WASHINGTON/DAMASCUS/JERUSALEM: The White House scrambled to regain the political initiative over Syria yesterday, insisting that US military strikes remained an option despite its deal with Russia to secure chemical weapon stockpiles through a United Nations resolution.

Under pressure from hawks in Washington and Israel, secretary of state John Kerry maintained that “the threat of force is real” if Syria does not comply with the plan to hand over its weapons.

“We cannot have hollow words,” he said during a stop-over in Jerusalem to help sell the deal to America’s Middle East allies.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama urged critics to focus on what had been achieved rather than the twisting foreign policy path that had led him there. The US strategy may not always have been “smooth and disciplined and linear”, the president conceded, but it was working, he said in an interview with ABC broadcast yesterday.

“I’m less concerned about style points. I’m much more concerned with getting the policy right,” he added.

After meeting Kerry yesterday, the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said: “What the past few days have shown is something that I’ve been saying for quite some time: that if diplomacy has any chance to work, it must be coupled with a credible military threat.”

US reaction to Saturday’s deal, struck by Kerry and the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been split squarely along party lines. Democrats were generally more sympathetic to the White House, but Republicans have been overwhelmingly hostile, accusing Obama and Kerry of “selling out” to the Russians and of allowing the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, to stay in power without any firm guarantee that he will hand over weapons.

“This is a Russian plan for Russian interests,” Representative Mike Rogers told CNN. “They got exactly what they wanted: Assad here for a year at least and not one ounce of chemical weapons came off the battlefield, but we have given up a lot of leverage. Putin is playing chess and we’re playing tic-tac-toe.”

A Syrian minister played on Republican fears by welcoming the deal as a “victory for Syria won thanks to our Russian friends”. In the first comments from the government since Saturday’s deal, Ali Haidar, minister of national reconciliation, said it had been achieved by “Russian diplomacy and the Russian leadership”.

Obama insisted that dealing with the Russians over chemical weapons did not mean the US had given up hopes of ousting Assad.” I don’t think that Mr Putin has the same values that we do,” he said in the ABC interview. “But we both have an interest in preventing chaos, we both have an interest in preventing terrorism.”

Chemical weapons experts and former inspectors generally welcomed the Geneva plan, but pointed out there was much that had not been resolved. The plan raises the possibility that some of the materials and munitions would be shipped out of the country. However, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) does not allow member states to “transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone”.

The UN is due today to release its report into the use of chemical weapons in the attack in Syria on 21 August. The secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has described it as “an overwhelming report”.

By arrangement with the Guardian