Poker-face Putin holds all the cards At one point last week in the charade known as "the Syria peace negotiations," John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, announced solemnly, "This is not a game." Well, he was wrong there. This certainly is a game: the trouble is that Barack Obama is trying to pretend that it's chess, while Vladimir Putin plays hard-faced poker. The absurd story that the White House has been concocting off the top of its head - in which the stage we have reached was actually the American goal all along - is desperate. We can expect the talks between the US and Russia to be punctuated by repeated announcements of "agreement" like the one we had yesterday, to make this seem credible. So this was always the plan, plotted three moves ahead by the clever American president, who was only pretending to be indecisive, quixotic and out of his depth. By sort-of threatening military intervention and then appearing to back down at the last minute, the US was not dithering or tripping over its own feet on the world stage. It was creating the necessary conditions for Bashar al-Assad and his Russian mentors to come to the table and begin the process of submitting themselves to international standards on chemical weapons. Of course, if we pursue the chess analogy, then the first clever move was really Assad's. By using chemical weapons, he created the necessary conditions by which the US would be forced to engage in these negotiations, which will almost certainly protect his regime from removal by the West, and will guarantee his Russian friends a place on the highest global platform. Assad the war criminal, presiding over his little tinpot dictatorship, can now present his demands (for no more threats of military intervention, and no help to Syria's rebels) to the world's only remaining superpower in return for handing over weapons that are illegal anyway. The man who holds an illicit armoury can use that cache of arms as a bargaining chip to protect his own future. And Putin, the ex-KGB autocrat presiding over a country with a dying population, a failing economy and a defunct military - who was once cast by Obama as beyond the pale because of his unacceptable human-rights record - can bluster and preen as he delivers peace in our time. Yes indeed, it's all going according to plan. Everybody involved in this farrago of cowardice and dishonesty keeps reminding everybody else of the sanctity of "international law." But Mr Obama has lost moral authority to Mr Putin, who clearly now regards himself as the custodian of the world's principles. So seriously does the Russian leader take this responsibility that he has been lecturing America on the subject, in its own newspaper of record. His article in The New York Times, humiliating the Obama administration with its sarcastic condescension, was a masterpiece of comic bravado. And the White House had no choice but to swallow it because it offered a blessed way out of an impossible corner, even while it blatantly insulted the president and his countrymen. We need to use the United Nations Security Council [to preserve] law and order in today's complex and turbulent world [in order to] prevent international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law..." And on and on - all of this blather aimed at the US proposal to use force to intervene in Syria where a blatant act of criminality had been committed by the Assad regime. What if the revered UN were to produce overwhelming evidence that it was definitely Assad who used the chemical weapons? Would Mr Putin then accept that Syria is no longer in a legal position to make any demands at all in return for putting those weapons out of its own reach? Somehow I doubt it. But there was a more insidious charge contained in Mr Putin's sermon on respect for the law as laid down by the UN Security Council (which is to say by him, since he has a controlling veto). It was the taunt that "the world increasingly see[s] America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force." And he went on, "We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilised diplomatic and political settlement." The first of these propositions is a version of an argument that is heard often on the Left and occasionally on the Right, too: that the West must not "impose" its own system of values - the ideals of democratic government and personal freedom - on other societies. It goes something like this: if people choose to live under totalitarianism, even with a regime that tortures them or denies them the right to life itself, we have no licence to inflict our model of society upon their alien culture. It may be hard for us (with our parochial fondness for freedom and basic human rights) to understand such attitudes but it is not our business to judge and intervene. I have always found this view bizarre, quite apart from the fact that it often arises precisely when there is clear resistance to those tyrannies from sections of their own populations. How is it different from callous cynicism? Either we accept that some things that men do to one another (or that some rulers do to their people) are absolutely wrong - like genocide, or enslavement, or denial of fundamental rights - or we subside into the most repugnant moral relativism. By all the standards on which modern ethical consciousness is based, it must be wrong to disregard whole populations in this way: to see them as so incomprehensibly different from ourselves that we cannot imagine them having the same wants and needs. It is tantamount to regarding them as less than human. But the second prong of the Putin doctrine (or ultimatum) may be more urgent in practical terms, as these "negotiations" wend their way through a succession of global meeting places. To say that we "must return to the path of diplomatic and political settlement" means that we must reach a new carve-up. The Cold War pact with East and West having their mutually agreed spheres of influence may not stand any longer, but a new deal will have to be done. The old imperial Russia, without even the ideological gloss of communism, is on the march. It isn't about defeating the evils of capitalism any more: Russia is now in a robber-baron stage of capitalist development that would make 21st-century Americans blanch. No, it's just about territory and geopolitical clout. Maybe that's what it was always about - even in the Soviet era. Significantly, Mr Putin's most notable target has been American exceptionalism. But he has proceeded to lay claim to precisely the idea on which that exceptionalism is based: although we are all different, he says,"God created us equal." And by saying that, oddly enough, he acknowledges that the language of God-given universal rights is now the only acceptable currency of international relations. Did he really mean to do that? A lot could hinge on the answer.