“No one knows how long the Syrian crisis might rage before Bashar Assad is booted out. However, one thing is certain. The longer this conflict continues, the greater the likelihood that the entire Middle East will head for the abyss — and that the very existence of the UN, the symbol of international order, will be gravely questioned.

The reason for these powerful reverberations is that the crisis in Syria is more than an uprising against a despot; it is also the battleground for an Islamic civil war between Sunnis and Shia and for a proxy war being fought by Russia, Turkey and Iran.

The first casualty of the Syrian chaos is the political architecture that since the Cold War years of the 1950s has guaranteed an uneasy stability in the region. Despite coups, civil wars, revolutions and full-scale wars, the system held because everyone knew that its guarantor, the US, would prevent the crossing of certain red lines. In that context the US intervened militarily and politically to contain or end conflicts in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq, not to mention Arab-Israeli wars.”

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