What Does The Russian Solution Solve?

Keating pushes back on the idea that the Russian solution is actually a solution. He claims that “the United States will almost certainly be drawn in again”:

Putting aside the potential difficulty of verifying Syrian compliance with the plan and rounding up dangerous chemicals in the middle of a war zone, how is the credibility of the United States, its allies, and the United Nations—considered so important to maintain in the run-up to a possible airstrike—going to be tested if we’re actively turning a blind eye to atrocities committed with conventional weapons while an ongoing international effort, which would presumably require some international “boots on the ground,” is underway to take away the weapons responsible for fewer than 1 percent of the casualties in this war?

Ambers was unimpressed with how the Russian deal came about:

Recognizing the perceived and actual limits of U.S. power, hard and soft, Obama has always wanted regional powers to take more responsibility for moral calamities in their area of influence. With Syria, I think he made a mistake. It is in many ways the perfect test case for this new form of interest-balancing. Instead, Obama fell back upon old arguments. … It’s kind of embarrassing, and politically, probably terribly damaging, for the Obama administration to have fallen back and blundered into the solution its actual foreign policy would have recommended, but it may hasten the discussions that lead to the beginning of the end of the Syrian crisis. The U.S. will have to lead not from behind, but from somewhere way outside of the negotiating room.

And Juan Cole argues that the Russian proposal makes a political solution in Syria more likely:

Without a US or Western bombing campaign, the Syrian regime is likely just strong enough to hold on for years. The rebels’ advance of last spring has stalled and in some places been reversed. Some sort of negotiation now seems likely. While in my view the two sides are not yet desperate or exhausted enough to make that sort of agreement the Lebanese acquiesced in at Taif in 1989, they may be able to take small steps toward that eventual outcome, which increasingly seems the most plausible one.