Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

On 20 March, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered the Kremlin’s sharpest criticism yet of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, saying that Assad was “making lots of mistakes”.  Some in the West have taken this as a sign that Russia may be preparing to drop its support for the Syrian regime.  It is no doubt true that the Kremlin is engaged in an effort to shore up its reputation in the region, but the latest fulminations from China suggest that Moscow is unlikely to move too far towards the West’s position on Syria.

Russia and China have been strident in their opposition to a policy of regime change or military intervention, and both continue to complain about the way in which Nato stretched UN Security Council Resolution 1973 on Libya from protecting civilians to justify regime change.  To mark the first anniversary of the military operation against Libya, codenamed Odyssey Dawn, on 18 March China’s official news agency Xinhua published a critique of the West’s ‘new interventionism’, which it described as an “inerasable dark cloud hanging over international relations”.

Xinhua argued that Libya was the testing ground for the new interventionism, which justified military intervention on humanitarian grounds, and that “disturbing[ly] the West appears to be continuing the momentum of promoting the new interventionism” by making Syria and the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad “their ultimate target”.

China’s problem is twofold.  The first is that it objects to morally-based interventionism for the obvious reason that this could in future be justified against China.  Secondly, it believes that the justification for the ‘new interventionism’ is in any case hypocritical humbug.  As Xinhua put it: “Be it ‘old interventionism’ or ‘new interventionism’, there is no difference in essence per se, that is they are both power politics and hegemony, with the purpose of maintaining the West’s strategic interests, and the only difference between them is that the latter has an even more misleading nature.”

A third objection, expressed by Xinhua, is that the most recent Western interventions have been disastrous.  In Libya, for instance, Xinhua argues that “in addition to the 20,000 deaths caused by the war, several tens of thousands of people have been rendered homeless; some 5,000 large and small armed groups are fighting among themselves; the pace of the process of political and economic reconstruction is quite arduous; and separatism is seriously threatening the state’s unity”.  It finishes by asking: “Are such results not a supreme irony to those interventionists who staged war under the banner of human rights?”  And it concludes by warning of the “need to be on guard against the spread of ‘new interventionism’ at all times”.

This makes clear there is to be no weakening of China’s opposition to an overt policy of regime change in Syria, let alone to a military intervention, which in turn suggests that those in the West who have been reading some weakening into the Russian position from Lavrov’s latest speech on Syria are misreading his signals.  A belated Russian attempt to minimize any rift with the rising Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy over Syria is not the same as preparing to compromise over Nato-led interventionism.