US Retreat and Filling of the Gap

As is well known, this decline of such a heavy weight State like the United States of America, which had dominated the international decision for over two decades, means objectively that the range of political, economic, military and cultural options that have dominated along the past phase of exclusivity, will be replaced by new alternatives. What in decline is not a country/state per se, but the whole model of the former international relations, and all the tools and structures of dominance of the Western capitalist center. This means that a new international order has been put on the agenda.

If the ascending international centers have the qualifications, capabilities, and means to increase their weight, role and effectiveness in a direct way, the matter for peripheral countries is related to the opened horizons for their countries and peoples to create their own special model that meets the needs of their peoples in development, sovereignty, and self-determination, on the basis of integration between the countries and peoples of the world, and mutual recognition of rights.

The current phase, despite all its pains, constitutes a historic opportunity for the States of global periphery to advance in faster pace and follow-up of this qualitative change at the international level, and each country to do that in accordance with its specificities and priorities imposed by the concrete situation, to exit the historical impasse that these countries have been stuck in, because of the neoliberal socio-economic model which had reached a dead end in the very home countries of this model.

This vision imposes on the live forces in the peripheral countries, especially in the countries of tension and protracted crises, including our country, to work to fill the emerging gap and find a foothold in the emerging international situation. The political solution is the main label of any serious step in this direction, without succumbing to the temporary considerations of the moment.

The series of US retreats from the Syrian file, leading to the recent declaration by the president of USA, Donald Trump , of "coming out of Syria very soon", in addition to the recession of the areas of armed conflict, came as a reinforcement and affirmation of the fact that the political solution is the only solution to the Syrian crisis, taking into consideration that the prevention of a political solution is in depth an American option, regardless of the role of other powers, especially that the necessities of this solution still exist, such as the recent tensions and attempts of obstruction in the Syrian north, and that many of the elements and components of this solution are already at hand, primarily the UNSC Resolution 2254 as a roadmap for the solution, and the ongoing preparations for the formation of the Constitutional Reform Committee.

Syria's adaptation to international changes is not limited to aligning with the ascending international powers. It also requires all forces to act on the objective necessities imposed by the Syrian reality, including radical and comprehensive national democratic change as a legitimate right for the Syrian people, and as a concrete manifestation of the international reality which is being formed, with its own logic and deep content, and as the Syrians share of contribution to the future international changes which are coming with no doubt.

Kassioun Editorial, Issue No 856, Apr. 1, 2018