It isn’t particularly clever to surmise that after a long War on Terror and military campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan, America seems particularly “war weary.” For years many Americans have asked why their government should rush in to mitigate and engage in foreign conflicts when there are national matters to be dealt with. From national health care reform and immigration to the economy, some think that it’s high time America minds its own business. Many find the realities of war, its bloody impact and its high cost hard to reconcile with more moderate political ideologies. Further, President Barak Obama not only promised that he would withdraw form Iraq, he also committed himself to scaling back the US defense budget, as the military expenditures of the past decade have grown to staggering proportions.

When open conflict began in Syria the United States had many strong words for the Syrian government. However, the complicated tangle of the civil war in Syria and the added ingredient of Islamic militants seemed to quell Western diplomacy, which found itself unwilling to take any military action in Syria and equally unwilling to further arm Syrian rebels groups that could just turn out to be jihadists. In Syria, Russia’s voice began to sound itself louder just as the former dominant western voices of negotiation seemed to be softening. The Russians were key in negotiating the deadline for the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. Anyone watching the situation closely could see Russia stepping into a space previously occupied by the US and it’s allies.

And now as Iraq seems to buckle with the weight of Shia-Sunni conflict and the significant gains of ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,) the Iraqi government has appealed to the US for support. For now it seems as though the US is committed to abstaining from militaristic backing on the scale that the Iraqi government has hoped for. In a move that may well further implicate a decided shift in the status quo, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, turned to Russia and Belarus this week for aid in the battle against Sunni rebels. In an interview with BBC’s Arabic Service, Prime Minister Maliki is quoted as saying,

“I’ll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract [with the US.] We should have sought to buy other jet fighters like British, French and Russian to secure the air cover for our forces; if we had air cover we would have averted what had happened.”http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28042302

The idea seems to be, why wrangle and tangle with the US when these former Soviet powers are not only able, but completely and quickly willing. Perhaps the US has finally found the backseat, but how will they feel about Russia driving the car?