Russia and China are unwilling to invest money and manpower in the Middle East . What they are doing is sitting back while the U.S. and other Western partners do so , hoping to step in and pick up all the marbles when the situation goes south . Their non-participation in peaceful solutions is more productive for their agenda than spending billions to counter ours . They see very clearly that they can win simply by doing nothing while at the same time assuring tyrants like Assad that they will back him in the future .