The agreement between Moscow and Washington to work together on Syria has been hailed by the UN-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, as much as anything, because as he himself has said, it is the first hopeful news about the Syrian tragedy for a long while.

He was right however, to caution that this is only a first step and indeed, there are those who will fear that this could be a step in the wrong direction.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said after his meeting this week with his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, along with President Vladimir Putin, that the Obama administration backed talks between the Syrian opposition and the regime of Bashar Assad.

Both countries have agreed to convene an international conference to seek a negotiated end to the savage fighting, which by some estimates has now cost 80,000 lives and driven millions of Syrians from their homes. The opening position of the conference would be to seek to have all parties agree to the final communiqué of the UN-backed Action Group for Syria almost a year ago in Geneva. This called for an immediate cease-fire and the setting up of a transitional government, which could include in its ranks, officials from the Assad regime as well as members of the opposition.

In large measure, Washington has given in to Moscow, which has consistently used the argument that there must be negotiations as political cover for its continued military and logistical support for the regime in Damascus. The question is why the Obama White House has changed tack.

First of all there is the issue of personalities. The hyper-active and sometimes abrasive former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been succeeded by the more “clubbable” John Kerry, who, from the Russian point of view, will have been the more welcome at the Kremlin in that he has not yet drawn any policy lines in the sand. President Barack Obama has never wanted to intervene directly in Syria, any more than he allowed what was actually extensive US involvement in the ouster of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, to be high profile.

Then there is Lakhdar Brahimi himself, who, before the US-Russian agreement was reached, was believed to be on the point of resigning his crucial role. While few might blame Brahimi for such a decision, it would have had a devastating impact on the Syrian conflict, signaling as it would have, that there seemed no resolution to the blood-letting and butchery.

State Department strategists have surely seen the thickly-sown minefield surrounding the proposed international conference, which is being touted for some time this month. Kerry appears to have dropped US insistence that Assad and close members of his regime should not be part of any transitional government. Instead, it seems that this issue is to be resolved by the conference itself. However, the biggest barrier has to be the likely reluctance of the opposition’s political front, the Syrian National Coalition, to have any truck with Assad and his people.

Moreover, even assuming that the SNC could agree to sit down and talk without conditions, it must be wondered how much backing the disparate units of the Free Syria Army would give to the negotiations. It can be certain that the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front would ignore any deal and continue with its own sinister agenda on the battlefield.

The expectation has to be that even supposing an SNC delegation comes to the conference, its presence will be disowned by some members of the coalition. Therefore any deal reached on a transitional government, will lack credibility and almost certainly be rejected by those political grouping that have chosen to stay away.

And here the wheel will have turned full circle. Almost from the start of the uprising, Assad protested, even as his troops were slaughtering his own people, that he really wanted to negotiate. His problem, he whined, was that there was no one with whom to talk. He continued to brand opposition fighters as “terrorists” and to blame the revolt on outside interference in the country. This of course was the position that Moscow also took, to justify its continued military and political support and to protect its sole warm-water naval base at Tartus.

The Kremlin has surely backed the conference in the confident expectation that it will be a debacle. Despite its crocodile tears about the continuing loss of Syrian lives, it will actually have reinforced its backing for the tottering Assad regime and, worse, the White House will have played into Russian hands.