THE SYRIA POWDER KEG: DANGER IN RUSH FOR INFLUENCE ON CROWDED BATTLEFIELD

AS UN secretary general, it is António Guterres’s increasingly frequent duty to warn the major powers they are rushing towards catastrophe. On Friday, on the eve of the US-led airstrikes, it was the former Portuguese prime minister’s turn once again to raise the alarm at the latest of a series of deadlocked security council sessions on Syria.

“The cold war is back with a vengeance and a difference,” Guterres said. The difference is that it is no longer cold. American troops are already a grenade’s toss away from Russians and Iranians in Syria, and this weekend, missiles and planes from the US, UK and France flew at the Syrian regime. “The mechanisms and safeguards that existed to prevent escalation in the past no longer seem to be present,” the secre- tary general said. It is debatable exactly when the world last found itself in such a perilous situation. Perhaps the 1983 missile standoff in Europe, when a Nato exercise, Able Archer, almost triggered a panicked nuclear launch by the Soviet Union.

The level of paranoia has not yet reached that pitch, but other aspects of the current crisis are arguably more dangerous. There is less communication between Washington and Moscow and there are no longer just two players in the game, but a jostling scrum of major powers in decline and middling powers on the rise. Pursuing national agendas on such a crowded battlefield without colliding with others is increasingly hard. The precise targeting of the Friday night airstrikes was all about avoiding such a potentially catastrophic collision. But US defence secretary James Mattis and his generals were reportedly under pressure from the White House to use the strikes as an opportunity to take a swipe at Iran.

Those temptations are not going to go away, particularly after the arrival in the White House of John Bolton, a radical hawk on Iran, whose new position as national security adviser at Trump’s ear will echo what the president is hearing from Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In the gravitational pull of these agendas and allies, there are disturbing echoes of the eve of the first world war. It has more than a whiff of Sarajevo 1914 – with nuclear weapons looming not far off stage.

The battle lines in Syria are far more complicated than the Balkans in the last days of the Habsburgs. The west is dominated by the regime, its Russian and Iranian backers and their various client militias. The rebels in the remaining western enclaves mix local self-defence with allegiance to various regional sponsors. Now the regime has consolidated its grip on Damascus, the survival of those enclaves is tenuous at best.

-The Guardian