Do Russia and America really disagree on Syria?

Mark N. Katz

While America (along with many others in the West and the Arab World) have called for the imposition of UN Security Council economic sanctions against Syria’s Assad regime, Russia (along with China) had blocked them.  This is just one more sign that Syria is becoming an increasingly serious bone of contention between Washington and Moscow.

But is it really?  The level of Russian-American recrimination over Syria has certainly increased dramatically.  The Kremlin, however, may have several reasons to believe that the Obama Administration does not actually want to see the downfall of the Assad regime—and that Washington thus finds Russia’s opposition to Security Council resolutions against Syria, which the U.S. supports publicly, to be quite useful.  There are three reasons why Moscow might well think this: