As this blog has repeatedly declared in post after post over the years, there can be no solution to the troubles in the Middle East, especially IS and Syria, without Russia and Iran. Recent improvements in relations with Iran was a good sign but what is now going on is a game changer. Russia and the US are talking about joint military actions which will enable IS to be rolled back from Syria through a combination of re-armed and re-equipped (by Russia) Assad forces on the ground and co-ordinated US and Allied air strikes. Russia has stopped insisting that Assad stays; only that the Syrian government must be supported and the terrorists defeated. The UK backs the US position. This would be the first time that the three WWII allies work together in unison for a common purpose. Their combined military strength is several times greater than the rest of the world put together.
Russia now accepts that Assad will have to go as part of a peace settlement, but wants him to have a soft landing after regaining control of a viable part of his country. The UK and US will go with that as long as Assad goes sometime. Meanwhile in Ukraine there is evidence of a fresh effort to find a political solution built on the Minsk agreement. Again and again this blog has explained that nothing can be resolved anywhere unless the West and Russia work together. Although on the margin Russia is, and has been since Napoleonic times, a Western power with an Eastern hinterland.
While Europe quarrels about how to handle refugees and exhibits a dysfunctionality at variance with the word Union, perhaps because of it, there is now beginning to shine a ray of hope that an end is in sight of one of the greatest human tragedies of our time, as common interest at last informs the critical thinking in Washington, London and Moscow. When they march together, everybody else has to fall in line.