On Wednesday, US diplomats in Baghdad were reduced to the role of meekly receiving a message. Russian air strikes on targets across Syria would commence in one hour, their visitor told them. For the safety of all concerned, it would be better if the US Air Force stayed out of the way and suspended its own bombing campaign in Syria.

Soon afterwards, SU-24 strike aircraft based outside the city of Latakia – Bashar al-Assad’s heartland – were airborne.

So began the day when Russia hurled its military power into the vortex of Syria’s civil war.

Russia’s air strikes on Syria’s rebel-held areas of Homs and Hama provinces have killed at least 36 civilians, including five women and six children, according to rebel opposition groups. Russian defence officials said aircraft, including Sukhoi Su-24 warplanes from an airbase near Latakia, hit the Islamic State (Isis) group but multiple local and international sources said IS-free areas were targeted instead.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), a Western-backed opposition group, said it has been struck by Russian aerial bombings. The group’s commander, Major Jamil al-Saleh, said the northern countryside of Hama “has no presence of Isis at all and is under the control of the Free Syrian Army”. He said his group had been supplied with advanced anti-tank missiles by foreign powers battling President Bashar al-Assad.

A French diplomat has criticised the strikes saying they support Assad’s regime.

As American officials scrambled to confirm the impact of the strikes, they conceded the operation was a rebuke of talks between President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin about deconfliction.

“This bypasses legitimate discussion,” a senior defense official told The Daily Beast.

Indeed, just yesterday, the Pentagon said it had ordered staff and senior officials to begin such talks.

According to a recent survey by Jane’s Intelligence Review, the Syrian regime’s hold on territory has shrunk by 18% over the past eight months. It now controls just a sixth of the country. As a result, President Bashar Assad is increasingly playing a defensive game, with his forces fighting to maintain control of vital population centers such as Damascus and Homs. Moscow, as Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, is trying to reverse this decline and keep Assad afloat…

Russia’s conception of itself as a global player hinges upon its continued ability to project power into multiple world theaters. In this calculus, Syria’s port in Tartus — which Moscow has claimed as the home base of its Mediterranean flotilla since the early 1970s — represents a crucial strategic prize. The declining fortunes of the Assad regime have raised the unwelcome specter that the Kremlin could find itself without the ability to access the Mediterranean in the not-so-distant future. By reinforcing its troop presence within the country — and by broadening its footprint through the establishment of a second base in Latakia — Russia is working overtime to preserve its global reach.

You almost have to admire the cynicism. After all, what’s driving the refugees is the war and what’s driving the war is Iran and Russia. They provide the materiel, the funds and now, increasingly, the troops that fuel the fighting. The arsonist plays fireman.

After all, most of the refugees are not fleeing the Islamic State. Its depravity is more ostentatious, but it is mostly visited upon minorities, Christian and Yazidi — and they have already been largely ethnically cleansed from Islamic State territory. The European detention camps are overflowing with Syrians fleeing Assad’s barbarism, especially his attacks on civilians, using artillery, chlorine gas and nail-filled barrel bombs.

Putin to the rescue. As with the chemical weapons debacle, he steps in to save the day. If we acquiesce, Russia becomes an indispensable partner. It begins military and diplomatic coordination with us. (We’ve just agreed to negotiations over Russia’s Syrian buildup.) Its post-Ukraine isolation is lifted and, with Iran, it becomes the regional arbiter.

An aggressive Russian military intervention in Syria has placed Barack Obama’s policy for one of the world’s most devastating conflicts at a crossroads.

Russia’s military resurgence in the Middle East comes as the White House’s own military contribution to the Syrian civil war is collapsing, something even Obama’s former aides are acknowledging. The question now facing Obama is whether he will cut his losses in Syria, an intervention he has never wanted, and leave Vladimir Putin holding the bag.

Putin’s military gambit in Syria is the inverse of Obama’s. It has been rapid where Obama’s is belated, decisive where Obama’s is tentative, and focused where Obama’s is diffuse.

This is the beginning of a dangerous new phase of the international intervention in the Syrian civil war. Not only has Russia tried to order U.S. forces to step aside, it actually has the firepower to back up its demands. Some of the 35 warplanes Russia has deployed to Syria are specifically designed for fighting foes like the United States, not ISIS…

It’s not hard to see how Russia’s support of Assad could run afoul of America’s support for secular Syrian rebels—and how Moscow’s effort to establish an aerial foothold in Syria could draw U.S. and Russian jet fighters into battle with each other.

Don’t pretend for a moment that that terrifying notion hasn’t crossed the minds of generals and politicians in both Moscow and Washington.

Two U.S. officials told The Daily Beast they more or less hoped that Russia did dive into what they called the “quagmire” of Syria, a conflict that the U.S. has kept at arm’s length by limiting its involvement to airstrikes directed exclusively at ISIS and al Nusra forces.

“If he wants to jump into that mess, good luck,” one official said, noting that Russia had become bogged down in Afghanistan a generation ago in a fight against Islamic radicals.

Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told reporters that the Russians may be “making a terrible strategic mistake” by deepening their military involvement in Syria. He also warned of the “risk of running into a quagmire.”…

One official, asked how he greeted news that Russia will now be sharing intelligence about ISIS locations with the militaries of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, replied, “With pretty much a yawn.”

Let’s say the U.S. did nothing right now, and just let Putin start bombing ISIS and bolstering Assad. How long before every Sunni Muslim in the Middle East, not to mention every jihadist, has Putin’s picture in a bull’s eye on his cellphone?

The Sunni Muslims are the vast majority in Syria. They are the dominant sect in the Arab world. Putin and Russia would be seen as going all-in to protect Assad, a pro-Iranian, Alawite/Shiite genocidal war criminal. Putin would alienate the entire Sunni Muslim world, including Russian Muslims.

Moreover, let’s say by some miracle the Russians defeat ISIS. The only way to keep them defeated is by replacing them with moderate Sunnis. Which moderate Sunnis are going to align with Russia while Putin is seen as the prime defender of the barrel-bombing murderer of more Sunnis than anyone on the planet, Bashar al-Assad?

Putin stupidly went into Syria looking for a cheap sugar high to show his people that Russia is still a world power. Well, now he’s up a tree.

“Russia has played a horrible hand brilliantly. We folded what could have been a pretty good hand,” argues Ryan Crocker, a retired U.S. diplomat who has served in nearly every hot spot in the Middle East and is among the nation’s wisest analysts of the region. “The Russians were able to turn a defensive position into an offensive one because we were so completely absent.”…

Given these reversals for U.S. policy, should the Obama administration simply accede to Moscow? That would be a significant mistake, in my view. For all of Putin’s vainglorious boasting, the Russians can’t defeat the Islamic State. Quite the contrary, Russian intervention (in partnership with Iran) may fuel the Sunni insurgency even more. And if U.S. military partners in the region — such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and even Israel — really think Washington has ceded the ground to Moscow, the region could become even more chaotic…

While Russia talks, the United States can also step up the fight against the Islamic State. It should urgently increase support to the 25,000 Syrian Kurdish forces and 5,000 Sunni tribal fighters north of Raqqa. These are motivated, committed fighters. Even Putin conceded Monday that the Syrian Kurds “are truly fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations in Syria.” They deserve more American help.

The truth is that the liberal and conservative hawks in America’s elite policymaking circles have a problem: In Syria they have three enemies (ISIS, Assad, and Al Nusra), no friends, and no plausible end-state. The most detailed plans for such an end-state practically announce themselves as Rube Goldberg machines. Fifteen extremely improbable things have to go exactly right to win this three-sided civil war, and then you still have to find a new leadership class in Syria that didn’t have its “moderate” label permanently worn off under years of combat stress…

Russia’s thinking on Syria has the luxury of simplicity. Support Assad and be done with it. Beat the rebels, beat ISIS and Al Nusra, and in exchange for help, make Assad eat some concessions. The costs of the Syrian civil war are no longer just being paid in blood by countless Syrians. The refugee crisis now threatens Europe’s reigning political parties and even the very political arrangements that define the European project…

The U.S. could adopt Russia’s general framework for dealing with international terrorist groups and instability in the Middle East: a strong preference for order, first. Experience has taught us who comes to fill in the void produced by chaos.

Putin may be a hypocrite and a dictator. But he’s not wrong.

President Obama’s epic failure in Syria brought Putin out of the cold and now Putin is trying to bring Bashar Assad out of the cold and into a Russian led coalition to fight ISIS and other radical Islamists like Jabhat al-Nusra, with the promise to the Europeans that this new coalition will help alleviate their Syrian refugee crisis, the very crisis Putin had helped in creating by his considerable lethal support of the Assad regime. If there ever was a deal made in hell this would be it.

Putin the arsonist is fading away, and Putin the fireman is emerging as the indispensable leader to fight Islamist terrorism in Syria, and to save Western Europe from those refugees storming its ramparts and trying to enter its rapidly closing gates. Every Russian move and every Iranian decision in Syria scream loudly that the two states are as committed as ever to the survival of the Assad regime.

Obama will now have to decide whether the U.S. is willing to go along, and if so, on what terms. The hardest prospect for Obama to stomach will likely be aiding Assad, whose forces have committed gruesome and widespread atrocities against civilians. But in the past few weeks, even some of Obama’s former aides and closest allies have come around to the notion that Assad’s forces would be essential to any resolution of the Syrian conflict…

Now, if Putin can get Obama to go along with his proposal as well, it would mark one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs of his 15 years in power. Russia’s role as a decider in the affairs of the Middle East would then be more pronounced than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the country’s diplomatic isolation over its military incursions in Crimea last year would be substantially eased. If the Russian military takes part in a coalition with the West in Syria, Putin would also have a lot more political leverage in getting the West to lift the sanctions it has imposed against Russia over Ukraine.

Obama’s speech was, as ever, full of promise. His turn from using “might” to claiming to have “right” on his side and relying on diplomacy have led to America’s opening up to Cuba and a key deal with Iran on nukes. But these are yet to yield positive results. “If this deal is implemented,” he said of Iran, “our world is safer.” Big if.

By contrast, Putin’s deployment of forces in Syria and arming of Assad create facts on the ground. They have also propelled him to the top by taking initiative on today’s most consequential world fight…

That’s how Putin seized leadership from America…

[S]ooner or later, after more bloodshed and under even worse conditions than now, our next president will be called upon to retake the leadership baton from Putin. And that could prove tricky.

We have gone from the victory-at-any-cost mindset of World War II to the exit-at-any-cost mindset of the Obama years…

When an American president is left with a lousy situation and no good options, then there is still the necessity of figuring out how to best advance U.S. interests going forward. (The specter of foreign fighters, the stream of refugees into Europe, and the strategic consequences of long-term control of the Middle East all underscore that we actually do have long-term interests and the “it’s not our problem argument” is just naive and shortsighted.) “It’s too hard” and “I don’t want to play” are not acceptable answers because what they produce is precisely what we have gotten: adversaries seizing the initiative and setting in motion a potential permanent redistribution of power and influence in a strategically important region of the world…

By the way, none of this means that it will be easy for the Russian-Iranian team to defeat extremists. Nor do I think that is their primary objective at the moment. What they seek to do is gain the kind of foothold that will guarantee them critical leverage in any political settlement to come in Syria. They will either be able to keep Assad in place or, alternatively, ensure him leadership for a transition period and then have the ability to select or veto his successor. This will guarantee both of them what they have wanted most all along — continued influence in Damascus. That is what both their regional strategies require, and because the United States, Europe, the Sunnis, and even the Israelis would all be perfectly happy with that in exchange for putting a lid on IS and stemming refugee flows, it seems likely that the Russian-Iranian gambit will work. They will get what they want, and the world, including Obama, will declare it a victory.