On Friday, The Washington Post reported that the CIA was vetting Syrian rebels, 400 at a time, with a view to training and arming them to serve as an alternative to Islamic State (Isis). Coinciding with the news of the beheading of another foreign aid worker, the report might seem unexceptional; at worst, another futile gesture seeking to impose order upon chaos. However, it represents a turnaround for President Barack Obama, with potential implications stretching to Libya.

There would be consequences for Malta even if the new initiative’s effects are limited to the Mediterranean Middle East. The Labour government’s goal to develop Malta as a Dubai, or Singapore, of the Mediterranean hardly depends only on Maltese determination.

Both Singapore and Malta are situated in the centre of ‘middle seas’, which, historically, are commercial crossroads. But it’s one thing to be situated on the rim of one of the fastest growing economic regions in the world (Singapore, if you really need that pointed out to you). It’s quite another if you’re on the rim of the Mediterranean Arab economy, whose weak development, globally, is second only to sub-Saharan Africa. As for Dubai, regional consumer demand (not to mention its oil wealth) is hardly irrelevant to the emirate’s success.

It will take more than the absence of armed conflict to integrate the Mediterranean Arab region into an area of stable economic development. But ending the armed conflict and containing the spread of effective Isis franchises into North Africa are necessary conditions.

US strategic thinking about the chances of influencing the chaos in Syria, therefore, should matter to us and our own strategic economic goals.

Back to the Post’s news about the CIA training camps for ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels, which has been greeted with two kinds of reaction.

First, there have been those who think that the Obama administration has finally seen sense. Two of his former rivals  John McCain and Hillary Clinton (the latter positioning herself for a 2016 bid for the presidency)  have long insisted that the US should be more involved in arming and training rebels, that if it had done so earlier the current mess could have been avoided.

Second, there have been those who have noted that the new policy represents more than the evaporation of reluctance. It actually shows that Obama is disregarding a report he commissioned himself.

About a year ago he told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, that he had asked the CIA for a study of the benefits of previous US involvement in training and arming rebels.

Just about the only positive case study (out of a myriad cases) that the agency came up with was Afghanistan in the 1980s – where US training led the Soviet Union, then occupying Afghanistan, into a debilitating Vietnam-style conflict that hastened the end of the Cold War.

However, given that the longer-term consequence of arming Afghan fighters was the consolidation of the power base of what became Al-Qaeda... even that example isn’t, shall we say, perfect.

Otherwise, the evidence suggested that CIA interventions tend to make things worse. For the advocates of this point of view, the Syrian conflict provided a textbook case earlier this month when a fighting group trained and armed by the US was overrun by the radical Islamist group Jabhat al-Nusra, with US weaponry ending up in the Islamists’ hands.

US strategic thinking about the chances of influencing the chaos in Syria should matter to us

It was hardly a first. For some time, weapons given to ‘moderate’ Syrian rebels have been turning up in Iraq in the hands of Isis fighters battling US allies.

It’s foolish to sit back at such news and smile sardonically at American folly. Even madness has method. And, before we even assume that madness is at work here, it pays to assume that the US is rational.

If a ‘failed’ policy is being repeated, there must be reasons for it – pressures in the political environment.

We do not have a US president who is up for re-election or who needs military interventions (as was the case with Bill Clinton did in 1998) to distract attention from domestic scandals. The reasons must therefore lie elsewhere. It must be that the US goal is not the resolution of the Syrian conflict and that the US can live comfortably with relative failure.

In this regard, it is illuminating to return to the conversations between Obama and Remnick (and published in the January 27 issue of The New Yorker). The president was pressed on whether the assassination of Osama bin Laden was of real significance, given that the al-Qaeda flag was then flying in the Iraqi city of Falluja, as well as parts of Syria and Africa. Obama replied: “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorists plots against the homeland [the US] versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

In other words, Obama is mainly concerned with stopping the likes of al-Qaeda and Isis as effective plotters against the US. But he sees no vested US interest in stopping chaotic conflict elsewhere, at least if it can be contained and absorbs the energy of his enemies.

It’s hardly a new US policy. And the view is particularly ingrained in Obama, who, as several of his advisers have attested, thinks of the US power to shape events to be much more limited than both his supporters and critics think. With Remnick, he did not need any more than two words to dismiss the idea that, if he wanted to, the US could resolve the Middle East conflicts: “magical thinking”.

Has Obama changed his mind since? No. What the CIA efforts in Syria represent is not a fundamental change in his thinking. It’s a tactical revision of the available means to a long-standing goal, containment. The aim is not to impose order but to block conflict from reaching the US.

There are three points about this policy worth noting. First, since it is a continuation of long-standing US strategy, it will outlast Obama and continue beyond 2016 (whether or not Hillary Clinton becomes the next US president).

Second, it shows that the US, in its real calculations, does not consider the regional conflicts to involve a ‘clash of civilisations’. On the contrary, the entire strategy is based on the belief that the conflict can consume the efforts of rival forces within the Muslim world, without requiring anywhere near full deployment of US forces.

Third, while this strategy is not necessarily cynical, from a Maltese perspective it does mean that, in drawing up our own regional economic strategy, we need to assume that the instability in the region will continue into the foreseeable future, with a possible knock-on effect on our close neighbourhood.

Can Malta’s Dubai co-exist with Obama’s Syria? One answer would be: yes, because we can be an oasis for affluent refugees and capital flight from a troubled region. But another answer would query whether economically robust affluence can be based on the region’s fragility.

It’s a hard question that leave no room for glib answers.

ranierfsadni@europe.com