According to Tony Badran, Washington has been pressuring the rebel forces fighting Bashar al-Assad to give in, and pressuring the Sunni states to reduce their backing of these forces. The effect of this administration policy is to aid the Russian military campaign:

From the administration’s standpoint, “there is no military solution” to the Syrian war—meaning, the U.S. president does not support a rebel victory. Instead, the rebels need to de-escalate the conflict and begin a political process that will ostensibly lead to a “political solution.” The administration’s language was not very subtle code for: whether you like it or not, you are going to stop military operations against Assad, and cut a deal with him. . . .

[Secretary of State John] Kerry’s rhetoric [about the importance of finding a diplomatic resolution to the civil war], therefore, was cover for deliberately dragging the rebels into a set-up, and then leaving them out in the cold to be brutalized by Vladimir Putin—with the only possible escape route being to join a government with Assad and stop demanding his ouster. Or, to put it in even more concrete terms, the administration is leveraging Putin’s brutal military campaign to extract political concessions from the opposition that are tantamount to surrender. And if they don’t hurry and sign that surrender now, as Kerry reportedly told them, the Russian bombing is just going to get worse, and in three months they’ll be decimated. . . .

Aside from perpetuating the horrific slaughter of the Syrian people and overseeing a population displacement on a massive scale, one likely result of this policy will be the complete collapse not only of traditional U.S. alliances in the Middle East but also of post-World War II security structures elsewhere. The United States is now partnering with Russia to line NATO’s southern border with a consortium of terrorist militias protected by Russian air power and armed with advanced weapons. The message is hard to miss: the old American security treaties, like NATO, that were once the cornerstone of global security arrangements, are barely worth the paper they are printed on.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.