Almost certainly by accident, US President Barack Obama's ill-planned threat of military force against the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is paying unexpected dividends in surprising places. The Russian initiative to strip Syria of its chemical weapons arsenal and the positive Syrian and international reaction counts as very good news, perhaps the best of any since the Syrian revolt commenced more than two and a half years ago.

No one can be more surprised than the American president and his chatty secretary of state that the Russian initiative has halted the uncertain “momentum” favoring an unpopular decision to go to war. Secretary of State John Kerry can claim ownership — however unintended — of the idea that to everyone's astonishment, including no doubt his own, has sucked the energy out of Obama’s bumpy road to war. 

The fast-moving events of the last two days have transformed both the international and domestic American environment. Obama's speech tonight can be expected to reflect this change. Instead of hawking the virtues of an all but unilateral American effort to “punish” Syria's contested use of chemical weapons as the first act of a broader embrace of regime change, Obama will offer modest, skeptical support for a Russian initiative that rescues him from ordering an attack he never meant to place on America's policy agenda in the first place. Thanks to Kerry's off-message remarks and some swift Russian diplomatic footwork, Obama, if he so chooses, can transform himself from the Lone Ranger out to punish the misdeeds of the detested regime in Damascus to the leader of an internationally endorsed effort to rid Syria, and perhaps the world of its horrific chemical weapons arsenal.

In keeping with Obama's standard operating procedure, this development is entirely unscripted, and like a host of American démarches on Syria in these last years, it was inaugurated by Kerry without any regard for its consequences or indeed its very meaning. It also stands in stark contrast to the administration's escalating bellicose rhetoric — witness hysterical references by Kerry to a “Munich moment” — emanating from Washington in its desperate search to mobilize a skeptical American public and political class to endorse a military assault, albeit an "unbelievably small limited kind of effort.”