(The Conversation) – The lightning-fast collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has sent shock waves across the Middle East. The disposal of the dictator whose family had ruled the country with an iron fist for more than half a century has triggered a potentially seismic shift in the balance of power in the region.

But there are also important repercussions beyond Syria and its neighbourhood – with Russia one of the more significantly affected powers.

Back in 2015, Assad’s regime had been on the brink of collapse. It was saved by a Russian intervention – with support from Iran and Hezbollah. Launched in the context of a growing threat from Islamic State, Russia enabled Assad’s regime to push back other rebel forces as well.

Over the years that followed, it enabled Assad to consolidate control over the capital, other key cities, and in particular the coastal region where Russia had two military bases.

The future of these bases is now uncertain. The Russian naval base in Tartus – which dates back to Soviet times – as well as an air base at Khmeimim, established south-east of Latakia in 2015, were vital assets for Russia to project military force in the Mediterranean sea and bolster the Kremlin’s claim to Russian great-power status.

Given the importance of the bases for Russia and the significant investments made over the years in propping the regime, Assad’s fall reflects badly on Russia’s capabilities to assert credible influence on the global stage.

Even if Russia somehow manages to negotiate a deal with Syria’s new rulers over the future of its military bases, the fact that Moscow was unable to save an important ally like Assad exposes critical weaknesses in Russia’s ability to act, rather than just talk, like a great power.

There are clear intelligence failures that either missed or misinterpreted the build-up of anti-Assad forces by Qatar, and Turkey’s tacit support of this. These failures were then compounded by diminished Russian military assets in Syria and an inability to reinforce them at short notice. This is, of course, due to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

The depletion of the military capabilities of two other Kremlin allies in the region — Iran and Hezbollah — further compounded the difficulties for Assad and exacerbated the effect of Russia’s overstretch. This also raises the question of whether Russia strategically misjudged the situation and underestimated its vulnerability in Syria.

But even more so, it highlights Russia’s own dependence on allies who do not simply acquiesce to Moscow’s demands — as Assad did when he provided Russia its military bases — but who actively support a wannabe great power that lacks some of the means to assert its claimed status – as Iran and Hezbollah did in 2015.

Where’s China?

Missing from this equation is China. While Beijing had sided with Assad after the start of the Syrian civil war, this support was mostly of the rhetorical kind. It was mainly aimed at preventing a UN-backed, western-led intervention akin to the one in Libya that led to the fall of Gaddafi and has plunged the country into chaos ever since.

A high-profile visit of Assad to China in September 2023 resulted in a strategic partnership agreement. This seemed to signal another step towards the rehabilitation of the Syrian regime, in Beijing’s eyes at least. But when push came to shove and Assad’s rule was under severe threat, China did nothing to save him.

This raises an important question about Chinese judgment of the Syrian regime and the evolving crisis. But there is also a broader point here regarding Russian great-power ambitions.

“Diminished,” Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

For all the talk of a limitless partnership between Moscow and Beijing, China ultimately did nothing to save Russia from an embarrassing defeat in Syria. Where Russia needed a military presence to bolster its claims to great-power status, Chinese interests in the Middle East are primarily about economic opportunity and the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

This has clearly limited Beijing’s appetite to become more involved, let alone to bail out Assad.

Putin diminished

Russia’s position in the Middle East now is in peril. Moscow has lost a key ally in Assad. Its other main allies, Iran and Hezbollah, are significantly weakened. Israel and Turkey, with whom the Kremlin has not had easy relations over the past few years, have been strengthened.

This exposes the hollowness of Russian claims to great-power status. It is also likely to further diminish Russian prestige and the standing that it has in the eyes of other partners – whether they are China or North Korea, members of the Brics, or countries in the global south that Russia has recently tried to woo.

The consequences of that for Ukraine – arguably the main source of Russia’s over-stretch – are likely to be ambivalent. On the one hand, the ease with which Assad was deposed demonstrates that Russia is not invincible and that its support of brutal dictatorships has limits. On the other hand, there should be no expectation of anything but Russia doubling down in Ukraine.

Putin needs a success that restores domestic and international confidence in him —and fast. After all, Donald Trump does not like losers.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Over the following decade, Russia’s military intervention in Syria appeared to contradict Obama’s assessment. Russia’s involvement in Syria during this period was often cited as evidence of its great power status. Nevertheless, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime on December 7, 2024, highlights the limits of Russian power and its declining ability to exert influence on a global scale.

While Russia’s relations with its neighbors have frequently been strained owing to competition for influence and unresolved issues from the Soviet era, its involvement in Syria—a country neither adjacent to Russia nor part of the post-Soviet sphere—was significant. Russia’s direct engagement in the Syrian conflict marked a major shift in its Middle Eastern policy and was perceived as a challenge to the U.S. presence in the region. As Fadi Elhusseini noted, “Even at the peak of the Cold War, Russia’s (either the Soviet Union’s or the Russian Federation’s) role was limited to sending arms, military advisors, and logistical support to its Arab allies. This intervention represented a dramatic escalation in Russia’s involvement and signaled an extraordinary military engagement.”

The establishment of a military base in Latakia in 2015 represented Russia’s first substantial intervention outside its post-Soviet sphere of influence. This action not only sustained Assad’s regime for nearly a decade but also positioned Moscow as a key actor in the Middle East. Russia’s airstrikes and military presence forced Western powers, including NATO, to navigate the Syrian conflict cautiously. At the time, this was celebrated as a reassertion of Russia’s standing as a global power.

“Small Frog in Large Pond,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

The events of early December 2024, however, have undermined this perception. A series of swift offensives by opposition forces reclaimed key cities, including Aleppo, Homs, and Hama, culminating in the fall of Damascus. Despite the continued presence of Russia’s military base, its inability—or reluctance—to prevent Assad’s downfall raises significant questions about the efficacy of its deterrence strategy. The Syrian opposition, while avoiding direct confrontation with Russian forces, demonstrated that Moscow’s influence in the region is far from absolute.

The implications of these developments are profound. For years, Russian military bases, like those of the United States, were regarded as a guarantee of security for allied regimes. However, the fall of Assad challenges the perception of Russian deterrence. Unlike the United States, which operates over 800 military bases worldwide and has a longstanding history of protecting client states, Russia’s military footprint is far more limited in scope and effectiveness. During the Cold War, U.S. bases served as a counterbalance to Soviet expansion, and they remain a cornerstone in countering both Russian and Chinese influence today. Russia’s failure in Syria suggests that its bases no longer function as a comparable strategic asset.

Russia may attempt to salvage its position through diplomacy or by leveraging its remaining influence in Syria. It could even claim to have facilitated the transition to protect its own interests. Yet, such efforts are unlikely to conceal the reality that Moscow failed to sustain Assad’s rule despite years of military and political investment. This failure will undoubtedly prompt potential allies to reconsider seeking security assurances from Russia, further diminishing its credibility as a global power.

A hallmark of great power status is the ability to operate effectively on multiple fronts. While Russia remains heavily engaged in the war in Ukraine, a true global power would possess the capability to uphold commitments in other regions simultaneously. Moscow’s inability to do so in Syria reinforces Obama’s 2014 characterization: Russia is not a global power but rather a regional one, capable of exerting influence in its immediate vicinity but falling short of broader global ambitions.

The fall of Assad serves as a stark reminder of the limitations of Russian power. It challenges the assumption that military bases alone can ensure sustained influence and raises doubts about Moscow’s ability to act as a reliable guarantor of stability. As the situation in Damascus stabilizes, the world is left to reassess the extent of Russia’s role in shaping global affairs. Indeed, this development may serve as a cautionary message for nations whose security heavily depends on the military bases of foreign patrons -— including those allied with the United States.

Damascus is the prize.

Damascus has an Achilles heel. It is landlocked, deep in the south of the country, and far from the port of Latakia that supplies it.

The other nearby port, Beirut in Lebanon, is a shadow of its former self, and the Lebanese government has closed the borders with Syria. You could get some things in from Iraq by truck, but the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces have taken all of Deir al-Zor province and the checkpoint of Al-Bukamal on the Syrian side of the Syria-Iraq border has fallen to the SDF.

Food, weapons and ammunition have to come from Latakia. The truck route from Latakia down to Damascus passes through Homs.

The fundamentalist Sunni Arab militia, the HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or the Levant Liberation Council), led by a former al-Qaeda affiliate, had Idlib. In the past week it has taken Aleppo and then moved south to take Hama. (These territories are green in the below map from “X”.)

Homs is next. If the Tahrir al-Sham takes Homs, it can cut Damascus off from resupply.

Game over.

This is the current latest status map of the Civil War in #Syria

Red: Assad’s army, the official army of Syria, aka SAA
Green: all the sub rebels groups
Yellow: kurds
[Hashtags (ignore): #Pushpa2TheRule    #SpotifyWrapped #pragyanagra #Bitcoin ] pic.twitter.com/SCnG7pUmqD

— The_Airplane_Master (@plane12429) December 7, 2024

In 2012-2013, when the fundamentalist Sunni rebels, including al-Qaeda, had taken Homs, they were pushed back out by the intervention of Iran and the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia alongside the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army. The fundamentalist hopes of cutting off Damascus were dashed.

In 2015, the Sunni fundamentalists in Idlib in the north of Syria tried out a Plan B, which was simply to take Latakia itself. That would also cut off Damascus from resupply.

Iran and Hezbollah could not muster the sheer manpower to stop this from happening. The Sunni fundamentalists were getting backing from Turkey and the Gulf, and the Syrian Arab Army had seen two-thirds of its troops (mostly themselves Sunni) desert. Hezbollah probably only really has 25,000 fighters despite exaggerated claims, and they were spread thin in Syria and in Lebanon itself. (Lebanon is a small country of maybe 4.5 million citizens, and only a third or so are Shiites, and only half of Shiites support Hezbollah. So it just isn’t that large an organization).

So it is alleged that in the summer of 2015, the head of Iran’s Qods Force, the special operations unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, flew to Moscow and informed Russian President Vladimir Putin that Iran had done all it could. If Russia did not want to see Syria fall to the Sunni fundamentalists led by al-Qaeda — with all its implications for nearby Russian Muslim-majority areas such as Chechnya — then Putin would have to intervene.

On September 30, 2015, Russia started flying air support missions in Syria for the Syrian Arab Army, Hezbollah, and Iraqi Shiite militias, against the Sunni fundamentalists. This combination of ground forces and Russian air support succeeded in defeating the rebels and bottling them up in Idlib in the north.

Therefore, in some ways the fate of the al-Assad government was sealed when President Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Russian Aerospace Forces became bogged down in the Ukraine War and were simply not available in the same way for deployment in Syria.

The Russian Federation is pulling up stakes and leaving Syria. The embassy in Damascus said on Telegram Friday that owing to the “difficult” military and political situation in Syria, Russian citizens living in the Syrian Arab Republic were encouraged to take the next commercial flight out of the country. (H/t BBC Monitoring). BBC Monitoring also reports that Russian military bloggers had warned this week that if Homs fell, Russia would lose its military bases in Syria.

Homs fell.

“Running Away,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Now veteran Iran correspondent Farnaz Fassihi reports at NYT that Iran is withdrawing from Syria.

I suggest that Tehran has no choice but to leave Syria. Without Russian air support, the couple thousand Revolutionary Guards and the remnants of the Hezbollah forces in the country, along with the tattered Syrian Arab Army, cannot hope to defeat the rebels now any more than they could in 2015. The situation is even worse than in in the summer of 2015, since Hezbollah’s forces have been devastated by the recent war with Israel, which saw their commanders blinded or crippled by Israeli booby traps and many of their tactical personnel killed or wounded in battle. Moreover, if Hezbollah attempted to deploy in a big way in Syria now, without Russian air support, Israel would hit them. Russia had offered them their only air defense umbrella, and then only as long as they were doing Russian bidding in targeting the Sunni fundamentalists.

Russian air power made the difference then. Without it, the Syrian government and its few allies are doomed.

The poor performance of the Syrian Arab Army troops at Aleppo shows again that for foreign patrons to stand up a friendly government and back a client army can often produce a Potemkin village, a facade with no reality behind it, which easily falls to pieces under some concerted pressure. This sort of disintegration afflicted the Iraqi National Army built by George W. Bush, the Afghanistan National Army built by Bush, Obama and Trump, and now the Syrian Arab Army stood up by Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Indeed, a commander of the Qods Force (the special operations overseas branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) and senior adviser to Syria, Brig Gen Kioumars Pourhashemi, was killed in the course of the HTS attack in northern Syria. Most Iranian media is in denial about the fall of Aleppo.

The Syrian Baath government of Bashar al-Assad is as guilty of genocide as the Israeli government, having tortured to death some 10,000 people and having killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in its war to crush the Sunni rebel forces in the teens of the last decade. The rebel HTS also has innocent blood on its hands.

The regional meaning of these events differs according to the lens through which they are viewed.

If we view the victors as Sunni Muslim fundamentalist extremists, their ascendancy will be welcomed by President Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, who indeed may have a hand in the campaign, since he has been a patron of HTS. Erdogan has championed groups as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood and the HTS, and while he is not himself a fundamentalist, he enjoys the soft power that accrues to Turkey from his support of groups such as Hamas, MB and others. The Turkish press is speculating that the four million Syrian Sunni refugees in Turkey might be able to return home if the Sunni rebels come to power. Likewise, Qatar, a regional champion of political pluralism that makes a place for political Islam, is a severe critic of the Baathist dictatorship, which wielded its secularism as a political cudgel. Most Sunni Muslims in Lebanon are anything but fundamentalists, but on the whole they will likely be happy about the collapse of the Baath, which they view as a totalitarian Stalinist knock-off in the hands of the Alawite Shiite sect, which discriminates against Sunnis. They are not wrong.

In contrast, the Christians both in Syria (5% of the population) and Lebanon (about a fourth of the population) are terrified today, given HTS’s past harsh record regarding religious minorities.

From the point of view of the region’s nationalist, secular-leaning regimes, this movement is an unwelcome resurgence of radical political Islam. That is how it will be viewed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, who has spent a decade crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, by Qais Saied of Tunisia, by Khalifah Hiftar, the strongman of East Libya, by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria, by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority, by the Democratic Union Party of the Syrian Kurds, and by Mohammed Bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates. Bin Zayed has spent his oil money trying to put down Muslim fundamentalists around the region, including in Libya and Sudan, and he is generally on the same page as al-Sisi. Bin Zayed spent some of Saturday on the phone with Bashar al-Assad discussing the events. As noted above, outside the region these events will alarm Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had shored up the al-Assad regime beginning in 2015 with air support from the Russian Aerospace Forces.

From the point of view of those countries that feel threatened by Iran, the development will be greeted as a further sign of Tehran’s enfeeblement. Israel has humiliated Iran and its ally, Hezbollah, during the past four months, which may have emboldened the HTS to make this move. Bashar al-Assad’s Syria is one of Iran’s few firm allies in the Arab world, along with the Houthi government of Yemen, the Shiite-led government of Iraq, and the Hezbollah-influenced government of Lebanon. Syria is a key transit point for Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and if it falls then Hezbollah– already on the ropes after Israel’s recent campaign against it — could face a bleak future.

These anti-Iran forces include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, and, outside the region, the United States. All are delighted at the news. In 2012-2016 during the Syrian Civil War, the US CIA funneled billions to 40 Sunni Muslim fundamentalist groups in Syria, using Saudi intelligence as the pass-through. These groups were mainly Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and were vetted as “not al-Qaeda.” They were, however, close battlefield allies of the Succor Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), the leading organization in the current HTS or Levant Liberation Council. So the CIA was again de facto allied with al-Qaeda in Syria, as it had been in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The prospect of the fall of Baathist Syria, however, is not without peril for these same countries, if al-Qaeda-adjacent forces come out on top. Would a wave of fundamentalist fervor in the region really benefit the bon vivant Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia? Will the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria be threatened by the victorious HTS, given that those troops are in part a support for the leftist Kurds of Syria’s northeast that have fought it on many occasions?

Indeed, if the Jabhat al-Nusra or Succor Front, an al-Qaeda offshoot, comes out on top in the new power struggle, even Turkey may come to regret these events. Erdogan has consistently underestimated the danger of groups such as HTS and ISIL, which have their origins in al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and which split from one another in 2012. Despite its insouciance Turkey has been hit by ISIL bombings on several occasions.

And, will Sunni fundamentalist militias marching into Damascus really be a good thing for the current extremist government of Israel, engaged in a genocidal campaign against Gaza that is justified as an attempt to exterminate Sunni fundamentalist militias? The far right Likud Party’s theory that chaos in its neighbors is good for Israel may be tested.

——

Bonus Video:

Channel 4 News: “Syrian rebels capture most of Aleppo in sudden offensive”

To end civilian suffering in Ukraine and Gaza, the UK must quit its double standards and apply international humanitarian law equally

In March 2003, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons were ever found, and President Bush lied to the world and the US. This war cost the lives of 4,485 Americans and the lives of 500,000 Iraqis. Moreover, this act of aggression cost the US upwards of two trillion dollars and, to boot, we are still paying the price today. How so? This war left a vacuum in Iraq so that Saddam’s generals formed Daesh or I.S.I.S. a terrorist group that is still active today..

To make matters worse, President Bush had the audacity to say that “Russia’s attack on Ukraine constitutes the gravest security crisis on the European continent since WW II.” Juan Cole notes that George W. Bush laid the foundation in Ukraine by destroying US credibility on enemy intentions and capabilities.

Before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, there existed ongoing talks among diplomats from NATO, including the US, and Russia. Putin regarded the dissolution of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” At a speech in 2021 Putin remarked that he was “extremely concerned about the deployment of elements of the US global defense system close to Russia.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Is the risk of direct conflict between Russia & NATO increasing? | Inside Story”

Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, did not have the wisdom to discuss with Putin the removal of anti-ballistic Tomahawk missiles from Romania, Poland and other NATO countries. Instead, Blinken, taking orders from Biden, discussed “confidence building measures” (CBMs) between Russia and NATO. This angered Putin beyond words.

Presently, we have the NATO allies in D.C., led by President Biden, who are like babes in the woods. There’s no way the Ukraine can overtake Russia. Consider this. First, for Russia’s core agenda NATO’s expansion is more important for Putin than the territorial conquest of Ukraine. Second, when Putin addressed the meeting of the Russian Defense Ministry Board in Moscow, Dec. 21, 2022, he said that “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity, and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved.”

Russia has developed the K-329 Belgorod nuclear-powered submarine able to carry six-Poseidon nuclear torpedoes. Its innovative design made it the largest submarine in the Russian Navy, circa 584 feet long and about 49 feet across.    The Belgorod submarine tested the mass-dimensional model of the Poseidon torpedo in January, 2023. The Poseidon is an intercontinental, nuclear-powered, nuclear armed autonomous torpedo 24 meters in length and a diameter of 1.6 meters. The Poseidon can travel at a speed of 185 kilometers that makes it unstoppable. It’s a strategic nuclear torpedo weapon that can target naval bases and coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. 

On July 10^th, 2024, the US and Germany announced they would begin “episodic deployments” of the long-range Multi Domain Task Force in Germany starting in 2026. Also, conventional long-range fire units will include SM-6 Tomahawk and developmental hypersonic weapons according to a joint statement of Germany and the US. The US also stated that F-16 fighter jets are headed to Ukraine while at the same time a dozen Ukrainian pilots are learning how to fly these planes in Arizona. NATO and the US are playing with fire and they are asking for a nuclear war with Russia. In my view, the only way NATO can avoid a nuclear war with Russia is to roll back NATO expansion entirely.

National impunity is not inevitable, at least if people and governments of the world are willing to take the necessary actions.

(The Conversation) – As wars grind on in Ukraine and Gaza, another location ravaged by conflict is taking steps to implement a historic peace agreement. From the mid-1960s through 2016, Colombia was torn by conflict between the government, leftist guerrilla movements and right-wing paramilitary groups. Now the government and rebels are working to carry out a sweeping accord that addresses many critical sectors, including environmental damages and restoration.

University of Notre Dame researchers Richard Marcantonio and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez study peace and conflict issues, including their effects on the environment. They currently are advising negotiations between the Colombian government and several rebel factions over wartime damage to soil, water and other natural resources. They explain that while Colombia’s transition from war to peace has been difficult, the accord offers a model for addressing the ravages of war in places such as Gaza and Ukraine.

Is it common for peace settlements to address environmental harm?

Few agreements include environmental provisions, and even fewer see them carried out, even though research shows that many drivers of conflict can be directly or indirectly related to the environment.

We work with a research program at the University of Notre Dame called the Peace Accords Matrix, which monitors the implementation of comprehensive peace accords in 34 countries worldwide. Only 10 of the accords have natural resource management provisions agreements, and these typically have not triggered major steps to protect the environment.

How is the Colombia accord different?

Colombia’s is seen as the most comprehensive peace accord that has been signed to date. It considers issues ranging from security to social justice and political participation, in great detail.

The accord acknowledges that a peaceful postwar society requires not only respect for human rights but also “protection of the environment, respect for nature and its renewable and nonrenewable resources and biodiversity.” More than 20% of the commitments in the agreement have an environmental connection.

They fall into four main categories:

– Adapting and responding to climate change

– Preserving natural resources and habitats

– Protecting environmental health through measures such as access to clean water

– Process issues, such as ensuring that communities can participate in decisions about rural programs and resource management

There also are gaps. For example, many protected areas have been deforested for ranching and coca production in the postaccord period. And there are no provisions addressing toxic pollution, an issue other agreements also neglect.

Often there are power vacuums during transitions between war and peace, when government agencies are working to reestablish their operations. Natural resources and environmental health need protection during these phases.

In Sierra Leone, for example, resource extraction by foreign companies drastically ramped up immediately after the Lome Peace Agreement eventually ended that nation’s civil war in 2002. Companies exploited a lack of governance and support in the rural areas and often mined metals illegally or hazardously without any regulatory oversight. Today these areas still struggle with mining impacts, including contaminated drinking water and fish, the primary protein source in the area.

European Commission: “Ukraine green recovery Conference”

What is the environmental toll of war in Ukraine?

The damage is vast: There’s air, water and soil contamination, deforestation and enormous quantities of waste, including ruined buildings, burned-out cars and thousands of tons of destroyed military equipment. Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka Dam flooded villages, destroyed crops and wrecked irrigation systems.

The cost estimates are staggering. A joint commission of the World Bank, the government of Ukraine and other institutions currently estimate direct damages at roughly US$152 billion.

In addition, cleaning up sites, rebuilding infrastructure and other repairs could cost more than $486 billion over the next decade, as of late 2023. That figure rises every day that the war continues.

There’s broad interest in a green and sustainable reconstruction that would include steps like using sustainable building materials and powering the electricity grid with renewable energy. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been adamant that Russia must pay for the damage it has caused. It’s still unclear how this would work, although some U.S. and European lawmakers support seizing frozen Russian assets held in Western banks to help cover the cost.

There is a legal basis for holding Russia accountable. In 2022, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a set of principles for protecting the environment during armed conflicts. Among other existing statutes, they draw on a protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that prohibits using “methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.”

There has been only modest discussion so far of how to integrate these principles into a formal peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. But a working group that included Ukrainian and European Union officials and former leaders from Sweden, Finland, Ireland and Brazil has recommended a framework for addressing environmental damage and holding perpetrators accountable.

What environmental impacts are known or asserted in Gaza?

Environmental damage in Gaza also is devastating. The U.N. estimated in early 2024 that over 100,000 cubic meters (26 million gallons) of untreated sewage and wastewater were flowing daily onto land or into the Mediterranean Sea.

Gaza’s drinking water system was insufficient before the war and has been further weakened by military strikes. On average, Gazans now have access to about 3 liters of water per person per day – less than 1 gallon.

Thousands of buildings have been destroyed, spreading hazardous materials such as asbestos. Every bomb that’s dropped disperses toxic materials that will persist in the soil unless it’s remediated. Simultaneous environmental and infrastructure impacts, such as water and power shortages, are contributing to larger crises, such as the collapse of Gaza’s health care system, that will have long-lasting human costs.

How can future peace accords address these impacts?

Integrating the environment into peace accords isn’t easy. Resources such as energy, clean soil and water are vital for life, which is precisely why military forces may seek to control or destroy them. This is happening in both Ukraine and Gaza.

Peace negotiators tend to focus on social, political and economic issues, rather than environmental reparations. But leaving environmental damage unresolved until after a peace accord is signed keeps people who have been displaced and marginalized by conflict in precarious positions.

It may even cause fighting to resume. According to the U.N. Environment Program, at least 40% of all wars within states in the past 60 years have had a link to natural resources. In those cases, fighting was twice as likely to resume within five years after conflict ended.

We see some lessons for future negotiations.

First, it’s important for accords to recognize environmental harm as one of war’s main consequences and to acknowledge that a healthy environment is essential for sustainable livelihoods and peace.

Second, connecting environmental provisions with other issues, such as rural reform and political participation, can create better, more sustainable and equal conditions for reestablishing democracy. The Colombia accords are an example.

Third, it is important to clearly define goals, such as what infrastructure and institutions need to be rebuilt, who is in charge of getting those tasks done, and the timetable for doing it. This can help ensure that environmental restoration doesn’t become a secondary goal.

Fourth, the international community has an important role to play in monitoring and verifying environmental restoration and providing financial and technical support. Foreign donors have already pledged $66 billion for rebuilding Ukraine and have said that they will require grantees to follow strict environmental standards in order to receive financing.

Reconstructing nations and simultaneously regenerating communities and ecosystems after wars is a daunting mission, but it’s also an opportunity to build something better. We see Ukraine and Gaza as potential test cases for addressing war’s toll on the environment and creating a more sustainable future.

Richard Marcantonio, Assistant Professor of Environment, Peace, and Global Affairs at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame and Josefina Echavarria Alvarez, Professor of the Practice in International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The latest aid package both opposes and facilitates genocide. How crazy is that?

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The process of crafting congressional legislation is often likened to sausage-making. Best not to look behind the scenes at the mechanics of the process, which is a bloody mess.

But the analogy is not apt. Sure, sausage-making can be ugly. The end product, however, is presentable and usually quite tasty.

The legislation that emerges from the U.S. Congress, on the other hand, is often as ugly and unappetizing as the process that created it.

Consider the recent bill that bundled military assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan along with a fourth provision covering more sanctions on Iran, the use of frozen Russian assets, and a potential ban on TikTok in the United States. The bill passed Congress by considerable margins. The vote was 79 to 18 in the Senate and—for the most controversial piece on Ukraine—311 to 112 in the House. The president then swiftly signed it into law.

But the margin of approval belies the months of political infighting that preceded the vote. First came the conflict over immigration provisions that the Dems originally included in the legislation to sweeten the pot for the Republicans only to discover that the Republicans were insisting on harsher measures. President Biden and the Democrats moved further to the right, yet it still wasn’t enough. In the end, the final legislation didn’t address immigration at all.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) delayed a vote in the House for months because of opposition from members further to his right who objected to providing additional funding to Ukraine. This determined minority threatened to remove Johnson over the issue, which ordinarily should not have discomfited the speaker, except that this same minority had ousted his predecessor. Moreover, Donald Trump had made his opposition to Ukrainian aid very clear, and Republicans, in this election year, have been tripping over themselves to show fealty to the Man. Even the one Ukrainian-born legislator, Victoria Spartz (R-IN), voted against the Ukraine bill in the House, largely because she is trying to get Trump’s endorsement in her primary race. Earlier, she’d called the Russian invasion a “genocide.”

Johnson managed to satisfy at least some of his critics by splitting the legislation into four distinct bills (Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, kitchen sink). In this way, House members could, for instance, register their support for Israel and their opposition to more arms for Ukraine. Senators had no such luxury since they had to vote on a single bill, which prompted three progressives to oppose the legislation because it didn’t attach any conditions to the aid to Israel (while 15 Republican extremists joined their House compatriots in opposing the Ukrainian provisions).

Progressives were indeed in a quandary over the bill. Imagine a quite different measure that condemned aggressor countries for breaking international law (Russia, Israel) while aiding those forces pushing back against colonial interventions (Ukrainians, Palestinians). It would never have been brought to a floor vote. But who ever said that U.S. foreign policy was principled or coherent? U.S. politics is all about holding one’s nose, averting one’s eyes from the sausage-making, and voting for the lesser evil.

That said, what impact will the bill have? Will it save Ukraine from being overrun? And is there any chance that all the pro-Palestinian and pro-ceasefire protests taking place around the country will force greater coherence upon U.S. foreign policy?

Ukraine

The war has not really been going Ukraine’s way for some time. Even when Ukrainian forces were successfully holding the line against Russian occupiers last year, they were suffering a lot of casualties. As Ukraine’s military supplies began to wane, Russia began to push further westward, potentially threatening large population centers like Kharkiv in the northeast. Russia’s larger pool of recruits, combined with a five-to-one artillery advantage (more in certain spots along the line of fire), was creating great anxiety that a Russian counteroffensive in the late spring or early summer could overwhelm Ukrainian defenses altogether.

“Contradictions,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024.

Meanwhile, Ukraine couldn’t completely defend its population centers and critical infrastructure further to the west. When Russia fired a barrage of 82 missiles and drones at the Trypilska power plant near Kyiv on April 11, Ukraine could only intercept 18 missiles and 39 drones. It had run out of interceptors. The remaining Russian weapons destroyed the plant.

The U.S. military package provides $61 billion in assistance, but the vast majority of the funding (80 percent) does not go to Ukraine. Rather, it allows the U.S. military-industrial complex to replenish the pipeline of supplies heading to Kyiv and fund ongoing Pentagon operations like training Ukrainian soldiers. It will take some weeks before those weapons begin to reach their destination, though the Pentagon, waiting for this moment, is shipping some existing supplies from bases in Germany and Poland. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to press its advantage.

Critics of this assistance to Ukraine—a bizarre alliance of the far left and the far right—argue that such shipments only prolong the war, causing needless suffering to Ukrainians. Others see an imperial motive, that the United States is just using Ukrainian bodies like meat puppets to draw the Russians into a quagmire and hamstring an adversary. The more isolationist critics maintain that this war has nothing to do with the United States, which should just stay out of it.

While I am no fan of the Pentagon, the U.S. military-industrial complex, or the obscene amount of money spent globally on what is euphemistically termed “defense”—$2.4 trillion in 2023, a new record—I view these arguments about Ukraine as dangerously naïve.

First, it is Russia that is prolonging this war, by continuing to occupy Ukraine illegally, pushing for more territory, and committing war crimes from torturing prisoners of war to bombing civilian sites. The Kremlin continues to claim that Ukraine is not a legitimate country, that it has always been part of the “Russian world,” that the government in Kyiv is “Nazi.” It is inaccurate to say that Ukraine is simply fighting for this or that scrap of land. Rather, Ukrainians are fighting to prevent the elimination of their country and their collective identity—in other words, against genocide. They know what happens to those who assert their Ukrainian identity in areas occupied by Russian forces (death, deportation, imprisonment). The vast majority of Ukrainians oppose giving up their land for a peace deal with Russia—around 80 percent—and a majority are against peace negotiations with Russia more generally.

Many hawkish voices in the United State would indeed like to see a weaker Russia. But the Biden administration has been clear that it would prefer some kind of settlement to this conflict so that it can focus on other foreign policy priorities. Ukraine is no proxy. It continues to fight not because it is being controlled like a marionette, but because it is exercising its own agency. It fights despite an American ambivalence that is expressed in so many ways—a reluctance to share the most advanced weaponry, a failure to deliver aid in a timely manner, and a large share of the Republican Party unwilling to provide any assistance at all.

Finally, there’s the question of U.S. interests. I generally prefer to avoid discussions of narrow U.S. national interests, which often boil down to maintaining military dominance, upholding dollar supremacy, and securing access to raw materials. I prefer to look at where U.S. interests can or should overlap with global concerns such as strengthening international law, addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, and reducing global economic inequality.

Viewed from this latter perspective, defending Ukraine is squarely in U.S. national interest. Russia’s seizure of Ukrainian territory (2014), the invasion of the country (2022), the maintenance of a military occupation (ongoing): these violations of international law are of such great enormity that a failure to punish the aggressor—preferably in court but on the ground if need be—threatens to overturn the very notion of an international community. Russia is paying for this war by pumping out as much oil and gas as the market can bear: in this way, the war is paid for by pollution. And the invasion has put an enormous burden on the world’s poor by reducing the capacity of Ukraine to produce grain. On the basis of these three criteria, the war in Ukraine is very much in the U.S. interest.

Will the recently passed aid package turn the tide of the war? That’s impossible to say. But a better armed Ukraine will have a fighting chance. And future generations will not blame the United States for standing idly by as Russia attempts to commit an act of ethnic cleansing of epic proportions.

Israel

And yet, in the same bill, the Biden administration is not only ignoring another act of ethnic cleansing but is abetting it. The military assistance bill that the president signed includes $26 billion designed to “help ensure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself against the very real threats it faces from Iran, as well as Iran’s proxy groups.”

This is an extraordinary misrepresentation of the military aid going to Israel. First of all, Iran was previously  urging restraint on its “proxy groups” after an exchange of incidents with the United States earlier in the year. And then Israel assassinated top Iranian military leaders in Syria in early April, which has set in motion another cycle of escalations.

Second, it’s not all about defense. Sure, there’s $5.2 billion for missile defense (Iron Dome, Iron Beam). But there’s also $4.4 billion for Israel to restock its military coffers and $3.5 billion for advanced weaponry—so that the Israeli government can continue to wage war in Gaza.

The Biden administration still believes that its military aid provides leverage over the Israeli government. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to demonstrate the opposite. As soon as the aid package passed, he launched more air strikes on Palestinians in Gaza (again killing mostly women and children) and announced that plans were still on track to invade the southern city of Rafah (over U.S. objections).

Washington is now pushing Hamas to accept a 40-day ceasefire. The Palestinian organization has insisted on a permanent ceasefire, though it might be mollified by an Israeli promise of the “restoration of sustainable calm.” Also on the table, reportedly, is “a willingness for full return of displaced Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza and the withdrawal of the IDF from the corridor that divides the enclave and prevents freedom of movement,” according to Axios.

The Biden administration, pushing this ceasefire proposal, is trying to prove that it’s listening to domestic critics—congressional opposition, voters in swing states, student protestors on campus—as well as the more numerous critics of U.S. policy throughout the world, especially in the Global South. The administration must also take into account the most recent report that the International Criminal Court is on the verge of issuing arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, for actions taken in Gaza.

But the aid package to Israel suggests a continuation of business as usual. None of that military aid was conditioned on the behavior of the Israeli military.

Unless and until a U.S. administration applies some real sticks in its relations with Israel, the gulf between evolving U.S. public opinion and stagnant U.S. policymaking will remain huge.

The Rest of the Sausage

The third element of the aid package provides $8 billion to U.S. allies in Asia to counter China, which includes some key military upgrades for countries like Taiwan.

Although China has indeed been more assertive in recent years, the Biden administration is doing little to repair relations with Beijing. As long as Washington and Beijing get along, Taiwan can prosper in the shadows of international non-recognition. So, this money might have been better spent on collaborative projects with China, which are a more sustainable hedge against war.

Finally, in the bill’s fourth basket, the Republicans assembled a hodgepodge of initiatives against China (to ban TikTok), Russia (to use frozen assets), and Iran (more sanctions). How long will it take the United States to figure out that punitive measures like these tend to push adversaries together? By all means, let’s isolate the one country that has invaded a neighboring democracy. But the United States should be much more strategic about how it can woo Iran and China to make Russia’s isolation more complete.

But that would require much smarter sausage-making. And so far, U.S. policymakers don’t seem up to the task.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus