| Summary/Abstract |
At the end of September, Russia began conducting air strikes in Syria , ostensibly to combat terrorist groups. The strikes constitute Russia’s biggest intervention in the Middle East in decades. Its unanticipated military foray into Syria has transformed the civil war there into a proxy U.S.-Russian conflict and has raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between Moscow and Washington. It has also succeeded in diverting attention away from Russia’s destabilization of Ukraine, making it impossible for the West to continue to isolate the Kremlin. Russia is now a player in the Syrian crisis, and the United States will have to find a way to deal with it .
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