It didn’t take long after the swift fall of the Assad regime in Syria for the members of America’s foreign-policy establishment to speak up in favor of their default position on just about every distant conflict: support for various sorts of American intervention and a generous supply of aid to right the wrongs of the world. Along with that reflexive desire to mess around in distant, complex and confusing disputes, the supposedly smart people were equally quick to express disdain for President-elect Donald Trump’s equally predictable response to developments in Syria.
Trump’s immediate reaction was to write on his Truth Social platform that, among other things, America’s response should be (in all caps for emphasis) to: “HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
So, who are you going to trust? The credentialed elites who have spent their lives studying and spouting opinions on the Middle East and guiding America to disaster after disaster or a real estate mogul/reality-TV star turned populist politician?
Despite the supposed great learning of the “expert” class and all of Trump’s shortcomings, the incoming president is the one who is in the right here. Though it would be impossible for the United States to be entirely disconnected from events in Syria, his instincts here are both wise and based on a better understanding of the events of the last quarter century of history than most of those who have been advising American leaders in the past.
How Assad fell
Bashar Assad and his minority Alawite regime survived 13 years of civil war because his Iranian and Russian allies were able to use their considerable military power to defeat his Sunni Arab opponents and massacre large numbers of civilians. The war they waged cost the lives of more than 500,000 people and displaced half of the nation’s population with an estimated 6.7 million refugees forced to flee their homes.
But with Russia distracted by its war in Ukraine and Hezbollah weakened by Israel to the point where it lost its ability to defend Iranian interests, the Syrian rebels were able to turn the tide of a war that most of the world thought had ended years ago. With what may well have been considerable help from the Islamist government of Turkey, which has been meddling in Syria for years, the jihadist forces opposing Assad launched an offensive that the former dictator’s army couldn’t stop. Iran cut its losses and withdrew from Syria, and the result is that a coalition of rebels is now in charge in Damascus.
This is a clear defeat for both Iran and Russia—and that is something for Americans to cheer. But what follows this is unclear. The main rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, is largely made up of former terrorists once associated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. In a bid for foreign help, for the last several years, they have been trying to convince Western nations that they have turned over a new leaf and are no longer Islamist extremists. That’s highly doubtful, and their intentions toward Kurdish forces in Northern Syria remain unclear. The Kurds were allied with the West during the fight against ISIS and a small force of U.S. troops is still based there.
Israel occupied Syrian territory around the Golan Heights (including the summit of Mount Hermon) to forestall any effort by Syrian jihadis to attack the Jewish state. And when one considers that the competing interests of Turkey, Iran and any remaining Russian forces still in the country are still in the mix, the current stalemate makes for a volatile and potentially dangerous situation. In particular, how Iran reacts to a new reality where it has clearly lost its bid for regional hegemony ought to worry the entire world. It might decide to accelerate its nuclear program and seek to declare itself a nuclear power so as to save face after the debacles in Lebanon and Syria, as well as to deter any effort to topple the Islamist tyranny that has ruled Iran since 1979.
The establishment demands intervention
In theory, this could be an opportunity for Syria to rid itself not just of a minority dictatorship but become a less repressive country where people no longer fear for their lives. Indeed, the understandable happiness about Assad’s fall has led some, like Washington Post pundit Josh Rogin to proclaim that “Syria is free. Now it’s time to help.” The editorial board of the Post doubled down on that position with a piece explaining, “Why the U.S. needs to help build a new Syria.”
Both of those positions were a clear rebuke to Trump and his “America First” mindset. So, too, was the response of New York Times columnist and longtime self-proclaimed Middle East “expert” Thomas Friedman. The inveterate Israel-basher poured scorn on Trump’s position that America ought to stay out of the Middle East. According to Friedman, Trump is obligated to prevent a nuclear Iran by attempting a rapprochement with Tehran and appease it in much the same manner as former President Barack Obama’s dangerous 2015 nuclear deal.
Nor was it only liberal outlets who were criticizing Trump. At his The Editors site, Ira Stoll wrote, “Trump Botches First Foreign Crisis as President-Elect.” He quoted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), arguing that the United States was obligated to remain in Syria to fight ISIS, to ensure that Assad’s chemical weapons don’t fall into the wrong hands and to back up the Kurds against any possible attack on them by a HTS regime in Damascus.
Assuming that Trump intended to follow the Biden administration’s policy of letting Iran’s Houthi terrorist allies interdict international shipping in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, as well as to stop Israel from defending its interests in the region, Stoll seems to believe that the new administration will be entirely isolationist.
To shame Trump, he even quoted President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech in which JFK articulated America’s Cold War pledge: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
The problem with these positions is not just that they mischaracterize Trump’s intentions and likely course of action. It also reflects a foolish inability to learn a basic lesson from America’s misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq—not to mention Cold War mistakes like Vietnam that followed JFK’s “bear any burden” promise—that the president-elect has absorbed yet allegedly smarter people criticizing him seem unable to grasp.
Anyone who thinks that Trump will let Islamists in Syria run amuck in the region the way Iran’s allies have done in the past wasn’t paying attention during his first term. While Obama was too interested in appeasing Iran to prevent ISIS from establishing its “caliphate” in much of Syria and Iraq, it was Trump who unleashed the American military on the terrorists and made relatively quick work of defeating them. Similarly, he backed Israel’s efforts to defend itself (including recognizing its annexation of the Golan) and turned the screws on Iran with tough sanctions and targeting its terrorists.
The blunders of Bush, Obama and Biden
Staying out of Syria doesn’t mean ignoring it, and Trump is clearly willing and able to defend American interests and allies when they are threatened in a way that the feckless Biden administration was not.
However, unlike the foreign-policy establishment, including both its liberal wing and the ancien regime Republicans still stuck in the mindset of the failed administration of President George W. Bush, Trump has no illusions about jihadi-ruled Damascus now being “free” or the rise of a “new” Syria that will become a partner for the democratic West.
America cannot fix Syria or remake it in its own image any more than it could do the same in Afghanistan or Iraq. Neither an American military expeditionary force nor an army of social workers and teachers is likely to transform it into a Jeffersonian democracy or anything other than another Arab/Muslim state with very different values and goals than those of the West. The best to hope for is an authoritarian regime that isn’t dedicated to war with Israel and the West or has a goal of spreading the jihadist virus to other nations in the region, especially those with relatively moderate governments that fear Iran and want peace or at least no conflict with the Jewish state or the West.
It is highly unlikely that Washington can bribe HTS to behave; still, the United States can contain it and, as is always the case with Trump, be ready to threaten its leaders to confine their activities to their own borders. That doesn’t necessarily mean the new administration would be indifferent if the Kurds were threatened. But the idea that America is obligated to send more troops or commit itself to joining in a new round of civil war there that would likely be presented to the public as a rescue mission is equally mistaken.
The problem with past American policies towards Syria was not a failure to intervene in the civil war. It was that Obama did not articulate American interests in a way that would contain it and the flood of refugees from the conflict, many of whom made their way to Europe (creating new problems on that continent). By declaring that Assad’s using chemical weapons on his own people crossed a “red line” and then refusing to enforce it when that line was crossed, Obama set the pattern for American humiliation in the region. That was compounded by his indifference to the Russian and Iranian interventions there that followed his “red line” fiasco.
These are mistakes Trump doesn’t plan to repeat. The idea that he can solve the problems of the region with a new round of appeasement of Iran or by pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians or any of its other enemies is also going to be a non-starter in an administration packed with friends of the Jewish state. The Trump 2.0 administration also understands that involving the United States in a new Middle Eastern quagmire like that authored by George W. Bush is also out of the question.
Staying out of Syria isn’t isolationism. It’s common sense. The same is true for a reluctance to engage in futile attempts to engage in nation-building in a place where the leading factions—and most of the people—don’t share Western values. Trump has shown himself capable of grasping that American foreign policy should mix strength and a willingness to strike enemies with a rational fear of being sucked into unwinnable conflicts and assistance projects that are doomed to failure.
As he showed when he ignored the experts who warned him not to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Trump should be guided by his allergy to advice from establishment figures who have been wrong about everything for a generation. Rather than mock or bash his stand on Syria, sensible observers should be cheering it.
{Reposted from JNS}
