There was never much hope that the 20 most influential national leaders in the world meeting in the Russian town of St. Petersburg on Sept 5-6 would occasion a thaw in the icy relations between the American and Russian presidents and some sort of accord for stopping the bloodshed in Syria.
In his opening statement, Thursday, Sept. 5, Vladimir Putin announced an open-ended discussion would start over a working dinner and go on into the small hours of Friday. The Russian leader was clearly setting the stage for a showdown with the US president, having loaded the dice in Moscow’s favor with the opposition of most of the Asian and European leaders to US military intervention in Syria. The only exceptions were French President Francois Hollande and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Tense eyes were trained on the G20 venue as Thursday night wore on to see the upshot of this weighty conference, which started out with the two parties solidly entrenched in their positions – the US president determined to exercise military force against the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its people, and the Russian president equally determined to oppose it.
But even if Putin manages to isolate Obama diplomatically by carrying a majority motion against US military intervention, he will still have to face up to the failure of his policy to stop the United States carrying out its second military offensive against an Arab nation in two years, after the 2011 Libya campaign.
As for Obama, the longer a decision to go forward in Syria drags out, the greater the pressure by lawmakers in Congress, whose votes he needs, and military imperatives, to embark on a broader operation against Syria than the narrow missile assault he first contemplated.
Had he wished to stick to his original plan, he should have instantly fired off a number of Tomahawks at the Syrian forces as soon as they gassed the eastern outskirts of Damascus on Aug. 21. Instead, he let ten days go by before suddenly deciding on Aug. 31, to put the operation on ice for congressional authorization.
Had he acted expeditiously, the whole issue of US military intervention in Syria would have been behind him by the time he reached the summit in Russia.
The American assault will now have to be expanded and revised to cover widely-dispersed targets distributed across large areas in view of the following developments:
