“AMERICA is not the world’s policeman—terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong.” That world-weary run-up to his conclusion was about the clearest moment in President Barack Obama’s televised address on Syria on September 10th. It was a speech that twisted and turned and contradicted itself, reflecting an astonishing fortnight which left Mr Obama looking like a spectator of his own foreign policy. First he put the onus of resolving the Syria crisis on an unwilling, risk-averse Congress, then on the government of Russia—just a day after his national security adviser, Susan Rice, had accused Russia of opposing “every form of accountability in Syria”.

His address was a confounding use of the presidential bully pulpit. With patience, eloquence and passion, Mr Obama set out his judgment, as commander-in-chief, that launching targeted missile strikes in response to the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad’s regime was “in the national security interests of the United States”. The president went on to make a moral case for action. Lest war-weary voters reject his course, though, he promised that he “would not put boots on the ground” and that his attack, while more than a “pinprick”, would involve only “modest effort and risk”.

Thus, in the words of Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, 90% of the address sounded like “the speech that the president would give to explain why he was using force—or had just done so.” But having argued that action could not be safely or morally avoided, Mr Obama went on to say that he saw no “direct and imminent threat” to American security in Syria, and so had felt it right to seek congressional backing. And then, in the bombshell of the night, he announced that he was asking Congress to postpone any votes at all, to allow time for Russia to work on a diplomatic plan for Syria to give up its chemical weapons.

The dealing’s done

It was too early to know if that diplomatic initiative could succeed, Mr Obama admitted. But—all talk of deterring others from imitating Syria apparently forgotten—he went on to say that “this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force.”

The contradictions swirling round Mr Obama could yet be resolved into a diplomatic triumph. In this remarkably optimistic scenario, Russia would make good on its unexpected offer to prod its ally, Mr Assad, to hand over all his stocks of chemical weapons to international control: a process helped along by a credible threat of American air strikes.

But such starry-eyed optimism hardly accounts for Mr Obama’s ceding of the cat seat. Over the days running up to the speech it had become clear that a resolution giving Mr Obama broad authority to launch missiles against Syria would struggle to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate, let alone the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where it would be opposed by liberal Democrats, libertarian Republicans and conservatives who simply do not trust Mr Obama on anything. Faced with defeat, even a probably unworkable and possibly insincere proposal from Russia seemed worth grabbing.

The proposal apparently came as a complete surprise. On September 9th John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, answering a reporter’s question about how, if at all, Syria could avert a strike, replied by saying that it could hand over all its chemical weapons forthwith. Having previously called Mr Kerry a liar for denying the links between the Syrian opposition and al-Qaeda, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, jumped on his seemingly off-the-cuff remark. As he showed with a remarkable appeal to international law and multilateralism in the New York Times on September 12th, Mr Putin is keen to be seen as a legitimate and indispensable player in world affairs. So at his boss’s bidding Mr Kerry’s Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, took the opportunity to call on the Syrian regime to give up its stockpiles of chemical weapons and join the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which bans their possession.

None of this was as impromptu as it seemed. In 2012, when Russia pulled out of a programme set up 20 years ago to help the former Soviet Union get rid of weapons of mass destruction, Richard Lugar, who as a senator had been one of the creators of the programme, suggested that the two countries could impose control over Syrian chemical weapons. The Russians buried the idea, arguing that the Syrian government needed no oversight. But it resurfaced last May when Mr Kerry brought it up on a visit to Moscow. It was fleshed out at a one-on-one meeting between Mr Obama and Mr Putin at the G20 summit in St Petersburg.

Russia has blocked every single attempt to impose sanctions against Syria. This, it has argued, has not been out of simple spite. Nor has it been because of a special cosiness with Mr Assad—who, as Mr Putin snarkily quipped, “spent more time in Paris than he did in Moscow”. According to Dmitri Trenin, the head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a foreign-relations think-tank, in 2012 the Kremlin told America it would agree to the eventual removal of Mr Assad as part of a political transition to a secular government that would accommodate Russia’s interests.

The recalcitrance boils down to Russia resenting the very idea of military pressure for regime change—or any action at all—without a resolution of the United Nations’ Security Council, where it has a veto. Russia had felt duped when, in 2011, America, France and Britain bombed Libya to protect civilian lives. The bombing was thorough enough to topple the regime, and stretched the Security Council resolution which permitted it to the limit of its meaning; the image of Muammar Qaddafi’s barbaric death stuck in Mr Putin’s mind. Everything he has done since then has been to stave off military action by the West. The chemical-weapons plan is part of that effort.

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, argues that Russia’s plan is not meant to be a confrontational anti-American gesture, but a way of restoring the countries’ relationship. It hinges on the (correct) assumption that Mr Obama never wanted to go to war in Syria. By offering him a face-saving way out, Moscow thinks that it is doing him a favour, hoping to make him feel grateful and indebted. But Mr Obama knows that Russia cares more about the process than the result.

On the night of September 9th, after the Russians made their intervention, France hastily put together a tough proposal for a Security Council resolution on Syria. It was to be tabled under Chapter Seven of the UN charter, authorising the use of force if Syria failed to comply, and called for dismantling of all Syria’s chemical-weapons stocks, as well as the prosecution at the International Criminal Court of members of the regime responsible for the attacks.

François Hollande, the president of France, is keen to keep his country at the diplomatic fore over Syria. When he announced in late August that France would participate in military action to punish Mr Assad, he found himself in the unaccustomed position of having France lauded by Mr Kerry as America’s oldest ally. But Mr Hollande was rather left in the lurch when Mr Obama decided to seek authorisation from Congress for military strikes. As Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, stressed when he announced the resolution: “We decided to take the initiative.”

The best that you can hope for

The new diplomatic push was also a way for Mr Hollande to deal with sceptical public opinion over Syria. Polls consistently show a majority of the French—like majorities of Britons and Americans—to be against military strikes. The French are particularly opposed to any action that lacks UN backing. They have not forgotten that the ill-fated American-led invasion of Iraq had no UN mandate because of a French threat to veto a resolution.

The risk for Mr Hollande is that he ends up looking naive. Mr Fabius said he was fully aware of the danger that the Russian proposal was a “diversionary tactic”, but that it was worth testing Russia’s word with a credible, binding resolution. Russia rejected France’s plan for a Security Council resolution the same day because it invoked Chapter Seven, and because it blamed Syria for the attacks in the first place (which Russia, despite calling for disarmament, has not done). Even so, Mr Hollande is grateful for the diplomatic turn.

So is David Cameron. Britain’s prime minister became embarrassingly irrelevant to the anti-Assad cause last month, after Parliament voted to forbid him to commit troops to it. A shift away from military action puts Britain back in the picture. With Russia apparently committed to reject anything that looks like an ultimatum, Britain is working with America on the Security Council resolution. Mr Cameron may even be congratulating himself on having played a role with Mr Putin—who is said to be more at ease with Mr Cameron, another self-confident cold-water swimmer, than with any other Western leader.

Time enough for counting

Plenty of diplomacy is yet to come. Mr Kerry and Mr Lavrov are set to meet in Geneva on September 12th. If a UN inspection mission can be put together at all, it will take months, probably years. Small wonder the beleaguered Assad regime, well versed in obfuscation and diplomatic delay, welcomed the prospect with barely disguised glee. Syria’s battered, fragmented and frustrated opposition bitterly resigned itself to doing without outside attacks. Its trajectory towards increased radicalism has steepened with the pervasive doubt that Mr Assad will be promptly punished for gassing his people.

The first challenge for any system of inspection will be finding stuff to inspect. One source familiar with American assessments says that if they knew 90-95% of the places where the weapons were before the fog of civil war descended over the country, they may now know only 50%. The only way an inspection regime would be able to get all of the chemical weapons, which can be outwardly indistinguishable from other munitions, would be if the regime was fully co-operative. If it is not, finding the weapons and the chemicals they are made from would be impossible.

Co-operation could conceivably have benefits for the Syrian regime beyond just deflecting air strikes. The process of consolidating the weapons at a few facilities might have tactical benefits, allowing the army to abandon isolated weapons facilities it must now protect and to concentrate forces where they are needed for fighting. If the inspectors felt they had full co-operation, they might not have to ask too many questions about the sources of the weapons and the technology that went into them. The answers to such questions might embarrass some of Syria’s friends.

Even if the Syrians were to co-operate, though, keeping hundreds of inspectors safe would be incredibly taxing; attempts to do so would require tens of thousands of soldiers even in a “semi-permissive” environment. Where they might come from, when America’s president is committed to putting no boots on the ground, is a mystery. So experts judge that a hard ceasefire is a necessity for any serious inspections. And it would have to last a long time.

Syria’s stocks of chemical weaponry are large: French intelligence estimates talk of tens of tonnes of VX, the most lethal nerve agent, and hundreds of tonnes of both sarin, another nerve agent, and mustard gas. It may be that all the nerve agents are in “binary” systems, which work by mixing much safer chemicals together to form toxins only at the moment the weapon is used. Such weapons are safer to transport than those which are deadly from their creation, so it might be possible to move them out of the country, if there are borders which are peaceful enough to allow it and if a country with the wherewithal to dispose of the stuff is ready to take them in. But even if all the nerve agents could be removed, it seems likely that the mustard gas would have to be disposed of more or less where it is. That would require purpose-built facilities inside Syria.

It would all be very costly and dauntingly, dangerously slow. Under the CWC, Japan is required to deal with chemical weapons it left in China after the second world war. The process has been going on since 1999 and is expected to cost perhaps $9 billion. And that is a smaller task, undertaken a long way from any war zone. Elsewhere, people are still working on destroying weapons made before their use was banned under the 1925 Geneva protocol: “Last time I visited Porton Down,” says an American of Britain’s chemical-weapons centre, “they were working on destroying things from the first world war.”

Learn to play it right

And what of the credibility of Mr Obama’s threat to strike if Mr Assad does not co-operate? Congress remains skittish and deeply wary of sharing the responsibility for unpopular military strikes. In his televised address, Mr Obama asked his “friends on the right” to reconcile their commitment to America’s military might with a failure to act in a clearly just cause. Addressing anti-war Democrats—some of whom have reported anger from constituents at the idea of spending any more money on foreign adventures— Mr Obama asked his “friends on the left” to realise that when Syrian children have been filmed writhing in pain on a cold hospital floor, resolutions and condemnations are not enough. Talk of a diplomatic track may move some of those friends, but not all.

Mr Obama did not have to go to Congress for permission to strike Syria: he chose to do so, shocking many of his own aides, for essentially domestic political reasons. Mr Obama’s opponents in Congress were uniting behind a charge that he was flouting the constitution in declining to consult them. If he had gone ahead alone with an unpopular action, Republicans seemed certain to snipe from the sidelines. Thus he decided to force Congress to take a stand. Alas, he misjudged his ability to shift the public mood. On September 10th, before his speech, he conceded to Senate Republicans that “I’m good, but not that good,” according to Senator Mark Kirk, a Republican who backs military action.