What is happening in the Security Council, with the overt political conflict taking place there, is not a struggle between major powers over Syria, but rather a struggle between major powers over the new world order, with Syria simply being one of its themes.
In short, the dispute between Russia and China on the one hand, and Europe and the United States on the other, is not because of Syria, but rather it is a dispute over the new conditions with regards to running the world.
China is not satisfied with its current timid share in global decision-making, since it is poised to become an influential engine in the world economy by 2030, and is the state with the largest investments in US government bonds (approximately 1 trillion dollars).
Russia is a country that has sustained economic growth over the past 7 years, and has witnessed significant developments in its global arms sales. There is a high possibility that new Russian oil resources will be discovered, along with the potential for natural gas in the country. Furthermore, following the very comfortable election victory for Vladimir Putin and his administration, Russia can no longer accept the role of an “extra” in a long American movie!
The world is now formulating its new balance of power, after Europe paid an exorbitant bill to avoid a collapse in the economies of Spain, Greece, Portugal and Iceland, thus bursting the “rosy dream of the economically strong European Union”. The world is shaping new relations, and there are now emerging powers such as Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Turkey and Poland.
This new formula for the balance of power – and the conditions and criteria of new relationships – is based on the latest economic, political and strategic data of a troubled world: financial crises on both sides of the Atlantic, revolutions in the Arab world – an area rich in oil reserves, and the major problem of using [external] armed force to resolve internal conflicts between rulers and their people.
In the recent past interventions have been used to prevent full invasions; however, if we consider every US military intervention since World War II, we would notice that they have all been conducted under the slogan of “saving the people from dictatorships”, such as in South Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti and Libya.
From here the major powers must agree on one thing: Who are the regimes that we will intervene with, and who are the regimes that we will intervene against?
Russia and China are spoiling Europe and America’s desired plans for intervention [in Syria], not because they believe in a regime such as that of al-Assad’s, but because they feel that the world’s power is yet to be divided in accordance with the reality of the new emerging powers.