inconvenient truths

endstates, interests, permanency, and limits

The weekend’s news of a reigniting of the Syrian civil war is the most useful, if deadly and tragic, recent evidence of several topics. One is that actions create consequences, in this case a civil war may reopen temporary alignments of players regardless of how long they appeared otherwise. The second is that we still forget to check our desired endstates too often. Third, limits on what we can do actually exist, regardless how we might prefer that not to be true.

Syria, another remnant of the disastrous British-French political map making following World War I, struggles as a nation-state. Member of multiple minorities (some religious sects like the Shi’ia, Sunni or Alawite) while others ethnic (Kurds) occupy—they hardly share it in the affirmative sense of the term—land amid some pretty contentious neighbors in Turkey, Iraq (hardly a functioning entity either), Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. The French departed in the mid-1940s after they tried putting these humpty-dumpty remnants of the Ottoman Empire into a coherent state, but their actions did nothing to set any sort of participatory system into effect.

Post-French Syria has suffered the internecine strife so common for newly independent states, with the Ba’ath movement playing an important role. Ba’athists particularly appealing to Hafez al-Assad because this trans-national Arab party welcomed Alawites, a decidedly “out” minority in Syria. He was an active duty officer who rose through the ranks to become head of the Air Force by the late 1960s. He reacted bitterly to the Arab defeat by the Israelis in the 1967 War, then the weakness of the neighboring Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan during its September 1970 struggle with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Hafez al-Assad coordinated a de facto coup in late 1970, becoming Prime Minister before assuming the presidency for almost forty years.

Once al-Assad became Syria’s unelected strongman, he set a path towards an Alawite dictatorship which excluded Islamists, among many in the country. He annihilated of opposition a decade into his rule with shocking brutality but paid little price as the uprising coincided with events surrounding the Iran-Iraq War, the post-Sadat future of Egypt, and the Reagan buildup against the Soviet Union, Syria’s primary patron. His actions foreshadowed his son’s equally barbaric actions against a similar domestic challenge just over a decade ago. The father also established a family dynasty in Damascus. His brother, then his second son were in line to succeed him but it was actually Hafez’s older son, Bashar, who returned from Britain to govern at the head of the Alawite regime.

At the quarter century mark of his rule, Bashar faced a civil war beginning during the Arab Spring of 2010-2011. He responded with unrelenting artillery against an opposition demanding both an end to the al-Assad dynasty and reforms to improve the lives of the average Syrian. Instead, the death toll over the past thirteen years climbed well above half a million along with perhaps 8 million internally displaced refugees. The conflict has reminded all of Putin’s support for Assad while multiple democratic governments across the industrialized world hoped he would tumble as other Middle Eastern strongmen did.

Three straight U.S. presidents failed to curtail the death and destruction, with Barack Obama famously mocked for drawing a “red line” to deter al-Assad from using chemical weapons against his own population. Not only did the Syrians gas the opposition as they mowed down block after block of cities, while Washington made no apparent effort to enforce repercussions of the “red line” vow. Obama instead argued the “redline” was the international community’s responsibility. It turned out that diplomacy requires military force and military force requires diplomacy to create effective strategy. Similarly, Obama’s successors Donald Trump and Joe Biden were unwilling to intervene to address this dictator, either because they did not believe they had the capacity or because they saw our interests elsewhere. In short, the U.S. presidents of both parties proved as unhelpful to the people of Syria as we were to the Hungarians crying for our help against Soviet tanks in November 1956.

Syria re-erupted this weekend as Islamists, excluded from the governing elite for most of the country’s history under the Alawite minority, are attempting to reopen fighting around the city of Aleppo and Hama (site of Hafez’s al-Assad’s pulverizing of the population in the 1982 uprising). The Turks, neighbors aware of the danger of warfare spreading across their own border with Syria, argue that Bashar simply is being unresponsive to demands that he talk with his opposition. No one doubts he persists in running an unpopular, illegitimate, and repressive regime dependent on ties to Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah (for whom Syria’s intervention in the 1970s Lebanese civil war was a pivotal opening).

The long-ostracized political opposition broadly labeled Islamists, hand in hand with an al-Qaeda affiliate, seek to oust al-Assad in favor of a regime more tolerant of religious tenets, a position long opposed by secularists in Syria regardless who was president. Teheran, in classic style, claims the problem is how Israel fits into the region, but that is only a sliver of the turmoil.

In sum, there are many sides to this conflict, few of which automatically remain aligned because their interests shift more often than one might expect. In the end, the primary concerns invariably seem to be regime survival rather than foci on the citizens of the regional players.

It’s hard to imagine the Biden administration doing anything at this point with its commitment to Ukraine and on-going attempts to curb China’s behavior. It’s hard to fathom what the conditions will be seven weeks from now when Mr. Trump moves back into the White House nor to know what his level of concern would be. It does seem logical that his antipathy for Teheran would leave him less than enthusiastic intervening in Syria’s problems unless they bled over into Israel’s or Saudi Arabia’s security interests. In the Middle East, however, one never knows quite how things will unfold. As Thomas Friedman said forty years ago in From Beirut to Jerusalem, the players in this region are generally working on three dimensional chess rather than checkers.

An unavoidable reality, however, is that limits exist on our power to intervene. One of the cries of exasperation one hears has heard since the 2011 “pivot to Asia” is that we keep getting dragged into other conflicts—read the Middle East. But, this is the fallacy: if you believe you have global interests, especially to provide the basis to a peaceful security around the globe, one must be willing to use all of the instruments of statecraft to accomplish that in each and every one of the times when that security is under threat.

But the resources—the instruments of economic, cyber, military, or diplomatic power—to achieve an endstate of peaceful international security are finite. Military power would mean a probable role on the ground in Syria, diverting forces from elsewhere should they be called upon. Four and a half years after a painful exit from deployment in Afghanistan, would U.S. citizens support active steps by all branches of the armed forces to empower al-Assad’s adversaries—including al-Qaeda—in a do-or-die conflict in yet one more Middle Eastern place which doesn’t seem that relevant to someone in Ft. Smith, Arkansas or Lenox, Massachusetts? Beyond peacekeeping, which has its own problems as we have learned, where would we intervene in Syria—to bomb Damascus, thus affecting the civilian population interspersed with al-Assad’s military forces?

In the peculiar game of international politics, U.S. interests more closely align with those of the Islamists than with Vlad the Impaler, Teheran, or Hezbollah. It’s hard to find much where we agree with Vlad these days; even less with Teheran. The Israeli-Hezbollah ceasefire is a subtext in the internal Syrian conflict because the shifting conditions in Lebanon require a recalculation for all parties. The al-Assads have been major players in the façade we call Lebanon for five decades but the current Hezbollah-Israel conflict signals a weakening for Damascus and Teheran, doesn’t it?

This curious configuration of traditional adversaries ought remind us of one of the misunderstandings of the post-1945 “international order” that we constantly try to reinvent against historic experience in power politics: all alliances are impermanent but shifting if they are built on national interests. Permanent alliances must subsume interests to the needs of others for the institutions to survive. We somehow have thought that the period after 1945 did not mean this was true but alas, it would appear so.

In sum, the tragedy of the Syrian civil war is heating up again but is unlikely to provide much satisfaction for anyone in Washington. Instead, it will likely continue to prove frustrating, sickening, and complicating for those paying attention.

President-elect Trump has vowed he will ignore these type of conflicts in the future, putting America First. I assume he means American First, China not-so-much but that is a part of the calculation his advisors will face. If we do not take a firmer position with this conflict, will it spill back into Lebanon, reigniting tensions between Jerusalem and Hezbollah or Teheran? What if China were to take a role as a peacemaker in this region? Would that alter our reactions—and should that? Why don’t we let China do things if they aren’t vital to us? That question will depend on how his advisors convince him to prioritize but right now we tend to see everything as a zero sum: we win, China loses. China wins, we lose. But do we really care about Syria?

It is these kinds of questions that return us to endstates. If we identify an endstate to protect our interests, that takes us down one path. If, however, our real aspiration is to remain the world’s determiner-in-chief, that is a far different set of actions, reactions, and complicaitons. What do we want the Middle East to look like versus what are we willing to do to get there? Those are likely two radically different answers.

Thank you for your time in reading Actions today or any other day. It’s a complicated world which plays out over minutes occasionally or centuries at times. I welcome your thoughts about this bloody question of civil war in Syria or any other topics in global politics. I don’t have all the answers but am pretty sure no one else does, either. Yet it’s our government acting on our behalf, not some intergalactic force doing it for us. Please do chime in!

I appreciate those of you who read this column regularly, once in a while, or who discovered it this morning. I especially thank the subscribers who support it. Have you thought of becoming a subscriber for 2025?

It was another cold day on Spa Creek but still pretty light, particularly as the sunlight wanes.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Robert Farley, “Obama’s blurry Red-Line”, FactCheck.org, 6 September 2013, retrieved at https://www.factcheck.org/2013/09/obamas-blurry-red-line/

Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem. New York: Farrar Straus & Company, 1988.

Jarid Malsin, “Airstrikes Pound Rebel-Held Aleppo, A Strategic Prize in Syrian Civil War”, WallStreetJournal.com, 2 December 2024, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/airstrikes-pound-rebel-held-aleppo-a-strategic-prize-in-syrian-civil-war-47ab2e76?mod=latest_headlines

Patrick Wintour, “Syria crisis due to Assad’s refusal to engage with opposition, says Turkish minister”, TheGuardian.com, 2 December 2024, retrieved at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/02/syria-crisis-summit-turkey-iran-russia