Welcome to the new era

It took 4,000 years to build Aleppo, a United Nations official said this week, and just a generation to destroy it. In fact, not even a generation: reducing much of the ancient Syrian city to bloody rubble took just over three years.

This is a tragedy you could follow on Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, through the personal, up-to-the minute testimony of besieged civilians like Bana al-Abed, the 7-year-old girl who’s now a social media star for chronicling the assault by forces loyal to the Syrian regime on the rebel-held sector of Aleppo. “Dear world, there’s intense bombing right now,” she tweeted on Wednesday. “Why are you silent?”

Why, indeed. The fall of Aleppo is obviously a humanitarian disaster that should haunt the conscience of the world. Thousands have died, civilians have been bombed, gassed, starved and deprived of medical assistance. War crimes of every description have been mind-numbingly routine.

But Aleppo is more than a humanitarian collapse. It’s the inflection point for a transition from one international system, dominated for better or worse by the United States, to a new and much less predictable order. In the emerging order of things, a weakened, unsure United States is staying on the sidelines while more confident authoritarian states – Russia, Iran, China – step forward to fill the void.

In Syria, this is clear. The Obama administration, gun-shy of Mideast adventures after bloody, inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, took a hands-off approach to Syria’s civil war from the start. And since politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, others inevitably expanded their influence. Russia and Iran came to the rescue of the Assad regime with fighters and bombers, while Turkey also quietly came to terms with the blood-stained winners.

The rest of the Middle East has taken note. As far away as Egypt, reports the Wall Street Journal, governments openly acknowledge Russia as the new power in the neighbourhood. Washington is hanging back.

This almost certainly won’t change once Donald Trump gets into the White House. Trump seems happy to let Vladimir Putin take the lead in Syria and isn’t fussed by such niceties as possible war crimes. As long as Assad and Putin both fight Daesh, the so-called Islamic State, it will be fine by him. “Syria is fighting ISIS, Russia is fighting ISIS,” he says simply. The enemy of my enemy, in short, is my friend, and no need to ask any awkward questions.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the international community was moved to intervene to save communities like Aleppo that were under siege by criminal warmongers. The doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” or R2P, championed by Canada’s Lloyd Axworthy, was invoked in the 1990s to justify military action to stop violence in Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Kosovo. Those were messy, complicated situations but somehow the world summoned the will to step in.

In fact, “the world” at the time effectively amounted to the United States, which had just won the Cold War and had never been more powerful. No one, let alone a defeated and dismembered Russia, could challenge Washington, which acted alone or through international bodies like NATO or the UN, depending on the situation. The doctrines of R2P and humanitarian intervention were made to align conveniently with American hegemony.

No longer. After the bloody, ruinously expensive experiments with regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. became understandably leery of more entanglements. Without its assertive leadership, there is in practice no longer any western “international community” prepared to take on the cost and risk of intervening in a conflict like the one that has shattered Syria over the past five years, with half a million dead and millions of refugees.

Instead, there are newly emboldened authoritarian states like Russia, Iran and China prepared to fill any void that develops in what they perceive as their spheres of interest. The result for unlucky Aleppo is that it was abandoned by the West, which has been content to stand by and wring its hands while lecturing Assad and the Russians on their blatant violations of law and common morality.

Sadly, we can expect more of the same after Jan. 20, once Trump is inaugurated. He seems uninterested in foreign policy as such, aside from wanting to get along with big men like Putin and wring a better economic “deal” out of China.

Trump’s general approach to the world, however, has been blessed by the aged Henry Kissinger, the legendary master of cold-eyed realpolitik on the world stage. Kissinger has little interest in promoting democratic values or invoking doctrines like responsibility to protect, to shelter people under threat. Instead, he’s all about advancing American interests and reaching accommodations with other powerful players, regardless of ethics or ideology.

So welcome to the new era. The brutal treatment of Aleppo and the impotence of the West in the face of it may be just a taste of what’s to come.

Fall of embattled ancient city signals a dangerous turn of events in Mideast