The United Nations Security Council has unanimously endorsed the resolution supporting the idea of Syria’s chemical weapons disarmament, two weeks after Syria already ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) promising to do so.
The lateness of the UN resolution is a function of repeated Western attempts, mostly pushed by France, to add an explicit authorization for military action into the resolution.
Russia held out, however, and finally got its way, with the final resolution largely the same as the one they had proposed in the first place, and mostly amounting to an endorsement of what Syria and the OPCW have already planned to do.
The resolution does include threats of “consequences” for Syria if it backs out of the deal, but this is not seriously expected to happen, and makes clear that what those consequences would be would have to be hashed out in another resolution, likely a Russian effort to prevent NATO from using vague terms to launch a war if the process hits any speedbumps along the way.
