“President Assad has an absolutely positive attitude, a good mood,” said Natalya Komarova, a member of the delegation, according to Russian news agencies.

But in an acknowledgment of the war’s toll, another visitor reported that Mr. Assad said rebuilding Syria could cost $400 billion.

If the primary message of the strikes was that Mr. Assad could not use chemical weapons, a secondary message was that the West was going to leave him in power, no matter what else he did.

“Even if this is a chemical weapons deterrent, that leaves a whole arsenal of conventional means with which people can be killed in Syria with few real repercussions,” said Sam Heller, a senior analyst who studies Syria at the International Crisis Group. “There is every reason to expect that that will continue.”

Seven years of conflict have seen Syria sliced up by world powers, with the Turks administering towns in the north, the United States working with Kurdish-led militias in the east, and Russia and Iran helping Mr. Assad rout the remaining pockets of rebels elsewhere.

At this point, no one seems to have a realistic plan to broker a lasting peace between those forces that would bring Syria together again in a stable enough way to allow millions of refugees to return home and for rebuilding to begin. Many discount the idea that Mr. Assad can play a meaningful role in that process.

“It is very shortsighted and erroneous in my mind,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Facilitating a win for Assad is making sure that Syria remains the epicenter of instability in the region.”