NOWHERE near enough attention is being paid to the way the diplomacy around the Syrian civil war is playing out. Nowhere near enough. The other day I noted that nothing had made me as pessimistic about development aid as the endgame of our failed intervention in Afghanistan. Today let me paint a stroke in the other direction: nothing has made me as optimistic recently about the prospects for a broadly international, pro-human-rights, anti-authoritarian foreign policy that brings together America, the democratic world, and many of the emerging-market/non-aligned countries as what's happening right now around the Syria question. The complete isolation of Russia and China in the Security Council vote on sanctions last week is a watershed moment. It not only, as my colleague writes, cemented the image of Russia and China backed into a corner together in defence of authoritarianism. It also strengthened the tentative cohesion formed during the Libyan revolution last year between the democratic West, Arab democracy movements, and the Arab League.

The Western criticism was echoed in the Middle East, where Arab powers like Saudi Arabia and non-Arab Turkey have turned decisively against Assad in recent months. "Unfortunately, yesterday in the U.N., the Cold War logic continues," said Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. "Russia and China did not vote based on the existing realities but more a reflexive attitude against the West." Arab League head Nabil Elaraby said the body still intends to build support for its plan. The veto "does not negate that there is clear international support for the resolutions of the Arab League," he said in a statement seen by Reuters. The Security Council's sole Arab member, Morocco, voiced "great regret and disappointment" at the veto. Ambassador Mohammed Loulichki...said the Arabs had no intention of abandoning their plan. Burhan Ghalioun, head of the opposition umbrella Syrian National Council, called Moscow and Beijing's veto "a new license to kill from these two capitals for Bashar al-Assad and his criminal regime, which just yesterday killed 300 people." The SNC said it held Moscow and Beijing "responsible for the escalating acts of killing and genocide." Protesters stormed the Russian embassy in Libya's capital Tripoli Sunday, climbing on the roof and tearing down the flag. Men held up a banner saying: "Libyan revolutionaries are ready to fight with their brothers in Syria."

This is simply extraordinary. At Foreign Policy, Colum Lynch notes that Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the UN, blamed the backers of the resolution for promoting a strategy of "regime change". Mr Churkin seems to have phoned in his quote from a secret city in Siberia where the year is still 2003. There is a world of difference between an American request in the UN Security Council for authority to launch an invasion of a stable country, and a proposal for sanctions under a Security Council umbrella on a regime that is actively slaughtering its own citizens in order to cling to power in the face of a popular uprising. And when the Arab League, the relevant local multilateral group, is strongly behind the proposal, that should settle the question.

What is Russia thinking? The reflexive Russian opposition to international sanctions against authoritarian regimes facing popular uprisings would make some sense if Russia itself feared becoming the target of such sanctions; but that seems a remote prospect, and should it come to pass, Security Council resolutions would be the last thing Moscow has to worry about. It might have made sense in the days when the USSR acted as a vetoing aegis in the Security Council for a worldwide bloc of authoritarian client states prone to periodic revolts. But Russia's remaining client states are a paltry and threadbare lot. Does Moscow really think that sticking its neck out pre-emptively to forestall any potential future sanctions vote in case of an uprising in Belarus is worth earning the hatred and contempt of the youth of the Muslim world? It's a debacle, and strong evidence for Stephen Holmes's argument that the Putin regime, far from a latter-day revanche of efficient Soviet central command, is a dysfunctional and disintegrating mess.

As for China, the vote is yet another in a series of recent strikes against the notion that Chinese "soft power" was poised to vanquish American hard power in the developing world. Over the past three years, China has proven inept and pointlessly confrontational in its push to seize control of the South China Sea. A relatively subtle American policy of offering help to regional countries looking for a counterweight to China, orchestrated with unobtrusive but pointed intent by Hillary Clinton, has proven extremely effective. Against all expectations, Western influence suddenly seems to be winning out even in Myanmar. In southeast Asia these days we are the soft power, China is the hard one, and we're winning.

I could go on, but I'm really just supplying more and more examples to underscore the basic point. For the past three years America has been walking softly, and it's working very, very well. Ten years back, America often found itself isolated, struggling to pull together "coalitions of the willing" packed with small client states. Lately, we have been finding ourselves in the majority, along with the democratic world, while Russia and China front a dwindling coalition of the unwilling. To some extent, this reflects a smart, subtle foreign-policy presence in which we have done a vastly better job of looking at what other countries actually want, and seeing where our interests align, rather than trying to bully other countries into supporting our goals. To some extent, it's luck: the Arab spring happened.

And to some extent, there's a personal factor. Look through the Pew Global Attitudes project data on confidence in the US president. In almost every country, you'll see a dramatic or startling increase in confidence between 2008 and 2011. In Germany and France, George Bush had approval ratings in the low teens in 2008; Barack Obama's approval has never dropped below 80%. In Japan and Britain the shift is nearly as striking. In Egypt, the corresponding figures are 11% and 35%. Even in Russia itself, they are 22% and 41%. When Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice try to win backing for American positions at the UN, the exceptional popularity of the president they represent in other countries is obviously a factor. Commentators who envision Barack Obama running on his foreign-policy successes in this year's campaign generally adduce examples like the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the crippling of al-Qaeda. Perhaps these are the examples that figure most clearly in the American voter's imagination. It would be nice, though, if voters evaluated presidents' foreign policies on the basis of whether they had won the respect of the world and advanced American interests internationally. The evidence of recent American foreign-policy effectiveness isn't that we've shot a lot of bad guys. It's that when our UN ambassador calls the Chinese and Russian vetoes of action on Syria "disgusting", she's speaking for the overwhelming majority of the world, and they are in the isolated minority.

(Photo credit: AFP)