by Zack Beauchamp
Steve Walt worries that regime change in Libya created intransigence over Syria:
[W]hat if the Libyan precedent is one of the reasons why Russia and China aren't playing ball today? They supported Resolution 1973 back in 2011, and then watched NATO and a few others make a mockery of multilateralism in the quest to topple Qaddafi. The Syrian tragedy is pay-back time, and neither Beijing nor Moscow want to be party to another effort at Western-sponsored "regime change."
Erik Voeten counters:
What is not credible … is that the Russians couldn’t have foreseen that resolution 1973 essentially authorized regime change. While the Russians now insist that any resolution on Syria is neutral on the domestic conflict, resolution 1973 actively takes sides and condemns the Libyan regime. It allows France, the UK, and the US to use force to protect civilian populated areas under threat of attack, specifically mentioning Benghazi where the uprising was at its most intense. This is clearly a resolution that was designed to aid the Libyan rebels in their struggle against the government.
Voeten concludes that Libya may have affected Russia's thinking at the margin given that it saw very little benefit from Qaddafi's downfall. I doubt this in and of itself would have been enough to guarantee the Russian veto of the relatively toothless Syrian resolution – it could always, for example, have used support on the Syrian issue to wring concessions from the West if supporting Syria wasn't important to Moscow. However, since Russia does stand to be hurt if Assad falls (as Paul Bonicelli detailed yesterday) in ways that it wasn't in Libya, Putin's government was already invested in propping up the Syrian regime. The consequences of Qaddafi's fall were icing on a pre-baked cake.
The Dish 