The icy joint press conferences between Vladimir Putin and, respectively, Barack Obama and David Cameron tell us something quite basic about the new shape of outside influence in the Middle East, specifically Syria.
Stripped of all diplomatic nicety, Putin's side, the side of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, is winning, and Obama and Cameron's side, the Syrian rebels, is losing.
There are some brutal and terrifying and inescapable power lessons out of all this. The Syrian conflict is the local version of the great Sunni-Shia hatred - sometimes war, sometimes smouldering hostility - that is raging across the Arab Middle East.
Assad's regime is based on the Alawite minority, which is an offshoot of Shia Islam. So it is getting support from Shia Iran and the Shia Lebanese militia, Hezbollah.
Assad's regime was famously secular. Its intense, visceral alliance with Iran and Hezbollah should put to bed forever all that drooling nonsense about secular Arab regimes being unwilling ever to co-operate with Islamist extremists.
The majority of Syria is Sunni, and so is getting support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Sunni states.
Moscow has a long-term relationship with Assad and Syria is the chief expression of Russian strategic influence in the Middle East. So Russia is giving hi-tech weapons to Assad, especially air defence missiles. Iran is sending thousands of Revolutionary Guards to help him, as well as providing strategic and intelligence advice. Hezbollah has sent hundreds, if not thousands, of fighters and is training Assad's hard-core forces in urban warfare.
Putin, and indeed Iran and Hezbollah, couldn't care less about Assad's human rights abuses - more than 90,000 dead in the two-year civil war, indiscriminate shelling of civilian neighbourhoods, and now, it seems, chemical weapons.
Obama, Cameron and the West generally have demanded from early in the Syrian conflict that Assad must go as part of the democratic transformation of Syria.
Yet this demand is not only completely unlikely to be fulfilled, it seems to emerge from a paradigm of Western liberal fantasy which has no traction in the realities of the political culture of the Arab Middle East.
Indeed, throughout the Middle East, one comparison is obvious to everyone. Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was a long-time ally of the US, and he has suffered every possible humiliation in a fall which has not ushered in a liberal, much less pro-Western, Egypt. Assad is an ally of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, and they have all stuck with him through thick and thin and his position is now, at the very least, quite competitive.
Western strategic aims in Syria have counted for nothing. The West is unwilling to intervene. This is for pretty good reason. Giving serious heavy weaponry to the rebels would almost certainly see some of it fall into the hands of Islamist extremists, if not al-Qa'ida itself.
It would be utterly unforgivable if the West gave anti-aircraft missiles, say, to the Syrian opposition to use against Assad's air force and these were instead used against Israeli passenger jets.
A more self-confident US would have intervened earlier and tried to shape, or at least influence, the configuration of forces within the Syrian opposition. It would have been intensely risky and I am not advocating that course in retrospect or now. But it was the only avenue of real influence.
The whole Syrian debacle also underlines what a false dawn the Libyan operation was in terms of breathing life into the so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine. That doctrine counts for nothing when serious powers believe their interests are engaged. Like most UN doctrines and laws, it applies only to the powerless.
Syria is the first Middle East conflict in a long time in which the West has basically taken a powder. Maybe that was the right thing for the West to do. But it also signals a massive decline in Western influence.
