The collapse of the Bashar Assad regime in Syria over the weekend sent me back to the Jewish Policy Center archive.
Incoming President Donald Trump is correct—who governs Damascus and its environs is not a choice that the United States can or will make. However, the United States has interests that include working with our allies and ensuring that our adversaries don’t take advantage of them—or us. While we all cheer the ouster of a war criminal and the shaking of the Islamic Republic, an appropriate future-looking policy requires an understanding of American culpability in the Syrian civil war that began in 2011 and never ended.
Chemical Weapons and Obama’s Role
Russia and Iran, of course, played large roles in this. But so did the Obama administration. Determined to get to an “Iran deal,” Washington appeased Iran directly and vacillated over appropriate policy choices in Syria. The decision to arm and train Sunni rebels was made, but weapons lagged, and it was unclear that the administration knew which militias were which.
The issue of chemical weapons is crucial, as the illegitimacy of their use is one of the few points of international consensus in wartime. The first treaty against it is more than 120 years old—the Hague Declaration of 1899, which was followed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the 1925 Geneva Protocol. A “red line” after the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad resulted in a bizarre decision by the administration to work with Russia to neutralize Syrian chemical weapons at sea:
It was a stab in the dark, utilizing equipment never before used under these circumstances, on a ship not designed for that purpose, using downsized machinery intended for the stability of land-based operations.
The administration crowed about its success, claiming the destruction of the Syrian government’s declared chemical weapon stockpile, heralding the “neutralization of chemical agents … as a watershed moment in the Syrian conflict.” Former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, “In record time, even amid a civil war, we removed and have now destroyed the most dangerous chemicals in the regime’s declared stockpiles.” From an inSIGHT article at the time:
Both acknowledged that it wasn’t quite the whole Syrian stockpile—after all, OPCW (The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) was relying on a self-declared Syrian arsenal. But OPCW was willing to swear that the President’s optimism was warranted. In a remarkably precise statement, Sigrid Kaag, special coordinator for OPCW-UN, said 96% percent of Syria’s declared chemical weapons were destroyed. Not 95% or 87% or 43.5%, but 96% on the nose.
It wasn’t true.
Later reports indicated that “the embattled Syrian government is employing chlorine gas in attacks on civilians; a chemical omitted from the 2013 deal brokered by the U.S. and Russia.” Well, it doesn’t count if it was left out of the agreement, right?
The history of the CIA and Pentagon programs to aid—and constrain—Sunni rebels in northern Syria was carried out from 2014 to 2017, when it was ended by then-President Donald Trump. A review of its roots, efficacy, and shortcomings is useful, but suffice it to say that the United States never articulated achievable war aims for its proxies and the proxies never produced any either.
Appeasing Iran
What mattered to the administration in those years was the determination to achieve a nuclear deal—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—between the United States and Iran. That policy lived through the Obama and Biden administrations, with U.S. President Joe Biden appeasing Iran up to and after the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Some highlights:
In February 2021, the administration released to Iran $1 billion in frozen assets held by South Korea and lifted the terror designation from Iranian-sponsored Houthi rebels. In 2022 came the “Maritime Border deal” with Lebanon intended to make Hezbollah a “responsible stakeholder.” In the summer of 2023, the U.S. weighed in publicly on Israel’s civil protests at the same time the White House bragged that it had given more than $315 million to the Palestinians in 2023—and nearly a billion dollars since the administration took office, ignoring Israel and the bipartisan U.S. Taylor Force Act. The apparent withdrawal of firm American support for Israel, coupled with the suggestion that the IDF would not be a cohesive fighting force, had an impact on the thinking of Hamas. And Iran. And October 7.
President Trump
But in between the two appeasing administrations—Obama and Biden—was the first Trump administration, where you can see the clear parameters and limits for American foreign policy. As well as ending CIA support for Sunni rebel groups—some of which were clearly jihadist—and keeping an American force in place to help defeat ISIS and protect our Kurdish allies, he addressed the ongoing use of chemicals by the Syrian regime against its own population.
He chose punishment as foreign policy: Syria had to be made to pay. Since the United Nations has no enforcement capabilities (and no one should want it to), the world’s only superpower had to consider punishing the violator and upholding the consensus. In 2017, the United States, the United Kingdom and France struck the Him Shinshar base’s chemical weapons bunker and storage depot, and the Barzeh “scientific research center.”
Not designed for “regime change” or to end the Syrian civil war, the raid was intended to punish the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, its protector Russia and its banker Iran. It was to make it harder to do it again. It was to uphold one of the few areas of international consensus in warfare—that CW use is forbidden. That mission was indeed accomplished, but the expected chorus of naysayers would have you believe that it was: a military failure; a political failure; or both.
The lesson was clear: The primary goals of American foreign policy are to make our citizens, friends and allies secure and to make our adversaries think twice.
It is a good mantra for the second Trump administration.
