The thoroughly establishment Foreign Policy journal just published an article titled “Assad Is Now Syria’s Best-Case Scenario” by Stephen M. Walt. It lays out in four sentences the realpolitik, not ‘US regime-change operation’, that guides US foreign policy: “The best course of action today is for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to regain control over northern Syria. Assad is a war criminal whose forces killed more than half a million of his compatriots & produced several million refugees. In a perfect world, he would be on trial at The Hague instead of ruling in Damascus. But we do not live in a perfect world, & the question we face today is how to make the best of a horrible situation.”

That statement of capitalist realpolitik is what many Assadists & Stalinists have been claiming all along & exposes their affinities with the most reactionary forces in world politics. The Arab Spring uprisings, including in Syria, & the Palestinian & Kashmiri struggles reject realpolitik for the visionary politics of social transformation. That’s what distinguishes freedom struggles from tyranny.