Will Syria Finally Break R2P?

I have spent a significant amount of time arguing with people online about the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Watching events in Syria, I am wondering increasingly if those arguments have become moot. As Marc Lynch argues, the entire affair seems to have degenerated into an silly language-game:

The air of surreality and endless repetition around much of the Syria debate emanates from the mismatch between stated and actual goals. In fact, both advocates and critics of these interventionist ideas generally understand that the limited measures being proposed have virtually no chance of changing the strategic trajectory of the war. The real argument is not over saving lives or even about removing the Assad regime, as laudable as such goals might be. It is over the extent to which the United States should be involved in the war, regardless of whether or how the war ends.

In other words, forces favoring intervention are caught between a rock and a hard place. For intervention to be necessary, Syria must be turned into a grave matter that America must put at center stage. All rides on the outcome. Yet the ways and means proposed to deal with the problem are obviously insufficient to solve the problem. To say nothing of the reality that Assad is hanging on due to the largesse of an nuclear-armed former superpower patron. Even in a climate of hawkishness about Russia, analysts generally shy away from “thinking the unthinkable” about the consequences of a clash between US and Russian forces in Syria. Or what kinds of further humiliating and increasingly bizarre yoga-like contortions the US undergoes to be able to intervene against regime forces while avoiding a clash between US and Russian forces.

Certainly Russia has blinked in the past when defending an client, though I am not sure something like the 1999 Pristina Airport showdown (which, believe it or not, featured whine-rock singer James Blunt in a starring role!) counts as a success for NATO strategy. Nor did Russia stand in the way of the direct bombing of Milosevic during the Kosovo War in general. But it would be also be remiss to point this out without also observing that the structural roots of recent Russian aggression lie in Moscow’s desire to avoid being in a position where it could not prevent a high-tech Western force from forcibly deposing a client. While Russian counter-escalation is not inevitable, the question is whether even a fairly moderate “bad” outcome is justifiable in light of the risk.

It’s striking that Russia’s thwarting of US power in Syria is emblematic of one of R2P’s many prominent weaknesesses: a lack of concern as to the consequences of power politics. Internally, there is very little interest in how force might conceivably alter the decision calculus of actors responsible for human suffering in one of the Middle East’s most violent and destructive civil wars. Externally, it does not often occur that other powers (some of which have nuclear forces) have ideological and material preferences about the fate of their clients and the distribution of power. Syria seems to have finally brought together both sides of this dichotomy together in one great big mess. Will it ultimately discredit R2P? Unlikely. But it does show (in excrutiating detail) how ridiculous many of its components are.