Abstract: Despite the fact that there was no more convenient interlocutor for negotiations than John Kerry, the victory of Donald Trump in the American presidential elections gave the Russian leadership hope for an improvement in Russian-American relations in general and reaching a compromise on Syria in particular. The “staff vacuum” that still remains in the U.S. State Department will not allow the American leadership to move on from slogans and populist declarations to the formulation and implementation of specific foreign policy steps, but some preliminary conclusions can now be drawn. Firstly, the U.S. will pursue a more proactive policy in the region, which will give the Syrian opposition certain opportunities. The situation gradually became clear that either the opposition, with the mediation of Russia, would be incorporated into existing power structures, or they would sooner or later be destroyed. Then, after the missile strike at the al-Shayrat base, the prospects for forcing Bashar Assad to negotiate became better. Secondly, during the episode in al-Shayrat both Russia and the United States demonstrated that they were not willing to launch a war with each other and are still open to dialogue, even if the results of this dialogue are not yet entirely obvious. Third, a more active policy by the United States in Syria may re-articulate Russian interest in the Syrian issue that has been noticeably lost since the beginning of 2017 due to the fact that it has moved from the global agenda to being more of a regional issue.
Leonid M. Issaev | 13 June 2017
About the Author:
Leonid M. Issaev earned his PhD in 2014 from the Institute for African Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is currently a senior lecturer at the Department for Political Science at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He is the Deputy Chair of the Laboratory for Sociopolitical Destabilization Risk Monitoring at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and senior research fellow at the Institute for African Studies at the Center for Civilization and Regional Studies, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Russian Political Sciences Association (RPSA) and the Russian Sociological Society. He is also an expert on the Middle East and Northern Africa at the “Valdai” Club and the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). Together with Askar Akayev, Andrey Korotaev and Sergey Malkov, he is a manager at the Russian Academy of Sciences program “The Mathematical Modeling of Global and Regional Dynamics Within the Context of the Modernization of Science and Education”. He teaches courses in Islamic political philosophy and political systems and political processes in the Arab world.