Skip to footer

Diplomacy or military intervention in Syria? 7 opinions from around the globe.

Russia and US sending mixed messages

  • By Whitney Eulich Staff writer

Foreign Policy
Opinion: David Kenner, associate editor at Foreign Policy
What Russia gave Syria 

“Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has had no better friend than Vladimir Putin's Russia,” writes David Kenner. Russia has reportedly supplied Syria with everything from attack helicopters to landmines to bullets and shells. “Amid these developments, the news that Barack Obama and Putin agreed at the G-20 summit [last] week to support a political solution to the Syria conflict would seem almost, well, laughable – if the situation on the ground weren't so dire.”

As the death toll in Syria rises, Russia and the United States remain on opposing sides of the conflict. The US says Assad must step down, while Russia has vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions on Syria and continues to provide controversial support.

And the support on the opposing sides of the Syrian conflict goes beyond simple diplomatic terms: According to The New York Times, CIA agents are steering arms to opposition groups in Syria, while Russia supplies Assad’s regime with sophisticated weaponry.

Though Russia and the US do not agree on much in the case of the Syrian conflict, they do agree it’s necessary to prevent the country from descending further into civil war. “With their respective governments working at cross purposes, however, it remains a mystery how they expect to accomplish even that limited goal.”

4 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.