Boris Johnson’s dramatic U -turn on Syria

British Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Boris Johnson, has made a U-turn on President Bashar al- Assad’s right to participate as a candidate in the next Syrian elections in a dramatic reversal of British policy.

The seven-year term of President al-Assad will end in June 2021.

The UK’s foreign secretary acknowledged that the inauguration of the new US president meant all sides needed to rethink their approach on Syria, the Guardian reported.

“I have to be realistic about how the landscape has changed, and it may be that we will have to think afresh about how we handle this. The old policy, I am afraid to say, does not command much confidence,” Johnson said.

The defeat of militants in Aleppo, Trump’s thaw in relations with Russia, and the Turkish rapprochement with Moscow has changed the equation significantly.

“We have been wedded for a long time to the mantra that Assad must go, and we have not been able at any stage to make that happen, and that has produced the difficulty we now face,” Johnson said.

“We are getting to the stage where some sort of democratic resolution has got to be introduced … We believe in democracy, we support democracy, and if there is a political solution then I don’t think we can really avoid such a democratic event. I think that is the way forward.”

In June 2014, the Syrian Arab Republic had organized a presidential election. The globalist powers were opposed to it and — in violation of the Vienna Peace Agreement — had prohibited Syrian consulates from organising ballots for Syrians outside the country.

The war prevented several millions of voters from voting, while all states with diplomatic representations in Syria acknowledged that it had been a genuine ballot.

Bashar al-Assad was re-elected president by a wide margin of 88.7 percent of the votes cast and 65 percent of the voting-age population.

But since 2011, accusations levelled by globalist powers against the Syrian Arab Republic are that it is a dictatorship and that it systematically engages in torture. The Syrian people evidently do not share this belief judging by the outcome of the vote.

In September 2015, Johnson’s predecessor, Philip Hammond, had generously conceded that President Bashar could remain in power for a three month transitional period.

But Hammond nevertheless maintained that the Arab Syrian Republic was a dictatorship and that the mandate of Assad was illegitimate.

In another first in front of the Lords on Thursday, the foreign secretary said the UK was only “narrowly” on the right side of the law by granting exports licences for arms to be sold to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition campaign in Yemen’s conflict has been dogged by allegations of war crimes.