It was perhaps the least surprising nugget of news in an extraordinary day-long slew of information out of Syria.
Bashar Al-Assad the ousted dictator was in Moscow according to Russian news agencies, via an “unnamed source” in the Kremlin.
The irony that his twenty-four-year dictatorship was essentially ended in twenty-four hours was matched by the fact he and his family had been granted political asylum for ‘humanitarian reasons’, a concept historically as alien to Assad as it is to Putin.
Whether Assad becomes one of history’s exiled and slowly forgotten characters or a bargaining chip, remains to be seen. Russia wants desperately not to lose its naval base and military airfield in Syria. It’s also desperate to shield itself from the humiliation of such a loss, along with the prestige Moscow derived, domestically, by keeping Assad in play.
Russia and Turkey, forged, via the 2018 Idlib agreement, a ceasefire in Syria, and Assad, until very recently, seemed to have been the very model of a Russian-bolstered come back. Syria was re-admitted to the Arab League followed his “winning” a deeply dodgy Presidential election in 2021 with that favourite statistic of all dictators: “95% of the vote”.
But for Assad’s troops yesterday, as the Times reported, whilst opposition fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham entered Damascus: “There were no Russian airstrikes to strengthen their morale, no Russian muscle, no Russian intelligence operation. Nor did Hezbollah units spring to Assad’s defence as HTS and affiliated opposition groupings swooped from the north.”
Recently Iran couldn’t even help Hezbollah in Lebanon after Israel pursued it to an effective stand still and withdrawal there. Iran, however, did muster some fighters to help Assad, but you can’t fight in Syria for a Syrian Army that this week has evaporated. Iran, so desperate to be a significant global player, is increasingly unable to flex any muscles. Is there now the whiff of irrelevance emanating from Tehran?
Putin is not immune either, so focussed is he on crushing Ukraine. Russian losses in November are the highest in a month since he invaded nearly three years ago. Moscow’s eyes are locked on Kursk and Ukraine’s eastern front. It didn’t see the Syrian collapse coming.
It’s not the first time either. Many who’ve been stuck in bitter long-term regional disputes in which Russia was a backer of one side are seeing Moscow as an increasingly empty threat. Azerbaijan felt Moscow’s long-standing guarantee of ethnic Armenian security in Nagorno-Karabakh was no longer relevant and took the disputed province in days.
Russia didn’t see that coming either – and Putin did nothing.
The Georgian people have spent nights on the streets of their cities expressing how little they like their government’s moves to closer ties with Moscow. They are looking to the EU for their future. The threat of what Russia might do as a result seems to be reducing.
Irrelevance in politics, anywhere in the world, is the equivalent of a terminal disease.
President Biden may be the only Democrat to have beaten Donald Trump in an election but the world, America and – when it was too late – the Democratic party realised he had grown so old, he simply wasn’t relevant as a Presidential option anymore.
It was by no means the only reason they lost in November but it’s part of what cost his party, and his Vice President the White House. She too was ultimately seen by the US electorate as irrelevant to the challenges of the times. Trump did not.
So, what of the UK?
The Telegraph’s columnist Kamal Ahmad wrote yesterday:
“William Hague once told me there was one true test of a British Prime Minister. Could voters imagine him or her arriving on the White House lawn to shake hands with the President amidst a global crisis.”
I can see Turkey’s president doing that with Donald Trump. The situation today in Syria has much to do with the manoeuvrings of Erdogan in the region. It’s possible if the 3 million Syrian refugees that have spent years in Turkey decide to return, he will have eased a big domestic strain. Then the UK might feel he’d be more amenable to the long sought but never secured “returns agreement” we’ve wanted. But don’t hold your breath.
However, I am not sure I can see Donald Trump asking Sir Keir Starmer to the White House lawn as a first resort in a global crisis. Not because of the old tweets of his Foreign Secretary, the Labour staff who went to campaign for Harris, or Labour’s decision under Ed Miliband to block UK involvement in any military response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Ghouta in 2013.
It’s because it’s hard to see what this government could or would offer in the case of Syria’s collapse. What role would we have? There are looming questions whether Labour can navigate a path to working with Trump, and the EU and China in a set of compromises that doesn’t ultimately see the UK government ignored by them all.
Kemi Badenoch was at least in Washington over the weekend to give a well-received speech in which a former Canadian PM predicted she’d become a “global star of conservatism” so at least she was in the same city as the White House lawn. But back here more and more Conservative’s tell me much the same thing, a plea if you like: “We need to see more of her, hear more from her.” She mustn’t allow herself to seem irrelevant to the public with issues in the UK right now.
I have no doubt Conservatives will get their wish, but it’s the hint of “irrelevance” that’s weakened Putin, weakened Biden, and the mullahs of Iran. It’s the risk to Macron in the midst of political turmoil in France, and the soon-to-come doom of Scholz in Germany.
For very different causes, both Badenoch and Starmer must be very careful it doesn’t infect them. In politics, at home and abroad, irrelevance kills.