Beyond Syria, The Big Picture

The sun is our anchor. It literally holds our planet, and the other planets of the Solar System, in its proverbial swim lane. It is, to use colloquial parlance, the center of our universe.

I saw a picture yesterday which blew my mind. Prompted by a CNN alert that Voyager 1 has become the first ever manmade object to leave the Solar System, I wanted to understand what "interstellar space" is and, from there, how our sun, the aforementioned center of our little universe, fits into the galaxy. I've seen pictures of the Milky Way and other galaxies, but I have never seen how the sun fits into the big picture.

For the first time, I saw a representation that includes our sun, but where our sun is not the center of something. Even in this interstellar cloud, our sun is absolutely negligible. It really makes you feel insignificant.

So, what does this have to do with Syria? Well, it also hammers home the concept of the big picture and how the big picture's components can sometimes seem much bigger than they are. Over the course of the last week, the events in Syria, which seem to mark a pivotal time in world affairs - and in many ways, they do - have demonstrated that they are just a small part of a very big picture.

First, the events. Kerry's off-the-cuff remarks led to a concerted proposal by the Russians and Syrians that Syria join the Chemical Weapons Convention - which they now have - and turn their chemical weapons - which they had heretofore denied they had - over to the international community where they would subsequently be destroyed. The Obama administration is taking this into consideration, but they have insisted on language that spells out consequences for Putin and Assad not sticking to their word - always a distinct possibility - which, unsurprisingly, the Russians and Chinese, permanent members of the UN Security Council, have heretofore nipped in the bud.

So, Obama is left with either accepting a proposal which would mean essentially caving to the Russians and the Syrians, or executing a half-hearted volley of tomahawk missiles that the American public does not want him to execute and would do very little to punish Assad.

My feeling all along has been we need to do something. I was talking to my uncle yesterday and he summed it up perfectly: "When I heard he used chemical weapons, I instinctively, without even thinking about it, thought to myself that we need to do something. But, when I stop and think about it, what is shooting missiles at him going to accomplish?"Obviously, if you shoot enough, it would do some damage, but he's right, considering Obama nor the people over whom he presides really want to execute a missile volley at Damascus.

Charles Krauthammer wrote a scathing op-ed piece today stating that any decisions Obama takes now are going to save his face, but embarrass the country while emboldening the Russians, Syrians, Iranians, and Lebanese Hezbollah. There are parts to this argument with which I totally agree. Richard Cohen, on the other hand, wrote an op-ed piece which was equally as scathing, but took the opposite tack: Obama should have done more much sooner and now the US needs to be the world's policeman, stand up to the Russians and their autocratic friends, and teach this thug Assad a lesson. There are parts to this argument with which I agree, as well.

My first takeaway from all of this is that Obama - and the United States - is damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. There really is no good option at this point. But, a second takeaway has struck me as so profound, yet so fundamentally simple. This flash point in which we currently find ourselves - the United States and the great democracies of Europe on one side and Russia, Syria, China, and the emboldened 21st Century autocrats on the other - is just a manifestation of the new Cold War: representative government vs autocracy.

In my opinion, the allure of representative democracy declined dramatically after the US invasion and relative failure of the occupation of Iraq. In Iraq, the world witnessed firsthand a facade of democracy that quickly imploded under the pressure of sectarian differences. Democratization itself was an afterthought; it was only after weapons of mass destruction were not found that the Bush administration groped around at justifications for its war in Iraq and clumsily settled on democratization. It severely discredited one of the United States' keystone selling points. It also created a vacuum that authoritarian Iran was quick to fill.

Secondly, the global financial crisis exposed democracy's ricketiness and inefficiency relative to authoritarian regimes. One only needs to compare the United States' lackluster stimulus package in 2009 - replete with pork and guarantees to bloated unions - or the European Union's inability to get anything serious done on the profligacy of its southern members to China's dictatorial, yet streamlined and efficient, stimulus package to determine that, in this case, the liberal West turned out a sub-par product.

Having perceived over the last five to ten years that the US-led liberal west is waning, authoritarian regimes believe they are waxing. One regime of the latter group, Syria, is challenged from within and responds with characteristically brutal force. The players of the Realpolitik poker game - Russia, Iran, China, the United States, France, the United Kingdom - call, raise, and fold and now the pot is pretty big. This is a pretty significant standoff; nothing as big as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the invasion of Poland, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it will be remembered as more than a typical Middle Eastern crisis. It will be remembered as the confluence of representative government's (democracy) influence and autocracy's. One seems to be in decline, while the other ascends. Only time, and skillful diplomatic maneuvering, will show who wins this hand.