It was already looking likely that President Bashar Assad's regime would survive — it has had the upper hand militarily in the Syrian civil war for at least six months now — but the events of the past two weeks have made it virtually certain.
Syria has already complied with the two initial demands of the Russian-American deal concluded over Assad's head last week. It has signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, and it has given a list of all Syria's poison gas facilities and storage depots to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. That means that the United States cannot attack it for at least a year.
President Barack Obama's ability to order such an attack was already in doubt because of opposition in Congress. Now he could not bomb without endangering U.N. inspectors, who will be all over the regime-controlled parts of Syria by November to take control of the estimated thousand tons of chemical weapons.