US President Barack Obama has vehemently rejected Russia’s military actions in Syria as self-defeating and dismissed the idea that Moscow was strengthening its hand in the region.
He vowed not to let the conflict become a US-Russia “proxy war.”
At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama pledged to stay the course with his strategy of supporting moderate rebels who oppose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but he dodged questions about whether the US would protect them if they came under Russian attack.
Russia’s dramatic entry into the Syrian civil war, after a year of airstrikes by the US and its coalition partners, has raised the specter of dangerous confrontations in the skies over Syria.
It prompted a question at the news conference as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin was outfoxing the US at a time when the US-led military campaign in Syria has failed to weaken the Islamic State (IS).
Obama dismissed that idea with an expression of disdain.
“This is not a smart strategic move on Russia’s part,” he said, referring to Putin’s decision to “double down” on his support for al-Assad by stationing warplanes, air defenses, tanks and troops in Syria. Moscow says it is targeting Islamic State forces and fighting terrorism, but US leaders are skeptical of that and Obama said the Russian president has overplayed his hand.
“It’s only strengthening IS, and that’s not good for anybody,” Obama said, adding that he hoped Putin would come to realize that allying Russia with Iran to try to keep al-Assad in power is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it will not work.
Obama said Putin has stepped deeper into a conflict that cannot be solved by military power alone, and that his approach is misguided in not distinguishing between Syrian rebels who want al-Assad ousted and those who are terrorists.
“From their perspective they’re all terrorists, and that’s a recipe for disaster,” Obama said in his most extensive comments on the topic since Russia began its airstrikes on Monday.
Evoking memories of the Cold War era of US and Soviet forces working behind the scenes to prop up client states, Obama said: “We’re not going to make Syria into a proxy war between the US and Russia.”
Asked if he felt outsmarted by Putin, Obama argued that Putin was acting in Syria out of political weakness and trying to gin up support at home while Russia’s own economy struggles.
“As a consequence of these brilliant moves, their economy is contracting 4 percent this year. They’re isolated in the world community,” Obama said, noting that Russia is under international sanctions for its military intervention in Ukraine.
“Russia’s not strong as a consequence of what they’ve been doing. They get attention,” he said. “Putin’s actions have been successful only insofar as it’s boosted his poll ratings inside Russia, which might be why the Beltway is so impressed, because that tends to be the measure of the success."
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