What Are American National Interests in Syria?
It’s time to wrap up our long-running adventure in one of the nastiest parts of the world.
Syria is a desperately complicated mess, second perhaps only to the Balkans for long-running and deeply held sectarian and ethnic strife. The very short version of recent history: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), until recently the Al Qaeda–affiliated al-Nusra Front, finally overthrew the formally Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad with the support of the Turkish government, which had until relatively recently been fighting HTS and even considering finding a modus vivendi with the Assad regime. Supporting HTS was the Syrian National Army (SNA), also backed by the Turks, and the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-dominated group affiliated with the Kurdish terrorist organization PKK in Turkey. SDF has been fighting the Turks and sometimes the SNA as well as the Assad government. At the same time, Israel took advantage of Assad’s swift demise to make territorial gains in Syria’s south.
The leader of HTS has undergone an at least aesthetic transformation, changing his name and trading in the thawb and turban for business suits. He says that he intends to run a technocratic government that respects the rights of Syria’s infinite variety of ticked-off minority groups. Progress on this front has been mixed: The SDF signed a deal agreeing they would integrate with the Damascus government’s military in exchange for various political guarantees. The deal occurred shortly after the leader of the PKK called on his group to disarm and go political a la Sinn Fein. The Druze, a religious minority, signed a similar deal the next day, apparently stymying Israel’s attempts to take them on as a proxy.
The Damascus government Thursday signed a new transitional constitution, which is a mixed bag—it institutionalizes Islamist government and, particularly, the rule of HTS for the next five years, but it also guarantees certain liberal freedoms and condemns “extremism.” We’ll see about all that. In the debits column, HTS-affiliated militiamen were at the same time blowing off some steam by massacring Alawite Muslims—yet another religious minority—who had by and large supported the Assad government and have been involved to an unclear degree in armed resistance against the new regime. Also unclear is how much direct involvement the Damascus government had in these massacres, and how much control it has over its affiliated militant groups.
So much for the very short version of recent history—three grafs or 400 words. That’s all interesting for hobbyists. But what does it have to do with America?
Inscrutably, the U.S. still has about 2,000 soldiers in southern Syria—or at least, 2,000 is the current officially admitted count. (The Pentagon has a habit of discovering more than the going number.) What are they doing there? Well, it’s not terribly clear. They notionally fight bad guys, but with ISIS off the scene, it’s not exactly clear who are the bad guys, or, really, who are the good guys; infamously, Jake Sullivan asserted in an email that “Al Qaeda is on our side” in Syria. The main post-ISIS threat was something like Tehran’s influence in the neighborhood—Assad was pals with the ayatollahs, and a variety of unsavory Shiite militias were active in Syria—or the reemergence of ISIS, but no political leaders in the U.S. ever articulated a clear and forceful reason for continued exposure in a rough neighborhood.
America has three positive interests in the Middle East: preventing the emergence of a regional hegemon, suppressing Islamic terrorism, and protecting the Red Sea and Persian Gulf shipping lanes. It has one negative interest: avoiding excessive involvement, especially military involvement, in the region’s internal affairs. American troop presence in Syria, on the very best of days, has only ever served the first two of these interests; it has always endangered the last of them.
The HTS government is unlikely to be to my tastes, and I would view it with significant alarm were it setting up in Mexico or Quebec. I think secular, liberal republicanism is a very fine thing on the merits. Yet it seems unreasonable to expect a state without Islamist elements to emerge ex nihilo in the heart of the ummah—a fact acknowledged in another sphere of our diplomacy, our chummy relations with Saudi Arabia and the despotisms of the Persian Gulf. A Sunni state with Turkish support is unlikely to fall under the sway of Iran. Stability, rule of law, and no overt hostility: These are what American interests demand of a Syrian government. If this new state can deliver (and we should do what is expedient, within reason, to make sure it can deliver), asking for more is a prospect with diminishing returns.
To its credit, the current administration seems to be cognizant of this. In January, the White House asked the Pentagon to start drafting Syria withdrawal plans. The SDF agreement happened under pressure from Washington—one of the mysterious aspects of our Syria policy is our crawl-over-broken-glass support for a communist terrorist group. It’s time to come home.
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