The time has come for a really serious effort to find a political settlement of the Syrian civil war. After more than four years of continuous conflict a quarter of a million lives have been lost, 12 million Syrians are displaced (four of them outside their country) and global and regional powers are directly involved. Sheer exhaustion and a collapse of hope have triggered a mass movement of refugees out of Turkish camps towards Europe. The military success of the extremist Islamist Isis against the Assad regime has confounded its other opponents. Russia and Iran, its main external allies, have increased their support in fear of the regime's collapse.
These developments reinforce the case for all the parties urgently to pursue a peace agreement. That it is now more achievable is becoming more generally recognised. The Iranian government is more willing to participate after it reached agreement on its nuclear programme with major powers. President Obama's administration is open to an initiative too after securing congressional support for that deal. President Putin of Russia is expected to propose talks at the United Nations next week. Major regional players like Saudi Arabia and Turkey are more likely to cooperate because of military impasse and a recognition that Isis is now beyond their control.
The crucial barrier to these efforts is the conflicting attitudes towards the Assad regime. President Assad’s national opponents insist he must be overthrown and cannot be part of a transitional regime. They have been supported in this stance by most of the western powers and dogmatically so by the US. They make a powerful case that a regime which has so pitilessly waged war and destruction on its domestic opponents has relinquished its entitlement to rule. But these powers’ refusal to intervene directly and their efforts to support a so-called moderate opposition to Assad’s rule have failed, leaving the field to the regime’s extreme Islamist enemies who threaten them too.
That failure has undermined their case for making Assad's departure a pre-condition for starting peace talks. Instead neighbouring states like Lebanon and Jordan, which bear a huge burden of supporting its external refugees, speak of a starting point for negotiations which includes the regime and a conclusion which would see him depart after elections. Their argument is now heard more sympathetically by the Obama administration. It needs to steer this emerging political process towards a more constructive engagement along the same lines. Given the chaos which followed the collapse of Libya after Gadafy's departure in 2011 the Russian case for preventing a similar Syrian collapse becomes more convincing if it is accompanied by a genuine willingness to open up a real negotiation.
The European Union is grappling with the huge human and political cost of this Syrian drama as it confronts the mass movement of Syrian refuges from Turkey through Greece and the Balkans in pursuit of refuge in Europe. Without an equivalent effort to settle the Syrian conflict politically by helping to get talks going urgently much of this effort will be self-defeating.