How Barack Obama’s Failed Policies Brought about Syria’s Current Crisis

Yesterday, Israel reportedly struck a car traveling to the Damascus airport, killing the Hizballah officer responsible for coordination with the Syrian military. Meanwhile, the rebel offensive begun last week continues, and various other anti-regime militias have made gains elsewhere in the country. Brian Stewart looks at the big picture:

The Assad regime has always gambled that its power would be best preserved, not by political or economic reform, but by fomenting armed resistance to America and Israel. This bellicose posture was based on the calculation that the Arab masses would tolerate oppression and cruelty, but that the regime could not survive if it gave up its permanent war with the Jews. In his first-rate book The Syrian Rebellion, the late scholar Fouad Ajami summarized this destructive attitude with the words: “Let them eat anti-Zionism.”

While this strategy may have worked under Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, it has collapsed over the course of the last decade—as evidenced by videos of Syrians celebrating the recent defeats Israel dealt to Hizballah, which joined Assad in the bloodstained repression of the revolt that began in 2011. Stewart also considers the American role:

Syria was a terrible casualty of President Obama’s grand strategy for the Middle East. During his second term, it became clear that his objective was to create a “geopolitical equilibrium” that would balance traditional American partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Successive U.S. administrations have accepted the proposition that, if he fell, Assad would either be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime or a failed state. In either scenario, the prevailing view in Washington was (and remains) that Syria would become an even more dangerous and tormented country, more likely to export violence abroad. The more prudent course of action was therefore to stick with the devil we know.

That analysis never withstood scrutiny, and it looks downright fanciful today.

In fact, Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden didn’t try to counter Assad and his Iran- and Russia-backed allies for fear of empowering Sunni jihadists, leaving Christian communities vulnerable, and fomenting further instability—and nonetheless Sunni jihadists grew powerful, Christians were slaughtered, and instability spread.

Read more at Quillette

More about: Barack Obama, Syrian civil war, U.S. Foreign policy

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict