After seven years of fighting, five million refugees, and a half-million dead, American strategy regarding the Syrian civil war remains in a state of confusion, writes Samuel Tadros. To develop a coherent and effective way forward, he argues, Washington must first abandon two illusions:
The first illusion is that there remains and should remain a country named Syria. . . . Even if Assad were to manage to defeat the various militias fighting him, rebuilding Syria as a functional state is beyond his abilities, let alone within his interests. The Sunni majority will not accept him; nor does he want a Syria with an overwhelming Sunni majority. “The bonds between them and their rulers,” as [the late Middle East scholar Fouad] Ajami warned, “have been severed.” Too much blood has been spilled and the wound will not heal. More likely is an Assad strategy of emptying the country of as many Sunnis as possible and achieving a more balanced demographic balance, even if this means giving up some territory on the periphery of his core territory.
A more problematic illusion is that of an Assad regime fighting [the country’s] militias. While the United States has removed its ambassador from Syria, it has technically remained committed to a mindset that views Assad and his cronies as a regime, albeit a brutal one. The reality is starkly different. There is today no Syrian regime. There are instead various militias fighting each other, and Assad is merely the leader—if we can even call him that as the Russians’ humiliation of him during Putin’s December 2017 visit exposed.
Abandoning these two remaining illusions would allow the United States to think clearly about what its goals in Syria should be. While the U.S. cannot completely end the Syrian civil war, curtailing the level of destruction and bloodshed remains an objective, not merely on humanitarian grounds, but also on strategic grounds, as the prolonged violence will continue to attract foreign intervention and have a spillover effect on neighboring countries destabilizing them further. While a military confrontation with Russia is to be avoided, a Russian victory has to be denied. A Putin victory in Syria would embolden him further in expanding his influence in the Middle East, undermining U.S. interests and sending a clear message that he is the new sheriff in the region.
And while stopping Iranian involvement in the Levant is a long-term project, checking Iranian moves . . . remains within immediate American interests. Most important in this regard is reinforcing the Israeli red line in the southern part of Syria, ensuring that no Iranian expansion takes place in the area. Instead of hoping for a permanent solution to the Syrian civil war, the U.S. should aim for an equilibrium. . . . Washington is incapable of stopping Syrians and their neighbors from killing each other, but it can surely remove their ability to inflict so much death and increase their costs of doing so.
Read more on Caravan: https://www.hoover.org/research/descent-syria-abyss