Trying to make sense of what simply occurred in Syria — the place the seemingly impregnable regime of Bashar Assad abruptly collapsed two weeks in the past within the face of an surprising insurgent onslaught — runs straight into the central paradox of world affairs: Everyone believes they’re on the appropriate aspect of historical past, and may inform the great guys from the dangerous guys. They’re more likely to be unsuitable on each counts, however even when they’re not, that form of ethical certainty results in catastrophe.
There’s not a complete lot of ethical readability obtainable within the treacherous political and historic panorama of Syria, besides that nearly nobody laments the downfall of the 54-year Assad dynasty. Like most nations of the trendy Middle East, Syria was carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, though in a unique sense it’s the oldest nation on earth, because it incorporates the archaeological stays of the earliest identified human civilization. Today it’s a uniquely strategic and extremely numerous “crossroads of religions, ideologies and terrain that borders 5 different Middle Eastern nations,” as Liz Sly writes in a helpful Washington Post evaluation.
Syria can also be the location of this century’s longest civil struggle and worst refugee disaster, and its self-destruction underneath the Assad regime has modified the world. At least six million Syrians have fled the nation over the previous 12 or 13 years, creating an interlocking set of humanitarian and political emergencies which have fueled the rise of far-right or neo-fascist actions in additional than a dozen international locations (our personal included). The ugly worldwide scramble now underway in Syria resembles an old school Great Power wrestle of the early twentieth century in multiple sense: While the gamers on the worldwide chessboard plot their strikes, common individuals wrestle, undergo and die.
At least 4 totally different nations have troops on the bottom within the wake of Assad’s fall: Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States, which lately and begrudgingly admitted that its army presence was bigger and extra entrenched than was publicly identified. That’s with out counting the assorted Islamist, Kurdish, Druze, pro-Iranian and/or leftist militia teams who might or might not have performed a job in overthrowing Assad, or the remnants of the official Syrian army, most of which has both melted into the civilian inhabitants or fled into Iraq or Lebanon.
At near-certain danger of oversimplification, right here’s the abstract: The Israelis are there to protect their frontier alongside the Golan Heights, which many of the world nonetheless thinks ought to belong to Syria. The Turks are there to suppress the Kurdish nationalists, who many of the world believes ought to get their very own territory. The Russians and Americans … nicely, that’s complicated. They had been each there to fight Islamic State militants, a minimum of formally, however at occasions have additionally waged a proxy struggle to prop up or undermine Assad, respectively.
The collapse of the Assad regime marked the tip of a Cold War-style “confrontational established order,” wherein Israel, the U.S. and their allies tolerated Syria’s alliance with Russia and Iran as preferable to the alternate options.
Exactly what these Russian and American troops in Syria have been as much as since Dec. 8, when Assad fled to Moscow and the Islamist insurgent faction referred to as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, rolled into Damascus, isn’t totally clear. At least on the floor, that occasion took all of the above-mentioned nations and the remainder of the world without warning. Lina Khatib of the London assume tank Chatham House calls it “an earthquake within the regional order,” whose long-term results could also be similar to the autumn of Communism in Eastern Europe.
That stays to be seen, however Khatib’s essay for Foreign Policy hints at a chilling however compelling risk: Some events to the Syrian battle had been much less stunned than others by what occurred, and most Western media evaluation has did not understand the underlying dynamics. Her most essential commentary is that the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime marked the tip of a Cold War-style “confrontational established order,” wherein Israel, the U.S. and their numerous Arab and European allies tolerated Syria’s deepening entanglement with Russia and Iran as preferable to the alternate options: “They noticed it as decrease danger in contrast with the unknown forces that sudden political change in Iran or Syria might unleash.”
That raises the query of whether or not sure gamers within the Syrian drama concluded that the time to roll the cube on “sudden political change” had arrived, and who may profit most from this disruption. Khatib by no means flat-out says that Israel was the driving pressure behind the lightning victory of HTS, however her total evaluation might be learn as pointing in that path. (Any such relationship, for apparent causes, would have been painstakingly hid and carried out by a number of intermediaries.)
At the very least, the “cui bono” query is evident sufficient: Khatib concludes that “the collapse of the Assad regime will inevitably imply the tip of the Iran-dominated regional order,” to get replaced by a brand new order constructed round Israel as “the Middle East’s agenda-setter.” This was the denouement, she suggests, of a three-part Israeli gambit aiming for regional supremacy: the destruction of Gaza, the decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the defeat of Assad.
Khatib goes even deeper n suggesting that Israel’s relationship with Russia — which isn’t unfriendly, curiously sufficient — might be a consider constructing that new order. Conventional knowledge might counsel that Assad’s fall was a significant defeat for Vladimir Putin, however she speculates (once more, with out precisely saying so) that it might need been extra like a strategic withdrawal. Russian troops might have stepped in to halt the advance of HTS at any level, with out risking direct confrontation with U.S. or Turkish forces. But they didn’t, which bolsters her implied argument that Putin determined to desert his “transactional partnership” with Assad and give attention to different priorities — for example, a good conclusion to the Ukraine struggle underneath the incoming Trump administration.
It’s stretching the circumstantial proof previous the breaking level to counsel that Putin reduce a secret cope with Benjamin Netanyahu: You get the Middle East, I get Ukraine. But thought-about as a speculation or a thought experiment, it’s a parsimonious rationalization of why Assad’s authorities collapsed so rapidly and when it occurred, barely a month earlier than Trump takes workplace.
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That additionally underscores that the Biden administration, with its endlessly mockable insistence on a “rules-based order” (wherein it units the foundations), was caught flat-footed by occasions in Syria, whereas most mainstream media commentary stays imprisoned by the ethical blindness I discussed above, and unable to shed its Cold War beer-goggles.
This affliction is discovered clear throughout the ideological spectrum, from the neocon dinosaurs who nonetheless dream of regime change in Iran (and rattling close to in every single place else) to the “liberal interventionists” who’re nonetheless mad that Barack Obama declined to go to struggle in Syria a decade in the past to the galaxy-brain, left-wing “anti-imperialists” who’ve made infinite excuses for the inexcusable crimes of the Assad regime and its Kremlin sponsor.
The primary premise that the U.S. is at all times and in every single place a baleful affect isn’t straightforward to falsify. But siding with Assad, Putin and the Iranian mullahs is taking the enemy-of-my-enemy fallacy to pathetic extremes.
On one aspect now we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, voice of the overseas coverage institution caught within the mud, actually suggesting that the U.S. ought to attempt nation-building only one extra time in one other Middle Eastern nation that may a lot relatively we didn’t. This in fact comes from the dude who instructed us that Mohammed bin Salman was the younger lion who would reform the Arab world, and likewise made sweeping guarantees of a “Biden doctrine” that may free the Israeli hostages from Gaza, forge a two-state resolution and convey peace to your entire Middle East.
On the opposite aspect now we have a free alignment of left-wing critics of U.S. coverage who, for numerous causes and to numerous extents, purchased into the parable of Assad’s Syria, in alliance with Iran and Russia, because the spine of “anti-Western, anti-Israel resistance within the Middle East,” in Khatib’s phrases. This is about midway defensible: Their primary premise that the U.S. is at all times and in every single place a baleful affect is one broadly shared around the globe, and never straightforward to falsify. But siding with Assad, Putin and the Iranian mullahs was taking the enemy-of-my-enemy fallacy to an absurd and pathetic excessive; it was like a third-generation, low-ink photocopy of the leftist romance with the Soviet Union, which a minimum of pretended to imagine in one thing.
To make issues very barely worse, among the extra deluded or imaginative of these left-wing thinkers have often pretzeled themselves into optimism about Donald Trump’s overseas coverage, mainly on the stopped-clock concept. It’s true that Trump’s ignorance, carelessness and xenophobia render him bored with abroad energy performs that lack any apparent short-term advantages. He doesn’t care what occurs in Syria or Ukraine or some other incomprehensible sh**gap bother spot, a minimum of not till Elon Musk or Stephen Miller or some paleocon underling convinces him {that a} Fox News propaganda victory is there for the taking.
If there was truly some personal understanding between Putin and Netanyahu, Trump will likely be offended he was disregarded — an early signal of his lame-duck irrelevance, however solely the primary of many. None of these guys will waste one other thought on the Syrian individuals, who had been by no means consulted about any of this. What are the percentages that is more likely to change?
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from Andrew O’Hehir on world politics
