This and last month’s UN-convened talks in Geneva between Syria’s government and rebels managed to under-deliver on already rock-bottom expectations. Syrian civilians continue to die in their thousands, shredded by shrapnel from barrel bombs and cluster bombs, or starved by the regime in dungeons and the rubble of besieged enclaves. Close to 10 million Syrians need outside help and more than three million refugees are overwhelming neighbouring countries such as Lebanon. This war, triggered because the regime decided to crush a grassroots mass movement for change and which by now must have claimed at least 150,000 lives, is beyond tragedy.

Yet President Bashar Al Assad, kept in power by Iran and its Shiite paramilitary allies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and amply provisioned with arms and a diplomatic shield at the UN Security Council by Russia, would appear to have little to perturb him. He surely believes the moment of real danger passed in late summer, when Barack Obama, US President, decided against missile strikes after the regime used sarin nerve gas against rebel neighbourhoods — something Obama had repeatedly warned was a “red line” that would change his calculus about the Syrian conflict. If that calculus did change, it was very much in favour of the Al Assads.

If the Al Assad clan were an economy, rather than a tyranny writing daily in blood that it will destroy a country in order to survive, then someone would long since have figured out that the incentives applied to it have gone perversely wrong.

After the US clutched gratefully at the Russian-proffered plan to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal in September, the regime has behaved as though it had no further need to listen to empty threats from Washington and its allies. True, the White House is now reviewing its Syria policy options — plainly aware that whatever the present policy is, it is not going well. Yet it still keeps on talking about the need to avoid unintended consequences that have already started happening.

The consequences of current policy, presumably also unintended, are plain. It is not that the West simply stood back and kept out of Syria. With a lethal cocktail of adventurism and hesitancy, the US and Europe have cheered on the rebels against the regime, promising but not delivering them the means to bring it down. Instead, they subcontracted the arming of the opposition forces to Gulf allies such as Wahabi Saudi Arabia, inevitably tilting the rebel camp towards Islamist extremism.

Obama rightly worries about Afghanistan and Iraq. But Syria is already on the road to becoming Afghanistan on the Mediterranean, and Al Qaida-type brigades have already acquired more influence and terrain in Syria than they did after the US-led invasion of Iraq — so much so that they are blowing back into Iraq, which is a pretty spectacular unintended result given the jihadists there were all but finished.

The Al Assads have the enemy they want. While it is their sectarian approach to Syria’s Sunni majority, as well as the West’s feeble support for the rebels, that have turned Syria into a magnet for international jihadists, Al Assad can cynically appeal to the world to join with him to crush jihadist terrorism.

Meanwhile, he is dragging his feet on surrendering his chemical arsenal. At best he is treating the chemicals deal as a medium-term contract. As long as it is in place, seemingly, the regime may keep slaughtering Syrians provided it does not gas them.

Yet the deal emerged because of the threat of cruise missile strikes. It showed once again the Al Assads do respond to the threat of force. Hafez Al Assad, Bashar’s late father, abandoned the Kurdish insurgency in southeast Turkey once the Turks massed tanks on his border in 1998. Bashar sent a confidant of his father to Washington to sue for peace in October 2005, fearing US reprisals after he funnelled jihadists into Iraq to kill Americans.

However much Obama repeats that all options remain on the table, the overwhelming perception is that the threat of force — essentially against the regime’s lethal mastery of the skies — has been removed. Nothing will change in Syria, and the conflict’s capacity to poison the region and threaten the world will only grow, until the incentives are changed for the regime.

— Financial Times