could have happened in Afghanistan, too, if more Americans started getting killed. But it hasn’t escalated in that way.

Read the entire interview here: http://journalistsresource.org/skills/research/syria-intervention-public-opinion-research-chat-harvard-matt-baum

So this is one strand to the discussion.  Why are we threatening to intervene in the first place?

A second strand of the discussion is one that I hadn't considered until I saw this piece on Lawfare earlier today - that is the issue of the president actually overstepping his constitutional bounds to involve U.S. troops in the conflict. Jack Goldsmith argues that to commit forces to Syria without Congressional approval in this case pushes presidential power further than it has been pushed in other conflicts - even Kosovo and Libya. Here is a salient portion of his argument:

There are many reasons why it is a stretch even under OLC precedents.  The main ones, as I alluded to a few days ago, are (1) neither U.S. persons nor property are at stake, and no plausible self-defense rationale exists; (2) the main non-self-defense U.S. interest that the Commander in Chief has invoked since the Korean War to justify unilateral uses of force – upholding the integrity of the U.N. Charter – appears (as Wells argued) to be disserved rather than served by a military strike in Syria; and (3) a Syria strike would push the legal envelope further even than Kosovo, the outer bound to date of presidential unilateralism, which at least implicated our most important security treaty organization commitments (NATO).

Read the entire piece here (it's worth it!): http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/why-doesnt-president-obama-seek-congressional-approval-for-syria/

So now that I have talked about the U.S. side of the equation, let's get to the Russian side.   On the Russian side there are three considerations that are at play here:

1. Precedent 
2. Interests
3. Pride/prestige

Precedent

Russia has not been happy with the Arab Spring and the response by the West in general.  Moscow tends to take a dim view of protesters (See the issue with the Pastafarians in St. Petersberg in the last week) in general.  Protesters that turn violent and try to overthrow the government are even worse.  The Russian government prizes stability over nearly everything else - and so movements that threaten regimes are seen as dangerous.  This is true even for democratic movements such as the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia that led to governments that were less friendly to the Russian state. Russia is unhappy that the U.S. and NATO coalition supported protesters and rebels against Qaddafi in Libya and at the vacuum of stability that has created.  This leads to the second point -

Interests

Russia has interests in Syria. I have written about some of those interests in a post a couple of years ago (Link).  These interests are both commercial (arms sales, technical assistance, etc.) military (advising - leading to more equipment sales) and strategic. Russia's only foreign naval post is located in Syria.  Russia's ability to project power in a region where it was once very influential - a region just outside the "near abroad" where Russia's influence is still strong - is seen as damaging to the state's geopolitical position.

Prestige

Finally there is the issue of prestige.  Russia allowed itself to be taken out of the discussion by abstaining in the security council vote on Libya.  That gave NATO and the U.S. a free pass to operate. In the case of Syria Russia has actively opposed moves in the security council to pass resolutions on Syria.  If the U.S. acts in Syria it will be truly unilateral, and in direct opposition to what Moscow wants.  Even if Russia is not the superpower it once was, the leaders of the state are upset when they are railroaded in international affairs.  U.S. action in Syria will be such an act.

So what are the consequences of such action? I don't know.  It will definitely increase the tension between the two states, but as far as concrete retaliatory action, I am not sure. I anticipate that Russia will take an even more active role in opposing U.S. actions in all spheres.  Active opposition by Russia in matters of trade, security, and finance would be very damaging.