First, the good news. The American and Russian-brokered ceasefire in Syria, the ‘cessation of hostilities’, which became effective on 27 February, has been holding. Sort of. The guns have certainly not fallen silent—far from it—but there’s been a significant decrease in bombing, shelling and other kinetic activity. The last attempt at a ceasefire nearly four years ago, then brokered by the UN, collapsed within hours. So on the face of it things appear promising.

Although, there are inherent flaws and weaknesses in this ceasefire, the peace talks did resume as scheduled on Monday 14 March in Geneva.

As a starter, this ceasefire only applies to the Western and Arab-backed armed anti-government opposition groups, the Syrian government forces and their Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, and the Russian military. It excludes two important parties: the Islamic State and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusrat Front.

On the one hand, the exclusion of ISIS is sensible—it’s executing a battle whose main focus isn’t the downfall of the Syrian government of President al-Assad but the establishment of a greater Islamic Caliphate. On the other hand, the Nusrat Front is an armed group whose main target is the government in Damascus. More troublesome still is the proximity of Nusrat’s fighters with some of the Western-backed groups, especially around Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. And Aleppo has been getting special attention from Russian fighters. Despite the ceasefire, Russian aerial bombings have continued, albeit at a reduced pace, ostensibly targeting the Nusrat Front but degrading the Western-backed armed groups. That’s no accident on the part of the Russians.

Apart from the inherent difficulty in monitoring the ceasefire violations, and the lack of enforceable mechanism, there’s no will from any side to denounce the truce violations because these would jeopardise the more important phase of the ceasefire, the peace talks about the future of Syria.

Nevertheless, the ceasefire has allowed some delivery of much needed humanitarian aid to thousands of desperate civilians who have been unable to access food and medicine because of the ongoing fighting. That alone is a success given that neither the US nor Russia had high expectations that the ceasefire would hold.

Now for the bad news. The ceasefire has benefited the Syrian president the most in that it has frozen the battle lines following the Syrian government’s successive wins against the armed opposition. This was only possible after President Putin decided to intervene militarily in the civil war in September 2015. And in doing so, Putin achieved his first goal: to save the political life of his only Arab ally, President al-Assad.

The second bit of bad news is that by giving al-Assad a new lease of political life, Putin has managed to protect Russia’s vital interest in Syria: its naval base in Tartus, Russia’s only toehold in the Mediterranean. The base is of huge strategic importance to the Russians who otherwise would’ve been cut out of the Middle East. By having access to that vital strategic asset, Putin is able to harden Russia’s soft underbelly and reduce the threat from jihadist extremists coming through the Caucuses.

Putin’s success in Syria occurred in spite of Washington confidently and smugly asserting that Russia would get bogged down in Syria following its military intervention in that country. On the contrary, Russia has consolidated its position in Syria and the region. And at the cost of about US$3 million a day and few battle casualties, this is a war which Putin can afford to conduct relatively cheaply and with little fear of a backlash back home.

Putin has also shown a greater willingness to protect his ally al-Assad than Obama has been willing to support the anti-al-Assad forces, focussing instead on fighting ISIS. The now infamous chemical weapons ‘red line’ threat and Obama’s failure to follow through when this was crossed further weakened his credibility in Syria and the Middle East. It confirmed yet again that the US president has no appetite to get involved in Syria’s civil war.

What does Syria’s future look like? We may well be looking at a de facto partition of the country along the frozen battle lines, and a permanent separation down the road. In the meantime, while al-Assad’s area of influence is diminished, he still controls a whole swath of contiguous land from Damascus in the south to Aleppo in the north, including access to the strategically important coastal area. More importantly, and thanks to Russian and Iranian military backing, al-Assad will be in a much better position to reject future US demands for his departure from the political scene.

If the ceasefire—if one can call it that—doesn’t hold, the Americans are looking at a Plan B which would include increasing military support to anti-al-Assad groups. Reportedly, this military aid wouldn’t include surface-to-air missiles for fear that such weapons could fall in the hands of terrorist groups. To not provide those missiles to the opposition would be a big mistake, militarily and diplomatically.  The message it would send the Russians (and the Syrian government) is that they would not need to fear any retribution for their relentless bombing—deliberate or not—of Western-backed opposition groups.  This would simply embolden Putin further.

So regardless whether the ceasefire holds and how the peace talks go, one thing is certain: Russia isn’t leaving Syria soon (notwithstanding an unexpected announcement by Putin on Monday that he had ordered a partial withdrawal of the Russian military). Like a fox, Putin’s announcement may well simply be a cunning negotiating ploy.

2016 has kicked off in big way with what’s been billed as the first cyber attack to actually disable a power grid. SANS ICS analysis indicates that the six-hour outage in western Ukraine was caused when hackers remotely switched breakers while simultaneously slowing the response by infecting utility company workstations and servers, then flooding customer call centres to prevent customers reporting blackouts. The companies affected had to switch their systems to ‘manual’ to restore power.

Unsurprisingly, media and intelligence agencies are looking at Russia, although Cyber Squirrel 1 could soon point its finger at another culprit. For some further reading, Net Politics has an interesting post about the use of cyber power between Russia and Ukraine.

China’s Defence Ministry announced the activation of three new units on 1 January, including one that it’s referred to as ‘cyber war forces’. The ‘Strategic Support Force’ is likely an amalgam of existing space operations and cyber and information warfare units. Its new commanding general, Gao Jin, was previously the Director of the PLA Academy of Military Science. The Academy is the source of the PLA’s Science of Military Strategy publication which included extensive discussion on Chinese concepts of cyber warfare. The reorganisation is likely part of broader reforms of the PLA announced at the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress in 2013 designed to centralise political control of the PLA which place the Central Military Commission in direct control of all military forces.

Also in China, authorities unveiled draft counterterrorism legislation in late 2015 that would require technology companies to install back doors and hand over encryption keys and user information to government agencies. US officials were quick to criticise the draft legislation, but this disapproval was quickly deflected by the Chinese Foreign Ministry which noted that recent US legislation included similar surveillance powers.

Encryption has continued to be a point of contention. Writing at the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims notes that ‘there is no such thing as “good enough” encryption once a backdoor has been added’. Mims states that there are already enough vulnerabilities in most personal devices that ‘lawful hacking’ by law enforcement agencies remains a better alternative than building in further vulnerabilities. Elsewhere, digital rights group Access Now have posted a letter online signed by nearly 200 experts, activists and corporations urging governments globally not to ban or limit access to encryption in any form.

Just before Christmas, the White House released a new strategy for greater US involvement in the development of international standards for cybersecurity. Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel announced the strategy as part of the US Government’s efforts to support a ‘consensus based, private sector driven international standards development process’ to develop internationally adopted standards for cybersecurity to help create trust in cyberspace and the growth of the digital economy.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense has announced new export permit requirements for cyber security products. The list of products subject to oversight includes systems that can deceive users, operating programs or communications with penetration programs; systems adapted for protecting or monitoring communication lines at a national level; and equipment and components designed for digital forensics.

And for those of you still on holiday or already nostalgic about the year that was 2015, our friends at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Net Politics blog have just finished a five-part series on the top five cyber news events of 2015 that’s well worth a read.

News this week that companies bidding to build Australia’s next generation of submarines could be targets of Russian and Chinese hackers hasn’t surprised anyone. But it remains to be seen if Defence will adopt the suggestion of former Army Chief Peter Leahy and Senator Nick Xenophon to return to typewriters and couriers to transmit classified information.

What was surprising was the revelation that contractors to the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) outsourced work on classified US military networks to uncleared Russian programmers. The two firms involved, NetCracker and Computer Sciences Corporation, have both denied any liability, but have agreed to pay a combined US$12.75 million in civil penalties to close the investigation by the US Justice Department. The original whistle blower complaint, made in 2011 but withheld until now, stated that numerous viruses had been loaded onto DISA network by the Russian programmers.

This experience hasn’t caused the US to reconsider outsourcing offensive cyber capabilities to private industry partners. Defense One reports that a US$460 million contract will be offered to provide services to US Cyber Command including planning ‘cyber fires’ and ‘cyberspace joint munition’ assessments. The US is increasingly open about its plans for offensive cyber capabilities, however other countries generally remain reticent to discuss their plans for this sensitive capability development area.

The hack of Sony last year unearthed  long-standing questions about what constitutes the use of force in cyberspace, and what a proportionate response to a cyber incident may be. Last week members of the US House Intelligence Committee’s NSA and Cybersecurity Subcommittee requested that the US Government pursue the development of binding international rules for cyberspace, stating that it’s in the ‘best interests of all nations’ to have normative behaviour in cyberspace laid out in a cyber treaty, including answering questions regarding use of force in cyberspace.

While not legally binding, the next edition of Tallinn Manual will seek to address those same questions. The successor to the 2013 manual, which focused on the application of international law to cyberspace during war, the 2016 edition will reportedly focus on legal issues regarding cyber incidents below the threshold of cyber warfare. Those incidents are more common between states but harder to respond to in accordance with international law, and without escalating conflict unnecessarily.

Last week saw the release of the full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which as part of its broad trade growth and liberalisation agenda seeks to create the conditions for the growth of digital trade in the Pacific. The TPP mandates the use and acceptance of electronic signatures, paperless trading and specifically restricts data sovereignty and the ability of governments to demand software source code as a condition of sale. David Fidler from the Council on Foreign Relations has provided a good summary of the e-commerce chapter of the agreement. He notes that the TPP provides a possible model for future agreements that preserves an open and global internet, and possibly counterbalances Chinese influence.

The struggle to balance privacy concerns, government data collection requirements  and commercial continues this week. In the UK, the Government has released a bill to update its existing surveillance and oversight legislation, within which the requirement for ISPs and telcos to retain two years of records on individual’s internet activity has garnered the most attention. Australia’s own metadata retention scheme may be delayed due to the inability of most providers to actually collect and store the information, but our intelligence watchdog, the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, has reportedly begun to recruit analysts to oversee intelligence agency compliance with the scheme. On the other side of the scales, in Belgium Facebook has been ordered to stop tracking internet use of non-Facebook account holders who use Facebook or be hit with a daily fine of €250,000.

On 30 September, Russian aircraft began bombarding rebel and Islamic State targets in Syria, heralding a new phase in Syria’s long and bloody civil war. The Russian attacks were accompanied by an assembling of pro-regime ground forces for a renewed offensive to reverse recent rebel gains in the north west of the country.

The Russian air intervention and the ground offensive by Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi and Lebanese Shia forces has removed any immediate threat to the regime enclave in Syria’s western coastal area. Yet these latest developments don’t appear close to bringing the war to a conclusion. Rather, the variety of inter-locking conflicts which now constitute the Syrian war appear far from resolution, with some movement on the ground but nothing suggesting a final coup de grace, or indeed a political process which could bring the conflict to an end.

The civil war in Syria, it should be remembered, is no longer a single conflict. Rather, there are no fewer than five separate but interlocking wars taking place on Syrian soil. Those are: the ‘original’ war between the Assad regime and the largely Sunni Arab rebellion against it, the war between the Kurdish YPG (Peoples’ Protection Units) and the Islamic State organisation, conflict between the rebels and Islamic State in the north and south of the country, clashes between the Islamic State and the Assad regime in Homs and Aleppo provinces, and finally Turkish attacks on the Kurdish YPG (most recently in the town of Tel Abyad) because of that organisation’s links with the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party).

The Russian intervention is of direct relevance to only one of these conflicts—that between the regime and the Sunni Arab rebellion.

The regime/Russian/Iranian offensive against the rebels is currently making some progress in the southern Aleppo countryside.  While Russian and regime bombing in the Ghab plain area prevents any further significant move forward by rebels, pro-regime forces are seeking to encircle Aleppo city, and eventually to link up with two Shia villages north-west of it, Nubl and Zahra.

If the encirclement is completed, this would be of high significance, because it would serve to cut off the rebels in Aleppo from their supply lines across the Syrian–Turkish border. Aleppo, Syria’s second city, has been contested between the rebels and the regime since the summer of 2012.

The Russian intervention was an emergency response to rebel advances in north-west Syria in the preceding months. A new rebel alliance, the Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), declared in March 2015, had made considerable gains in the months prior to the intervention. This new bloc brought together a number of the most powerful rebel militias in Syria’s north, including the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Salafi Ahrar al-Sham.

Those forces captured Idleb city and the strategic town of Jisr al-Shughur in the spring of this year. This left the way open for a rebel push into the regime controlled Latakia province on the western coast. Latakia contains the Russian naval depot at Tartus, the only Russian naval facility outside of the former Soviet Union.

This would have spelled potential disaster both for the Assad regime and its Russian patron. The Russian intervention was intended first and foremost to prevent this. This is clear—despite the hollow claim by Moscow that its intervention was intended to help the regime in its fight against Islamic State.

This is confirmed by the pattern of Russian bombing in Syria—overwhelmingly directed not against IS, but rather against rebel targets adjoining regime-controlled areas at vulnerable points. While Russian spokesmen have claimed from the outset of the bombing campaign on 30 September that Moscow was targeting IS positions as well as those of the rebels, it’s an observable fact that the great bulk of the attacks have targeted Idleb, Hama, Latakia and Homs provinces. These are the areas immediately adjoining the regime’s vulnerable western coastal enclave. The IS presence in them is minimal to non-existent. So the goals of the Russian offensive are clear.

But while Moscow can save its client from immediate destruction, it can’t resolve the key strategic dilemma facing the regime. From the outset of the war, Assad’s problem has been an insufficient number of men willing to engage in the fighting on his behalf. This derived from the narrow sectarian basis of the regime. Assad’s own Alawi sect accounted for only about 12% of Syria’s population (compared with around 60% for the Sunni Arabs who formed the core of the rebellion against him). This absence of manpower is what lies behind the retreats from large swathes of territory which the regime has undertaken in the course of the last three years. The regime has sought to reduce the area under its control in order to govern it effectively.

But what this means is that the air assistance of the Russians can do little but preserve the regime enclave. Assad can’t afford to advance far from his current area of control, because the acquisition of new areas to rule would then revive the original problem of manpower shortages which made the retreat necessary in the first place.

The Iranians, of course, are providing the manpower for the current regime offensive. But unless Teheran envisages placing Sunni areas of northern Syria under permanent occupation, this is only a temporary solution.

The Russian intervention has been accompanied by diplomatic moves from Moscow, with Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, saying after a surprise visit by Assad to Moscow that Russia supports preparations for ‘parliamentary and presidential elections’ in Syria, and would even be willing to offer air support to rebels in combat against Islamic State.

Given that Moscow envisages a continued role for Assad throughout this projected political process, however, it is unlikely to have much purchase with rebels, who have been fighting for four years to bring down his dictatorship.

The Russian intervention into Syria, while undoubtedly significant, doesn’t appear to be a ‘game changer’ in the Syrian war, presaging its early conclusion. Rather, Moscow took the decision to double down on its support for the Assad regime at a time when it was experiencing extreme difficulty.

The Russian intervention isn’t of a type and scale which can deliver victory to Assad. Nor will it impact significantly on the other conflict systems currently under way in the land area that was once Syria.

On 6 October, Russian warships on the Caspian Sea fired 26 medium range cruise missiles at 11 targets in Syria. Washington has protested that these strikes have not only struck the forces of the self-declared ‘caliphate’ but also ‘moderate’ Syrian rebel groups. US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has argued since that by entering the conflict on the side of the Assad regime Moscow is ‘tethering’ itself to ‘a sinking ship of a losing strategy’.

While Carter’s assessment of Russia’s approach may well prove to be correct, it’s clear that Washington’s approach has already proven to be a losing one.

Central to this failure has been Washington’s inability to construct a ‘solvent’ strategy whereby, to paraphrase Walter Lippmann, commitments accurately reflect US vital interests and don’t exceed US capabilities to protect or prosecute those interests.

Since August 2011 the Obama administration has maintained that while only Assad’s removal will resolve the crisis, the ‘United States cannot and will not impose this transition upon Syria.’ Rather, Washington has sought this indirectly through the imposition of sanctions and provision of support to anti-Assad forces.

The ‘Assad must go’ rhetoric and this indirect strategy has led the administration astray.

First, it has permitted a number of regional players such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies to sponsor their own often jihadist proxies in Syria. Unsurprisingly, their actions have been guided by their own individual interests first and their strategic alignment with the US a distant second.

Second, the expansion of IS prompted the administration to give ‘teeth’ to its indirect strategy by prosecuting an ongoing air campaign to ‘dismantle and degrade’ it and developing a program to vet, train and equip ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels.

The former was designed to weaken IS offensive capabilities and allow local anti-IS forces to take the initiative. The problem in Syria (PDF) has been that ‘the secular rebel groups vetted by the United States are divided, weak and unlikely…to augment US-led operations from the air.’

The latter initiative has been underwhelming. After admitting in July that it’s US$500 million training program had yielded only 60 ‘moderate’ rebels, the administration cancelled the program in early October to focus instead on identifying acceptable Syrian rebels ‘already on the battlefield’.

The crucial problem bedevilling the Obama administration and the political class in Washington as a whole is that their core goal in the Syrian crisis—the removal of Assad—is not aligned with either US vital interests in the Middle East or the capabilities that the US is willing to deploy to achieve them.

Two central questions arise here.

First, does the continued existence of the undeniably odious regime in Damascus imperil vital US interests in the Middle East, let alone US national security? In answering this question, they would do well to recall that the current dilemmas Washington faces in Syria ‘stem not from the mere existence of the Assad regime but instead from the war that emerged from confrontation between the regime and its opponents’. Additionally, the actions of the US and its allies have arguably helped to perpetuate it.

Or second, does the emergence of IS, a movement bent on the destruction of the territorial and political order of the contemporary Middle East, constitute the preeminent threat to US interests in the region? In September 2014 President Obama appeared to signal the administration’s belief that it did in fact constitute such a threat.

Since then Washington has pursued a contradictory strategy. On the one hand it has argued that the Assad regime’s continued existence is the ‘magnet’ that attracts foreign fighters to IS, while on the other it has declined to revise its position that Assad’s removal is the precondition for a political resolution to the Syrian civil war.

As Paul Pillar has argued, this ignores the fact that ‘the untoward effects of this war will be ameliorated only insofar as peace is established in Syria…It is the continuation of the war, much more than any particular outcome of the war or any particular political configuration of Syria, that is the source of most of the trouble that is worth worrying about’.

This failure is shared by Obama’s Republican critics. Indeed, the alternatives offered by Republicans divorce further the relationship between commitment, interests, and capabilities that should underpin sound strategy.

Jeb Bush has argued that ‘defeating ISIS requires defeating Assad, but we have to make sure that his regime is not replaced by something as bad or worse’, while others are bedevilled by wilful obfuscation of the dynamics at play with respect to Syria and IS. In February Marco Rubio asserted that Obama hadn’t implemented a military strategy to combat IS as he ‘doesn’t want to upset Iran’. That ignores the fact that Washington and Tehran’s interests are aligned when it comes to combatting IS.

It’s difficult to disagree with Michael Brendan Dougherty’s assessment that the majority of the GOP primary contenders have argued for a  fairy-tale strategy on Syria that will somehow ‘defeat everyone at once, at low cost, without ugly alliances, and to the benefit of unnamed good guys’.

Russia’s intervention in the crisis has served to reveal the inability of the current administration and its Republican alternatives to bring US commitments into alignment with what are deemed to be its vital interests in the Middle East.