Miscalculation in Proxy War: The United States and Russia in Syrian Civil War from the Neoclassical Realist Perspective
Journal: Gazi Akademik Bakış
Year: 2020

This article aims to puzzle why the leading military power of the world, namely the United States, was pushed back from the negotiating table in the Syrian Civil War, and conversely, how and why the world’s declining power, namely Russia, became the sole actor in that conflict. The article will try to answer this question from the neoclassical realist perspective. In this perspective, states do not always act rationally. Instead, they can fail because of miscalculations. The United States, in th