Tag: Syria
– Former Senator Bob Dole has died at 98. He was a masterful legislator and a witty partisan. NYT has some of his quips.
– WSJ says US is trying to block Chinese efforts to build an Atlantic base in Equitorial Guinea.
– NYT says Syria is a narcostate with illicit amphetamines its biggest export.
– FT says US has been sharing intelligence on Russian threat to Ukraine, convincing allies.
– Dan Drezner parses the stories on Ukraine.
– Jim Fallows analyzes the threats to US democracy, sees protection of minority rights morphing into minority rule.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Admire Russia’s provocative statecraft, even if its objectives are odious
Russian President Putin is feeling his oats. He is pushing against the West along a front that extends from the Baltics to Syria and possibly beyond. Here is an incomplete account of his maneuvers:
- The Baltics: Russia has concentrated troops along its border with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Moscow is also conducting menacing exercises and violating Allies’ airspace.
- Belarus: Again lots of military exercises, but more inventively Putin has encouraged President Lukashenko to import Kurds from Iraq and try to push them across the border into Poland and thus the EU. This constitutes intentional weaponization of third-country nationals.
- Ukraine: Moscow has (again) concentrated military forces on the border with the apparent intention of threatening an expansion of Russian-controlled territory inside Ukraine beyond Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. Moscow is also raising gas prices and shipping more gas to the West avoiding Ukraine and thus reducing its revenues.
- The Balkans: Russia is giving and selling arms to a vastly re-armed Serbia, is financing the Serb entity inside Bosnia and Herzegovina and encouraging secession talk there, and has gained vastly increased influence through proxies inside Montenegro.
- Turkey: Moscow has sold its advanced air defense system to Turkey, which as a result has lost its role in manufacturing components of the American F-35 fighter and will likely look to Russia for modernization of its fighter fleet.
- Syria: Russian air forces intervened in Syria in 2015, when rebels were seriously threatening the regime in Damascus. Russian forces have occasionally tested their mettle against the Americans and US-supported forces in the northeast.
Russian military forces have also taken on a “peacekeeping” role inside Azerbaijan after its 2020 clash with Armenian-supported secessionists in Nagorno-Karabakh. Moscow’s troops were already stationed inside Armenia. Prior Russian interventions in Georgia and Moldova were explicitly aimed at preventing NATO and EU membership, respectively, and have resulted in separate governance of Russian-controlled territories within those states.
For Putin, not only NATO but also the EU is an enemy. He is right: the EU and NATO are committed to open societies, democratic governance, and the rule of law, which are anathema to Putin. He wants none of their members on Russia’s borders or even nearby. The Eurasian Economic Union is intended as the economic dimension of his fight against the West. He is also seeking to weaken the EU and NATO from within. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is Russia’s handmaiden within the EU. Montenegro risks becoming one inside NATO.
It is difficult to know how the West should respond to all this. Neither the EU nor NATO is skilled at anticipating and preventing trouble. Nor can they coordinate and focus resources as quickly as an autocrat can. But it is important to recognize that for Russia all these pieces are part of the same puzzle. Obsessed with being surrounded, Russia responds by trying to expand and establish autocratic hegemony in what it regards as its near abroad, even if that designation is no longer so commonly used. You have to admire Russia’s provocative statecraft, even if the objectives are odious.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Normalization won’t normalize, but UAE and Russia will gain
Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat, and Venus Mohammed write:
The visit of the UAE Foreign Minister can be analyzed in two complementary ways:
- Washington’s silence reflects its disinterest in the Syrian file in general and also preparation for an upcoming strategic dialogue with Moscow in Geneva next week, which will focus on keeping the cross-border routes for humanitarian aid open. Washington is offering an initial reward to Moscow by remaining silent on the Emirati openness to Damascus and thus indirectly encouraging it tacitly. In return, Washington expects Damascus to reciprocate, with support or pressure from Moscow. This could mean a new step-by-step road map in Syria, which the US hopes will emerge in the meeting with Moscow next week.
- The visit came within the framework of coordination between Tel Aviv and the UAE to support Moscow, which coordinates extensively with Tel Aviv to target Iranian sites in Syria. Israel and Russia want to weaken Iran in Syria. Israel has three times within a week attacked storage sites for Iranian weapons, drones, and missiles in Damascus, at T-4 airport, Shayrat and Homs countryside, and even the coastal regiment In Tartous, where American reconnaissance aircraft are operating over the Syrian coast.
The Americans want to stabilize the balance of power in Syria as it is. Having lost influence Trump’s departure from the White House, the UAE wants to show itself useful to the Biden Administration. Abu Dhabi is trying in to tell Washington that it can provide services even if immoral, such as normalization with Assad. The UAE Foreign Minister had informed his American counterpart about this visit and its goals last week, which helped neuter the American position.
As Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov has said, the situation in Syria is frozen. The UAE visit has some symbolic significance, but there will be no serious impact on the ground as long as Washington insists on the status quo until a ceasefire paves the way for a new political settlement. The UAE wants to be the main Arab country that has a relationship with the Assad regime so it can function as the link between Damascus and the West in general, hoping that it can influence the the Assad regime to change some of its behavior, in particular limiting the Iranian presence.
It is possible that Washington and the UAE can benefit in the short term by improving their own bilateral relations, but this does not spell the success for the Emirati efforts in achieving any results in Syria. The Iranian alliance with the Assad regime dates back four decades, when the Assad regime sided with the Iran against Iraq. Iran founded Hezbollah, which expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization from Lebanon. Iran also financed the construction of the Syrian nuclear reactor that was destroyed by Israel in 2007. Without the Iranian presence, the Assad regime would have collapsed years ago. The UAE has nothing to give Assad to pry him away from Iran. Normalization with the regime, including Assad’s return to the Arab League or the extension of a gas pipeline, will do nothing other than strengthen Iran in Syria, as has already happened in Lebanon and Iraq.
But if the UAE’s goal is to please the Americans by offering Syria as a gift to Iran in exchange for a return to the nuclear agreement, that is a different issue. Only time will tell if Washington’s reticence is Machiavellian.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Syria in focus: security, justice, social cohesion
Don’t miss this (livestream should be here):
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Stevenson’s army, October 26
– WaPo sees Kerry-Sullivan clash over China policy.
-WSJ doubts Taiwan defense capabilities.
– Politico says Nicaragua is a problem for US.
-State is creating new cyber office.
– Fox News says US was warned of attack in Syria.
– On FP, analysts say DOD needs a bureaucratic upgrade.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
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
RSS - Posts
