It seems quaint to dwell now specifically on America’s Syria policy, with the current administration casting doubt on fundamental pillars of America’s post-World War II foreign policy. But with president Donald Trump likely to cede the lead on ending the war in Syria to Russia, it’s worth reexamining how and why Washington’s influence came to be secondary to Russia’s.
While the conflict is undoubtedly complex, the reason Russia has been better able to realize its preferred outcomes is simple: Russia has in the Assad regime a faction it could reasonably prop up in direct service of Russian objectives at a cost it was willing to pay. The United States has no clear interest in Syria beyond countering the growth of terrorist groups, has defined no real objective in the civil war itself, and lacks effective ground partners unencumbered by ethnic complications (like the Kurds, who are sometimes viewed with suspicion outside of historically Kurdish regions and are opposed by Turkey) or questionable ideologies (like Salafist Islamism).
Russian Interests, Objectives, and Partners
Russia has relatively straightforward strategic interests at stake in Syria. First, the Syrian port of Tartus is home to Russia’s only naval facility in the Mediterranean (a relationship dating back to the 1970s and Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad), meaning a threat to Bashar al-Assad’s regime is a concrete threat to Russia’s ability to operate in the Mediterranean. Since intervening in 2015, Russia has begun efforts to expand the Tartus facility and recently signed an agreement with the Syrian government to allow up to eleven warships to be located at the base, perhaps as part of a broader strategy to strengthen its ability to operate in the Mediterranean. Secondly, taking action in Syria gave Russia the opportunity to generate national pride at a time of economic stagnation at home, and lastly to defend and enhance its influence in the Middle East.
In pursuit of these interests, Russia’s discrete objective is to shore up the Assad government’s forces and destroy Assad’s insurgent opponents, ISIS or otherwise. Russia has a clear partner on the ground – the Assad government and the Syrian National Army, supplemented by irregular forces from Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran. Russia needed to provide military support to the existing Assad government, shore it up with training and equipment, and use its airpower and special forces to help turn the tide against the varied coalitions of insurgent groups. By supporting an existing government, weak as it is, Russia will not find itself responsible for rebuilding a state and designing a government from scratch, and will face less pressure to play a significant role in funding the country’s reconstruction. Russia intervention is further simplified by its leadership’s lack of consideration for avoiding civilian casualties and willingness to target civilian infrastructure, including medical facilities.
America Interests, Objectives, and Partners
The United States, by contrast, has a more muddled set of interests in Syria. America’s most obvious interest today is to deny a safe-haven from which terrorist groups can plan and launch attacks, especially ones that could reach the United States.
The steps required to turn this into policy are relatively clear, even if execution is complex. In Syria this meant hitting the Islamic State and like-minded groups, like Jabhat al-Nusra (which has since been re-branded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) with airstrikes while providing Special Operations support to factions on the ground willing to take the Islamic State head-on, a role in which Kurdish militant groups have proven most reliable and effective.
Somewhat ironically, American efforts to pursue this same counterterrorism objective in Iraq have in many ways mirrored Russia’s actions in Syria: prevent the embattled government from collapsing and slowly work to roll back anti-government insurgents by providing training and weapons to the allied government’s forces and supplement their capabilities with American airpower and special forces.
But the United States has flirted with a second objective, one tied to its interest in ending the Syrian civil war: regime change. In 2011, during the height of optimism for the Arab Spring, the Obama administration’s sympathy for Syrian protesters’ democratic demands and its revulsion at the Syrian government’s killing of civilians finally led the administration to seemingly endorse regime change. On August 18th, 2011, Obama issued a statement declaring:
The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.
As the civil war evolved, translating this second objective – the desire to see Assad leave – into policy is a step the United States never seemed comfortable taking, ultimately finding the lack of partners on the ground and the associated cost reconstruction costs required too much to overcome to fully commit to such a policy.
Having campaigned on the promise to end the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama was never likely to use American troops as the primary force for unseating another government in the Middle East. Even if Obama possessed the will to commit the tens of thousands (or more) of combat troops required for such an intervention, he lacked the support of the American people. Seventy-two percent of Americans opposed sending the U.S. military to fight Assad, according to a 2015 Brookings survey. A 2013 Gallup poll found that 51% of Americans even opposed using American force simply to punish Syria for using chemical weapons.
This led to a search for Syrian rebel factions to support with arms and training to serve as a main ground force instead. But the Obama administration must have also been conscious of the lessons of the earlier Afghan war against the Soviet Union – in which hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid, matched by Arab Gulf allies, were poured into the anti-Soviet jihad, contributing to a milieu of money, war, and violent Sunni Islamist ideology from which al-Qaeda emerged by the war’s end – as the United States’ Goldilocks-like search for an effective and ideologically acceptable rebel faction turned up few good options.
Even if the United States found a suitable proxy, reluctance to bear the costs of post-Assad state building and reconstruction – the immense scope of which the United States was deeply familiar from similar efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan – was another factor weighing against an emphasis on toppling the Assad government.
Though the United States has funded assistance programs for anti-Assad rebels, as the war wore on Washington focused most of its military efforts on countering the Islamic State, which presented a more immediate threat to American interests and security as it upended the post-2011 settlement achieved in Iraq and gave aid and inspiration to individuals seeking to carry out attacks in Europe and the United States. This led Washington to instead pursue Assad’s ouster primarily through diplomatic negotiations, quixotically hoping to reach an agreement that would see Assad step down without dismantling Syria’s governing infrastructure (such as it still exists).
Trying to Square a Circle
It’s difficult to intervene in a civil war when you don’t support either side. That’s the position the United States found itself in when Russia finally threw its weight behind Assad. The United States did not favor Assad, but neither did it trust many of the strongest groups opposing him enough to throw behind them sufficient military support to tip the conflict’s balance in the rebels’ favor. Moreover, Washington was never comfortable with the state-building obligations committing to a policy of regime-change would have entailed. The United States chose instead to focus on countering the Islamic State rather than ending the civil war, and settled on supporting its longtime Kurdish partners to do so, despite the ethnic and geopolitical limitations that entailed.
Here we can again appreciate the greater clarity of Russia’s situation: Russia could clearly choose a side in the civil war. It was already allied with Syria’s existing government, whose ground forces, supplemented by Syria’s other allies in the region, could be meaningfully augmented by Russian special forces and airpower. Furthermore, with Syria representing Russia’s lone Middle Eastern ally and playing host to its only Mediterranean naval port, Russia had tangible strategic interests at stake in the civil war’s outcome.
The lack of any meaningful American threat of force against the Assad government – having prioritized the fight against the Islamic State instead – left little leverage to be used in Washington’s attempt to end the civil war through diplomatic talks. The Assad government felt no need to make concessions, and no rebel faction felt they enjoyed America’s meaningful backing. It’s this situation that Russia’s intervention upset. Russia not only tipped the conflict in Assad’s favor, but bought for itself greater leverage than the Americans in future negotiations to end the war.
The Trump administration, like Obama’s, is focused first and foremost on defeating the Islamic State. Unlike Obama, Trump appears far from conflicted about what this means for the future of Assad’s government. Trump’s words to date suggest he is more than happy to cede leadership on negotiating the civil war’s outcome to Russia if Russia cooperates with the campaign against the Islamic State, suggesting that the future of Bashar al-Assad – head of a government responsible for the torture, rape, and murder of thousands of its own citizens via barrel bombs, extrajudicial hangings, and the bombing of schools and hospitals – is for the time secure. Assad appears likely to stay, but as long as he does so will the constellation of rebel factions that oppose him, some of which the United States believes pose a significant threat to U.S. interests. While the Islamic State will eventually be dislodged from its territory, the United States will still need to sustain counterterrorism operations for some time – it just won’t have much say in the political future of the government in Damascus around which the conflict continues to revolve.
Header photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shakes hands with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on October 23, 2015, at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna, Austria, before a bilateral meeting focused on Syria. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]
Filseyni 