President Trump has assailed Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for him. This is good and welcome toughness.
Trump has also indicated he does not want to replay the errors of former President George W. Bush in Iraq or former President Barack Obama in Libya by launching a U.S.-led war in pursuit of regime change.
The line between retreat and all-out war is a fine and winding one. Walking it will take diplomatic skill and military smarts that the Obama administration lacked and the Trump administration hasn’t yet shown. It may prove impossible. But for now, Trump has to try to avoid another war.
The situation in Syria is as complex as any geopolitical problem in the world today. Assad is a murderous dictator facing rebellion, not merely from one camp but many sides. Backing Assad is Putin, as well as his closest ally, Iran.
Much of Syria in recent years has been controlled by ISIS. At the same time, al Qaeda branches that keep merging and changing their names represent another source of terrorist extremism present in the country. It’s complicated.
War-happy U.S. administrations in recent decades have not adequately appreciated the complexity and danger of the Islamic world. You may recall the early proclamations that the Iraq War would be a “cakewalk” and that America “will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.” The war dragged on for years, and a stable, America-friendly democracy in Iraq has continued to prove elusive.
You may recall former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s flippant declaration, “We came, we saw, he died,” regarding Obama’s regime change in Libya, which deposed Moammar Gadhafi. Since then, a power vacuum has welcomed in al Qaeda, ISIS, weapons, chaos, and murder.
Both of America’s regime-change wars this millennium have been mistakes that have made things worse. Plenty of voices are calling for a third such war today. Trump needs to resist that call.
At the same time, Trump is right to promise consequences for Assad’s unconscionable chemical attacks on his people. Last year, Trump launched a missile attack on a Syrian military base after a regime chemical strike. This year’s attack may warrant a more forceful strike on the regime’s chemical or military capabilities. But any U.S. action should be discrete and targeted, and carefully chosen so as not to spark escalation.
A war for regime change in Syria would probably create the same sort of vacuum that our wars in Libya and Iraq created. ISIS and al Qaeda affiliates are both perched in Syria, and they would greet decapitation of the regime as an opportunity. The idea that we can neatly separate freedom-loving Syrian rebels from nasty terrorist extremists is the sort of fantasy only the most naive technocrats would buy. The nation-building after a regime change would not only be lengthy, costly, and deadly, but it might ultimately fail, leaving new evils in the place of the current evils. Consider Russia’s and Iran’s tentacles in this region, and the image of a post-Assad Syria becomes even murkier.
America needs strong leadership in this moment. America doesn’t need another war.
