More specifically, Prof. Sasley is so busy painting the best face on the Syrian deal that he neglects to note the ways in which President Putin is positioning Russia as a regional counterweight to the United States. This is particularly obvious in Iran, where the immediate result of the U.S. collapse on Syria was a quick move by the Kremlin to float a new offer to sell advanced air defenses to Tehran, thus helping Iran to defend a nuclear program that is orders of magnitude more dangerous than Assad’s sarin gas.

Putin’s goal is to make Russia a viable alternative partner for repressive states in the Middle East (and by extension, in the rest of the world). His offer to such regimes is simple: Unlike the Americans, Russia will never judge other forms of government, violate the sovereignty of authoritarian states, encourage any “color revolutions” against their leaders, or hold any of them to any standards regarding human rights. Should those dictators take Putin’s hand, he can now use Russian support of Syria to buttress one more pledge: when the going gets rough, the Kremlin will not throw them under the bus the way the Americans did with their Arab allies. Perhaps Prof. Sasley is not alarmed by the possible creation of this kind of brutal new order in the Middle East, but we see nothing good in it, neither for Western interests nor for the furtherance of anything like Western values.

The fact of the matter is that no serious student of Russian affairs would deny that Moscow now has more power in the Middle East than at any time since at least 1973, if not longer. Until now, the Russians have had to pry that influence away from the U.S. and its allies through venal promises of arms and unconditional political support to some of the worst regimes in the region. Now, that influence has simply been handed to Moscow by an American administration seeking an exit from a strategic dead-end of its own making. We understand that apologists of such a policy will want to put the best possible face on this disaster. But the debate needs to be kept in the realm of historical reality, rather than based on hopeful reinterpretations of Russian history and foreign policy that have nothing to do with how the Kremlin actually conducts itself.