The world’s attention remains focused on US President Barack Obama to find out when, or whether, he will give the green light to launch military operations against the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which has been accused of using chemical weapons against its people in an attack that curdled the blood of all those who saw the horrific images from al-Ghouta on Aug. 21. Meanwhile, Lebanon's citizens and others find themselves eyeing the movement of military flotillas off the country’s coast, as they await the possible repercussions of such operations on their small piece of land, reminiscing about Lebanon's long history of involvement in the wars of major powers.

Many of them still remember the day when the US fleet arrived in 1982 and bombed Beirut’s southern suburbs and encampments of factions allied with a Hafiz al-Assad–led Syrian regime, only to withdraw its forces from Beirut following the double suicide bombing against US and French barracks in October 1983. The suicide attacks, which led to the death of 241 American and 58 French soldiers, have since been attributed to Hezbollah. The Sixth Fleet’s movement did not, at the time, achieve the US administration’s objectives for various reasons, the most important being the presence of the Soviet Union in its capacity as a superpower and overwhelming Arab rejection of all forms of Western intervention.

Today, however, the circumstances are completely different. The Russia of President Vladimir Putin is not the Soviet Union under the likes of Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, and the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is no longer divided into two camps, with Moscow standing on equal footing with Washington. The difference between them today is vast, and an examination of national income, one of the criteria by which power is measured, reveals Russia today to be at the point where the United States stood six decades ago, in the 1950s.

Putin has overplayed his Syria card and use of his country’s Security Council veto power to the point where he has rendered the former ineffective and the council ineffectual. He is now on the verge of losing the card and may be in part responsible for pushing the world into creating a new security framework outside the purview of the Security Council to contain the chemical threat and punish those who use it. Moscow's announcement that it will not take part in a military campaign against Syria is additional proof of its limited power and indicates that it has expended its diplomatic capabilities.