Don't Ruin Syria's Day After
Why are Israel and the US trying to destabilize a promising transition?
The fall of Bashar al-Asad has been one of the few good news stories in the Middle East. Since racing to capture Damascus as regime forces vanished and collapsed, the jihadist insurgent group HTS has rapidly moved to consolidate power, reassure others about its intentions, and build relations with key regional and global powers. Ahmed Sharaa, the new president, has demonstrated considerable pragmatism and savvy thus far in the face of the massive problems facing a country shattered by more than a decade of brutal civil war and external intervention. The recent National Dialogue Conference laid out an inclusive, if vague, vision for the future of the country. Sharaa is attempting to bring all the country’s many armed groups under a single national military structure — a vital step towards establishing sovereignty and internal security. Unlike, say, the United States in 2003 Iraq, Sharaa has worked with the existing state rather than dismantling it.
The new Syria has a real chance — not something we can say about much of the region these days. But some key players seem determined to wreck those hopes. The spoilers this time are not Iran or Russia, both (for now) mostly sitting it out. And, thus far, we haven’t seen the emergence of an Asadist insurgency or major flareups of local violence and revenge killings which might spiral. It’s all too possible that Turkey will push HTS to go after the U.S.-backed mostly Kurdish Syrian Defense Forces in the northeast as part of its broader move to end its long war with the PKK, but that crisis-in-waiting hasn’t quite exploded yet. The two key spoilers are all coming from abroad, and all of them are ostensibly on the U.S. side of the equation - one extremely public, the other quiet but real. This, as a great thinker once said, is why we can’t have nice things.
The first spoiler is Israel, which has taken advantage of a weak and unconsolidated new Syrian regime to occupy additional territory around the Golan Heights (which nobody believes will be “temporary”) and evidently seeks to establish a zone of influence across the entire south of the country. Israel launched a major bombing campaign inside of Syria Tuesday, without even the pretence of an imminent threat or a causus belli - simply the assertion of its right to attack Syria, or really any Arab state, any time it wants, for any reason, without any consequences. This may be the dream of the Israeli security establishment, but it is absolutely disastrous for Syria and for the broader regional order. Syrians are understandably furious at Israel’s demands for the demilitarization of the south, an infringement of sovereignty which would be difficult for any regime to stomach and is even tougher for a new regime struggling to establish nationalist legitimacy.
It would be good to see the United States, ostensibly invested in regional order, stepping in to restrain its ostensible ally from such obviously destablizing and dangerous military escalations. But it doesn’t seem likely. When Secretary of State Rubio was in Jerusalem two weeks ago, all he had to say was “while the fall of Assad is certainly promising and important, Syria replacing one destabilizing force for another is not a positive development.” That’s not promising. I haven’t been seen much response from either the White House or State Department about Israel’s attack on Syria, though Rubio has apparently been calling regional leaders; that the only substantive readout was his assurance to the Iraqi Prime Minister that Syria should not become a haven for terrorists or a threat to its neighbors does not send a message of restraint.
Which brings us to the second destabilizing force: continuing sanctions. Comprehensive U.S. sanctions on Syria, imposed over the Asad regime’s horrific human rights violations and war crimes, were well-deserved at the time — and clearly contributed to the hollowing out of the Asad regime. But since Asad is gone, they have equally clearly served their purpose and should be lifted. Biden did issue a new general license allowing some energy sales and limited transactions, but it lasts only six months and there’s no way of knowing what Trump will do when it’s time to renew. The EU went considerably farther earlier this week, lifting a number of sanctions and other restrictions in order to support the Syrian transition. But many sanctions remain in place - both zombie sanctions leveled on Asad and other sanctions associated with HTS’s pre-existing designation as a foreign terrorist organization.
Those sanctions need to be lifted immediately, not in a few years. In the new wave of the Middle East Scholars Barometer which will be published soon, 74% of respondents said that the sanctions should be lifted immediately and only 21% recommened a wait and see approach (only 1% wanted the sanctions to stay as they are). Syria’s transition will be severely impacted by ongoing economic catastrophe. Americans, of all people, should remember how destabilizing it is for a transitional government to not be able to keep the lights on. But the U.S. has gone in the other direction: the freezing of foreign aid and the inexplicable destruction of USAID has hit Syria hard, slashing assistance to Syrian civilians which America had provided throughout the long war. That “will disproportionately affect Syria’s most vulnerable communities who, after nearly 14 years of conflict, are wholly dependent on aid for their survival.” The aid freeze has already been catastrophic for the global humanitarian response in Syria, both for the direct loss of US funds (about a quarter of the total) and because aid operations are deeply interconnected, so that a funding cut to key implementors on the ground (and even just the intense uncertainty surrounding literally everything) might impact far more than just the delivery of American assistance. It’s hard to see how starving, freezing and harming the quality of life of people in the midst of a tenuous transition is going to go well.
Current U.S. policy — from sanctions and the ending of vital aid to implicit support for Israeli attacks — seems designed to destabilize the new Syria and reignite civil war, with no evident reflection on whether and how that could possibly serve American national interests. It’s easy to lose sight of the importance of this amidst the chaos of Trump’s strip-mining of the American state and multi-pronged assault on higher education, Israel’s escalation of war in the West Bank and the Gaza ceasefire teeters on the brink, and everything else. But it would be truly tragic for the hopes of the overthrow of Asad (something Rubio used to be quite in favor of) to end up an early and tragic casualty of American dysfunction.
I talk about some of these issues with Smith College’s Steven Heydemann in this week’s Middle East Political Science Podcast. Heydemann and I are the co-editors of the recent University of Michigan Press book Making Sense of the Arab State, which I blogged about here and we discuss at the top of the podcast. It’s open access and a free download here, so check it out if you haven’t. In the second half of the podcast, we turn to Syria. Heydemann is one of our leading academic experts on Syria, of course, and we talk at length about what Asad’s fall tells us about the strengths and weakness of Arab states (he did survive more than a decade of brutal war, external intervention and sanctions after all, but also did see stateness deeply compromised and hollowed out in the years since his supposed ‘victory’ in the war). Listen here:
Bonus: Yesterday, I sat down with Jonathan Fulton, maestro of the essential China-MENA blog and podcast, to talk about my recent Cambridge Element What is the Middle East? Fulton’s seat in the UAE, where he constantly engages with a steady stream of scholars working on China and the Indian Ocean, gave him a distinctive perspective on the book’s arguments and themes. It was a fun, short conversation — listen here, and subscribe to his excellent newsletter!
