On the campaign trail, Donald Trump asked whether a strategic partnership between the United States and Russia could emerge for solving the Syrian Civil War and containing and destroying the threat of the Islamic State. Translating campaign statements into governing policy is not an automatic or easy process, which raises the question: could this proposal actually take shape as a viable strategic concept?

Where U.S. Policy Currently Stands

The Obama administration based its approach to Syria on three core assumptions: that the regime of Bashar al-Assad would fall quickly and be replaced by a broad, pro-democratic coalition; that success in Syria would not require much effort or investment on the part of the United States, because U.S. allies in the region would be prepared to take the lead in doing the “heavy lifting” of assisting Assad’s ouster and in reconstructing a post-Assad Syria; and that Russia would not be prepared to expend resources to prop up Assad in Syria, because the Kremlin did not have any vital interests in his survival. None of these assumptions have stood the test of time. Indeed, the U.S. position in the Middle East has been damaged as radical Islamist groups have used the chaos of the Syrian Civil War to gain bases that allow them to destabilize the entire region, while Russian action—first to forestall U.S. military action over Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, and then to intervene directly in 2015 to turn the tide of the war in Assad’s favor—has created the impression, not only in the Middle East but around the world, that the United States is feckless and in decline while Russia is a resurging global power.

The Trump administration has inherited a U.S. policy on Syria that is characterized by a series of contradictions. While the United States is unwilling to become directly involved in the fight against Assad, it continues to provide aid and assistance to opposition groups seeking his overthrow. It is asking U.S. allies and U.S.-backed groups in Syria to focus more attention on combating more extreme jihadi elements, such as Islamic State and the Nusra Front, rather than joining with them in the fight against Assad. It continues to try to persuade Iran and Russia to abandon Assad and to encourage him to give up power, and to get every outside actor in Syria—from the Gulf emirates, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to Russia and Iran—to focus their efforts on combating the Islamic State as the first priority. None of these efforts is particularly successful, especially since the other players in Syria, as well as the Syrian government itself, know that the United States is not prepared to undertake any sort of major action in order to push its preferred outcomes.

There is no low-cost, no-risk approach that will achieve the entire U.S. wish list for Syria: no Assad, no Islamic State, no Russian or Iranian presence, no conflict between different Syrian factions and their outside sponsors, no more refugees, no more terrorism, and a pro-American democratic regime taking power. There is no magical force of moderates capable of simultaneously destroying the Islamic State and overthrowing Assad, who can also then reconstruct an effective state that will be secular, democratic and pro-American. There is also no foolproof plan that can insert U.S. military forces into the region and guarantee that there will be no unacceptable losses or risks of major escalation that could lead to unpleasant second- and third-order effects. If the United States is not willing to intervene on a massive scale in order to impose its own will, it must decide whether the fight against Islamic State or Assad’s overthrow is more important, and whether it can live with a Syria where U.S. adversaries, starting with Iran, may still be able to exercise influence.  It must acknowledge that if the United States is not going to risk large amounts of its own blood and treasure to change the outcome of events in Syria, it becomes necessary to find solutions that can win the support of other stakeholders in the outcome of the Syria conflict.  Russia is among the most important of these interlocutors.

Russian Interests and Approaches on Syria

It must be recognized that the United States seriously misread Russian interest and intentions in Syria, and miscalculated the extent to which Vladimir Putin would risk taking losses to ensure that Bashar al-Assad did not fall. This derived, in part, from continuing to ignore signals from Vladimir Putin that he would be prepared to take more assertive action to secure the regime’s internal independence to run Russia, defend the Russian position in the Eurasian space and ensure that Moscow’s “voice and veto” would be respected by Washington when it came to other global issues. When it became clear to the Kremlin that the Obama administration “reset,” like the Bush administration’s outreach, was not going to lead to U.S. acquiescence to these demands, Moscow looked for ways to limit U.S. freedom of action around the world.

When it came to Syria, three broad streams of Russian interests have been at play in the decision to support Assad.

Based on what happened in recent instances of regime change, like Ukraine and Iraq, Moscow had little confidence in America’s promises that Russian interests in Syria would be respected if Moscow acquiesced to Assad’s overthrow and his replacement by a pro-American coalition. Russia did not expect that its contracts would be honored, its supporters included in a new administration (or safeguarded from retribution), or its military facilities in the country—especially the naval station in Tartus, at present the only Russian base outside the territory of the former Soviet Union—would be left in its possession. Indeed, since the intervention began in 2015, Russia has not only overhauled the Tartus facility, but also concluded an agreement with Assad to turn the Khmeimim air base outside Latakia into a permanent Russian facility. These two assets now allow Russia to deploy a formidable anti-access/area denial umbrella in the eastern Mediterranean and to be able to project power throughout the Middle East in a fashion that has not been seen since Soviet times.

At the same time, the Putin administration did not buy into confident American proclamations about the division of anti-Assad forces into clear “moderate” and “radical” camps, instead operating from the assumption that armed opposition to Assad was a sign of either direct or indirect support for radical jihadi groups—groups that also were targeting the interests of the Russian state within Eurasia and even inside Russia’s own territorial borders. To the extent that anti-Assad forces have also drawn on recruits from some of the restive Muslim-majority parts of Russia itself, aiding the Assad regime was a way for Moscow to encourage would-be Russian jihadis to leave Russian territory to fight (and die) in Syria. Russian officials have been quite open that their assistance to Assad has been driven, in part, by the strategic logic that it was easier for Russia to fight such forces in Syria than to face them back home inside Russia’s borders.

Finally, Moscow decided that showing its willingness to stand by an ally even in a time of trouble was absolutely necessary in order to reassure other strategic partners, elsewhere in the Middle East and in Central Asia, that the Kremlin was reliable and would defend its friends even against significant Western pressure. Moscow has contrasted this steadfastness with apparent American fecklessness in abandoning long-term allies and partners, such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt once the optics of the Tahrir Square revolution changed Washington’s public-relations calculus, to suggest to other authoritarian leaders that Russia would prove more reliable than U.S. promises. This apparent reliability, even in the face of widespread Western criticism of the Russian role in supporting Assad, has been useful in sustaining Moscow’s relations with other strategic countries, like Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and has helped Russian efforts in making diplomatic inroads with traditionally staunch U.S. partners, like Turkey and Egypt.

From a geostrategic perspective, Moscow also has concluded that its ability to operate in the Middle East as a player of influence is enhanced by stabilizing and prolonging a de facto division of the region between a Sunni coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, and a Shia coalition, headed by Iran. Assad’s outright overthrow would upset that balance, and weaken the Iranian strategic position by cutting off its access to its Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon. While Iran and Russia do not see eye-to-eye on all issues, Moscow is more comfortable than Washington with allowing the Islamic Republic a degree of influence in the region, while Russia’s ability to present itself as a necessary interlocutor between Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel guarantees that its presence will be needed in the region. In a more realpolitik assessment, a continued Shia-Sunni “cold war” across the region also guarantees that Sunni extremists are less likely to focus on Russia if they continue to be involved in fighting in the region.

In support of its agenda in Syria, Russia follows an approach based on its own counterinsurgency experiences, as well as those of its partners, like the government in Algeria: Elements of this approach include the use of overwhelming conventional force to crush opposition forces and demonstrate to civilians that support of the rebellion comes at a high material and human cost; efforts to find opposition forces willing to defect and join the side of the government, while pushing other “moderate” forces closer to the jihadi extremists; and a willingness to entertain options that would allow Kurds and Sunnis to enjoy relative independence from the Assad government in Syria, in return for ceasing combat operations against Damascus. This latter strategy is also open to allowing groups sponsored by Turkey or the Gulf Arab emirates to have defined spheres of influence in the country. In pursuing this approach, therefore, operations against the Islamic State have not always had the highest priority.