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Syria: what’s missing is more important than doing what was done before

Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the Secretary of State’s Special Representative for Syria Engagement and the Special Envoy to the Global Coalition To Defeat ISIS until November 8, 2020, posted the following comment on peacefare.net, responding to my post on Syria yesterday. I am repeating it here, hoping it will be easier to find and more widely read:

Dan, you are right about the statement being the most extensive of the thin gruel we have gotten from Team B on Syria, and what they have announced that they will keep doing, what I will call operational activities “1,2,3….X”, is pretty much what we were doing up to a year ago (and with some minor mods what Kerry was pursuing). But I’m not sure we have a real policy towards Syria, or at least a policy similar to the one Pompeo and Kerry followed.

First, what the statement says is, we are doing all these operational things. Those cited and others we are doing have immediate purposes–help refugees, implement UNSCR 2254, support UN-led negotiating effort, fight ISIS, deal with CW threat, react to Iranian deployments, etc., but there is no clue to how these all fit together into a larger policy, especially one that deals with the underlying reason we have all the above problems to deal with–the Assad regime’s war on its own people supported by Iran and Russia including for their own regional expansionist goals. What the real US policy is in the larger sense remains under question, either it’s still being debated or the White House understands what they have decided on will be so unpopular best to conceal it.

There is thus no known ‘whole’ that is greater than the ‘parts,’ and what we have are just those ‘parts,’ “1,2,3,….X”. To illustrate what I’m driving at let me cite what I think (and drew on when I was doing Syria) is an analogous situation, one where the Biden administration is much clearer: Ukraine. Any policy has various elements (everyone has her/his own, I have four): (1) national interest in play; (2) specific goal to serve the interest, (3) operational strategy to achieve the goal, and (4) specific operational activities in support, i.e., the “1,2,3….X”. The Ukraine specific operational activities are remarkably similar to those being done with Syria: work through an international coalition, push for ceasefire, implement UN resolutions and support negotiations (in Ukraine case Normandie Process), provide arms to local partner, deal with humanitarian fallout.

But with the Ukraine policy there is a superstructure (elements (1)-(3) above) that explains and guides the specific operational activities. The national interest is preventing a major deterioration of European security through a Russian victory over and possible assimilation of Ukraine. The specific goal to advance that interest, given geography, balance of forces, other priorities, is necessarily limited: avoid a complete Russian victory, as opposed to rolling back or defeating the Russians or even the status quo ante. The operational strategy given the interest and the goal in the context of limited means is to create a stalemate, inflict costs on the aggressor with clarity that further aggression will generate more (hopefully counter-balancing) costs, while holding out a compromise resolution. Such a resolution is the best case scenario but a stalemate is ‘good enough.’ The operational activities, the “1,2,3,….X” are fluid, can be dialed up or down to signal resolve, and further the stalemate while holding open the chance for a compromise resolution.

This is essentially what our strategy was with Syria: national interest was preventing an Assad, Iran, Russian victory, the specific goal as our means were limited was to ensure through a stalemate that they could not win, the operational strategy was to increase costs, signal resolve and hold out a compromise solution, and the operational activities were geared to advance that operational strategy. This is what is now missing–we don’t know the larger purpose, i.e, the (1), (2) and (3) of the administration’s approach to Syria. As we have (4) we can through inductive reasoning postulate that they have some (1)-(3) and that it might be like the Trump or late Obama administrations’, but that’s just speculation. Jim