Recently, Vladimir Putin made a statement that the S-300 antiaircraft missiles, which under contract would be sent to Damascus, have not yet been delivered. The reason is—I think—that Russia did not want to spoil the prospects of Geneva II. In this context, the arming of the rebels can become an incentive for them not to take part in the conference.

It is well known that the rebels are asking for antitank weapons and antiaircraft systems. It may be just a matter of time for the United States to pass from sending small armaments to the rebels to sending them antiaircraft and heavier antitank armaments. It’s the logic of escalation. You start with small things and then you’re being dragged in.

Why do I think there will be escalation? The reason is that the rebels have been fighting Assad for two years, and they were not successful. They have managed to establish control over 20-25 percent of the territory on the border with Turkey and Jordan. The rest of the territory is more or less controlled by the government. It is true that the rebels make incursions on the territory controlled by the Syrian government, but then they go back. They cannot hold onto the positions that they seize for a couple of days.

In the last two months, the balance of forces on the battlefield has changed in the favor of the Syrian government. Until now the rebels have been unable to dislodge Assad. One of the reasons is that the rebels who started this war under the slogans of freedom and democracy are losing their appeal among the Syrian population. All of a sudden people in Syria, even those who do not sympathize with Assad, have seen that the rebels are extremely dangerous, that some of them are crazy radicals who are eating the hearts of their enemies, that they are fanatics who promise to send the Alawites to the cemetery and to chase all the Christians to Beirut. They are the people who seize and kill Christian priests. Two Christian priests had disappeared completely and were probably killed in the region of Aleppo, which caused massive indignation in a number of Christian countries such as Lebanon, Greece and Cyprus, and also in Russia. Thus the rebels appear to be the people who will bring Syria to ethnic cleansing and religious war.

Whatever can be said about Bashar Assad, under his rule, all the ethnic groups and religious groups in Syria were living in peace: the Christians, Kurds, Alawites, Sunnis, the Druze . . . I visited Damascus in February 2012 and I saw a city that was not divided by ethnic or religious animosity. But it will become a city, once the rebels come there, that will be divided by religious and ethnic animosity. Large parts of those people who want to seize power in Syria are not about democracy, they are not about freedom, and they are not about prosperity. They are about other things. Can one fight for democracy in Syria with the support of Qatar and Saudi Arabia?

So I think that by arming these people and supporting these people, the United States is committing a big mistake. By trying to dislodge Assad, whom they consider to be a dictator, it may be bringing to power forces which are much worse than Assad: a person who received a European education and who basically is somebody who observes certain rules of the game. But the people who are now trying to come to power in Syria are the same people who killed American diplomats in Benghazi. There should be no illusions. Some people who can use the United States do not necessarily like it, and will go against its interest once they achieve their goals and their ends in Syria.

Paul Saunders: Certainly in the situation with Syria and other international problems, we frequently see Russia and China take similar positions and have similar objections to U.S. and European policies. We’ve seen increasingly frequent consultation between Chinese and Russian leaders in recent years. There was just a phone conversation recently between senior leaders in the two countries, and Xi Jinping—the new president of China—made his first visit as president to Moscow. How do you see the Russia-China relationship? Is there closer cooperation? Are there any important differences between China and Russia?

Alexey Pushkov: The joint Russian and Chinese position on Syria is a fairly new phenomenon. As you know, China preferred until recently not to take an active part in the resolution of regional conflicts. In the UN Security Council it used to abstain. The fact that China supported Russia and vetoed three resolutions in the Security Council that could pave the way for foreign intervention in Syrian affairs is very telling. We experience a new quality of the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership. The Chinese are against interventionism. They do not think that those interventions are humanitarian. They don’t think those interventions have to do anything with democracy. They think it’s about geopolitics, and they are strongly against any kind of pressure being exercised on sovereign governments—first of all, on the Chinese government itself.

As far as I can judge, they see the Syrian case as a test case for the introduction of the new international model—one that will be based on the concept of multipolarity rather than the unipolarity. What happens in Syria is considered in China as matter of principle—a matter of political philosophy. They will not support a world in which a group of countries will dictate to others how to behave, and will bring down governments, finance “orange revolutions” and organize interventions like the one in Iraq, which turned to be completely non-humanitarian—it has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq itself, and is still resulting in deaths. The joint Russian-Chinese position is a reaction to the policy that the United States and its allies have been conducting for the past ten years.

The immediate reason for this cooperation between Russia and China was the Libyan War. Then in 2011, both Moscow and China abstained on Resolution 1973, and it turned out this resolution was given such a broad reading that it almost became the opposite of what was intended. This resolution was taken as a green light for a war by the use of air power and missiles against Libya. The result was that both Russia and China reconsidered their stand on Libya, and decided not to give UN legitimacy to another war of this kind.

Thus, China and Russia share the same concept: the world should not be unipolar, because unipolarity leads to wars. There is a good reason to believe this because in the last fourteen years we have seen four wars: a war in Yugoslavia, a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan and a war in Libya—and possibly we will see a war in Syria. All these wars were actually, with the exception of the war in Afghanistan, based on very shaky grounds.

Therefore, the proximity of Chinese and Russian views should not be considered as something accidental. Russia and China are both members of the Security Council, and consider themselves nations that should have a bigger say on the fate of the world and also on the resolution of regional crises. And they don’t want military solutions anymore. They don’t want to allow war to become the ordinary way of solving political differences and tensions in different regions and in different countries.

There are good reasons to think that Russia and China can show the same cohesion in the future, too. The main point is that the United Nations should not be used as an instrument that will cover foreign interference in the affairs of a country or region. The Security Council should no longer back these interventions, even if they are labeled humanitarian. And military support of antigovernment forces inside different countries should stop being accepted by the world and by the international community. So I think it goes really deep into the political philosophy of both Russia and China.

Paul Saunders: You referred to U.S. policy in the last ten years, really not making a distinction between the Obama administration and the Bush administration that came before it. And it was my impression certainly that when President Obama came into office, there were a number of people in Russia, in the government and the foreign policy establishment, who were pleased by that and by the administration’s reset policy of improving the U.S.-Russian relationship. But now it seems perhaps that views have shifted. Or have they?

Alexey Pushkov: Initially Obama was considered in Russia to be an antipode of George W. Bush, a president who would change policies and bring a new dimension to American foreign policy. And initially it seemed to be the case. Obama declared the policy of reset with the Russian Federation. He promised to bring back troops from Iraq and withdraw troops from Afghanistan. For a while the Obama administration managed to keep on this track. After the surge, it started to limit its presence in Afghanistan and it started to cut the number of troops present in Iraq.