After the unravelling of the Syrian ceasefire can the US and Russia ever get along?

Any settlement in Syria will probably look more like the Russian version (with a weakened Assad) than the Western version (without him). This has nothing in common with the era of the Cold War; far more with the shifting sands of the Middle East today

A UN humanitarian aid convoy in Syria was hit by airstrikes Monday as the Syrian military declared that a U.S.-Russian brokered cease-fire had failed (AP)

It took less than a week for the temporary Syrian ceasefire, so painstakingly negotiated between the United States and Russia, to be declared extinct. The immediate cause was the destruction of a UN aid convoy near Aleppo, which the United States and the UK blamed on Russia, and Russia vehemently denied.

Recriminations continued in New York, where world leaders were gathered for the UN General Assembly. The bitter exchanges, most notably between the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, led some to ask a more fundamental question: was this plan - any plan underwritten jointly by the US and Russia - not doomed from the start? Can the US and Russia ever get along?

That is indeed a question that hangs in the air, and I will try to answer it. But before that, some aspects of the latest failure to quell hostilities deserve to be considered a little more closely.

First: the ceasefire did not collapse solely because an aid convoy, even this particular, 31-lorry, UN convoy, was attacked as it arrived at a Red Cross-Red Crescent warehouse. The first, most egregious, breach had come two days earlier, when US planes, apparently with British drone support, had struck a Syrian army base, killing 62 soldiers.

The US eventually admitted a regrettable mistake, and UK involvement - as yet unexplained and unapologised for - emerged as a footnote. But the damage had been done, at a time - tragically - when the ceasefire had appeared to be holding.

Second, the Russians have repeatedly denied that their planes attacked the aid convoy, and what really happened is still unclear. Russia has hardly helped its case by altering its exact version of events; but neither has the US produced conclusive proof the other way. It cannot be excluded that a reason for Russia’s inconsistency is that Moscow does not actually yet know what really happened.

Nor, though, should the confidence of the US and UK be taken completely at face value. The destruction of the aid convoy offered a welcome opportunity to change the subject, and the target of blame. Until yesterday, when President Assad accused the US of deliberately attacking his troops, the “mistake” had practically vanished from Western headlines.

Third, it is a conceit believed perhaps only by aid workers, and probably not by anything like all of them, that humanitarian assistance can always be viewed in isolation as an inherent good in itself. In this sort of war, where both sides are holding civilian populations under siege, safe passage for aid inevitably changes the balance on the ground.

It does not matter what the aid consists of - in this case it appears to have been winter clothing, food, drink and medical supplies - the unpalatable truth is that any type of aid becomes a part of the military calculation. This is not pleasant to acknowledge, but it is true. A siege - essentially trying to starve people into submission - is as much an instrument of war as air strikes. It is primitive and callous, but that is what war is like.

The passage of this aid convoy might have been cleared during lengthy and elaborate negotiations; all of its paperwork might have been in exemplary order; it may have been designed to be as “neutral” as it could possibly be. But there were always going to be those who would have seen it less as emergency relief to suffering civilians than as help to the other side.

And fourth, did the US-Russia agreement of 9 September ever have a chance? I would stick my neck out and say that it did have a sliver of a chance, because it had been so carefully and minutely negotiated - until the US air strikes on the Syrian army base. That incident - it hardly matters whether it was accidental or on purpose - served to reinforce established views on all sides. It allowed Assad to claim that the Americans (and its ally, the British) were acting in bad faith. Similarly, the attack on the aid convoy allowed the Western side to claim Russia’s bad faith. All the familiar preconceptions reasserted themselves.

Beyond this, though, is the complexity of the Syrian conflict. The US and Russia can conclude all manner of agreements between themselves, and the Kremlin might, just, be able to pressure Assad into compliance (though its clout is probably less than the West generally believes). But how far do the US and the UK or anyone else control the ever-shifting ranks of their allies?

Islamic State may be the enemy number one, and the Kurds may be “on our side”. But which Kurds? What game - how many games - is Turkey playing? Iran? The Saudis? A quarter century after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there is no script here that a joint US-Russia agreement can dictate. The proxies in this conflict are not exclusively theirs.

Which is where we return to the possibility, or not, of the US and Russia being able to get along at all in the foreseeable future. Their cooperation in Syria was seen as perhaps offering an opportunity for better US-Russia relations overall. Now that seems to have come to naught.

But Syria is not a useful test case. A reluctant United States has been thrown together with a Russia that intervened both to defend its own security interests (including against jihadism) and in quest of a wider diplomatic role. Any settlement in Syria will probably look more like the Russian version (with a weakened Assad) than the Western version (without him). This has nothing in common with the era of the Cold War; far more with the shifting sands of the Middle East today.

Both the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, and his Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, seem to understand this - as may Presidents Obama and Putin. They are not trying to divide the world up between them; they are engaged in a highly practical exercise of damage-limitation.

It would also appear, however, that there are forces - certainly in Washington and probably in Moscow - that are stuck in the mentality of the Cold War, and treat every misstep by the other side as an attempt to seize the advantage in what they still see as a bilateral game. There will be few tears shed here for the aborted ceasefire, because the contest for Syria is still seen, at least in part, as pitting Russia against the West. So long as this way of looking at the world persists, the prospects of the US and Russia forging a normal and productive relationship are slim.