Syria: Moment of Maximum Hope
22:30 Share

I'm Andrew Schwartz, and you're listening to The Truth of the Matter, a podcast by CSIS where we break down the top policy issues of the day and talk with the people that can help us best understand what's really going on. To get to the truth of the matter about the latest developments in Syria, and we're talking on Monday, December 9th,

Right after the weekend in which all the dramatic events happened, I have with us none other than our Middle East program director and senior vice president, John Alterman, who knows more about the Middle East than anybody I know. So, John, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Andrew. All right. I got to start out by asking is, you know, the Assad government's been overthrown after his 24 years of rule and his father's 29 years of rule. So al-Assads have been in charge for quite some time since the early 70s.

John, how optimistic should we be after the overthrow of this brutal regime? I think we can be optimistic. We have to be very cautiously optimistic. We have seen any number of revolutions, whether they're in the Middle East or around the world, where your moment of maximum hope is right after the government falls because the possibilities are there, because the bad guys haven't seized control yet.

Because liberals are still expressing their hopes. Sometimes things begin to sort themselves out in constructive ways, but sometimes they don't. I still remember when I was in high school and the Shah of Iran fell, there were a lot of Americans who said, wow, Ayatollah Khomeini, I mean, that's a real democratic leader.

Because the Shah was really incredible thinking about, you know, because Richard Falk at Princeton was a prominent professor working for it because the Shah was repressive. And because the his secret services were surveilling Iranian students in the United States and the Carter administration was all about human rights around the world. And there was really a hope that.

that Iran was going from dictatorship to democracy. And certainly there were some democratic voices in the early post-revolutionary government. And yet, as it consolidated, the liberal voices were forced out, the reactionary voices took control, and human rights in Iran have in many ways been on a steady deterioration in the years since. There was all sorts of hope, as you remember, with the Arab Spring in 2011.

There are countries which have remained in complete chaos since 2011, Libya being one of them. So I think we should certainly be optimistic. There's certainly the possibility of things being much better than under Assad. But we have to be very cautious and very clear-eyed about just how many obstacles there are, just how many threats there are, and where we should invest and where we should

try to block things from happening. Because one of the things that strikes me about Syria, more than any other country I can think of in the region, especially now, there are a lot of countries with a hook into Syria. There's a lot going on. There are a lot of countries that can spoil what happens in Syria and getting some alignment among regional powers and getting an agreement among all the powers about what they'll agree not to do.

I think is going to be very important in the coming months. And, you know, I've heard you talk about the role of spoilers in this equation, John, namely Russia, Iran, Turkey. How do we contain their influence over this? Well, in many ways, they had reached an accommodation agreement.

with each other in Syria and with Assad in Syria. That accommodation collapsed in less than two weeks as Turkey seems to have worked in concert with Hayat Tahrir Hashem, this HTS group that overthrew the government. What Turkey's ambitions are vis-a-vis

The government of Syria vis-a-vis Kurdish groups, vis-a-vis the Iranians, with whom the Turks have a complicated relationship, vis-a-vis the Russians, with whom the Turks also have a complicated relationship. I can't tell you how many people have asked me this weekend, isn't Turkey our ally? They're a NATO ally. They're actually a real ally. And we support groups in the northeast of Turkey that Turkey objects to. The Kurds.

They argue that the Syrian Democratic Forces, the government in the Northeast, is a thinly veiled version of the Kurdistan Workers' Party. The PKK. PKK. How we accommodate the Turks, how the Turks accommodate us, how they accommodate our allies. I mean, there are a lot of different players. I also think we have to look at what happened in Iraq after the fall of Saddam.

where the Iranians played a very, very long game because they had a strategic interest in Iraq. The Iranians have been investing in a strategic relationship in Syria for decades.

they're not going to walk away. So is there an opportunity to signal to the Iranians, to have the Iranians signal to us to do something constructive while we're being wary? And, you know, this is in the context where the Iranians are trying to figure out how to engage with the Trump administration and are sending signs that we want to find a modus vivendi. So is there an opportunity there? I think there's an opportunity we should explore, right?

But I think with all of it, we have to be extraordinarily cautious. Lots of people also, John, this is a question we've heard all over the weekend. Does this maybe inspire a pro-democracy movement to rise up in Iran? That would take a number of things happening. First, we saw in the Arab Spring that what happens –

in the Arab world doesn't have much inspirational capacity. In Iran, when there were Iranian uprisings in I think 2009, they didn't really spread to the Arab world. There's a language barrier, there's a cultural ethnic barrier that you can say they're all Middle Eastern, but in fact... Yeah, Iranians are Persian. They're a Persian Shia community that doesn't speak Arabic, mostly. Right.

versus mostly Sunni Arab community that mostly doesn't speak Persian. So it's not obvious. There's also, I think, the countries are in really different positions. Iran lost a lot with the fall of Bashar al-Assad. I think they were surprised that Assad proved so brittle. This was really their only state partner.

And now they have all these proxy groups. But even supplying Hezbollah becomes much more difficult. Yeah, and Hezbollah is degraded. Hezbollah is degraded. So the Iranians have a lot of hard choices to make. And they're also looking at a Trump administration coming in, which is saying we're going to reimpose maximum pressure from day one. President Pazeshkian came into power and said we're going to try to find a way to work

with the United States, whether he actually has the ability to do it, whether he actually wants to. I think there's going to be an exploration there. But Iran has an economy that's in lots of trouble. Oil prices are down, which is a main source of income for them. They are more isolated in the world than ever, certainly in the last six months. This whole network of proxies has been set back. They're looking at a much more hostile approach

U.S. administration coming in. So I think the Iranian government has a lot of hard choices to make. One of the hard choices it has to make is when things start to unravel, do we open up and try to relieve pressure or do we double down on repression? Now, Bashar al-Assad came into office in 1999.

And he said, no, we're going to open up. We don't have to do this thing with winning 99% of the vote. He was the head of the Syrian Internet Society. Bashar's first instinct was we're going to lighten up on the people and we're going to build legitimacy and support. And about six years later, he decided that was a losing game and he cracked down. He began winning reelection by 99% of the vote, just like his dad had.

But Pazeshkian has said, no, we're going to open up. We're going to be less repressive. We're going to let people dress the way they want. So is he or the people who actually control power in Iran going to double down on repression? Will they open up? Can they retain power if they open up? I think a whole bunch of really serious questions, but there's no question in my mind that the Iranian government

has some excruciatingly difficult decisions to make. And those decisions have been getting exponentially more difficult with every passing month. And the fall of Bashar al-Assad makes all of their choices much more difficult because they've lost an important line into Lebanon. They've lost an important line into the Arab world. And

they're seen not able to really support their partners. So there's a question of capacity that, given what happened in Lebanon and then given what's happened in Syria, brings to the fore and potentially makes them all the more vulnerable. When they're vulnerable, the question is, do they lighten up and try to reach compromise or do they double down? And that's a big question.

This is a big question. John, you're one of the only people that anybody has ever heard of who's actually met with al-Assad, who's interviewed al-Assad. Did this surprise you or did you sort of see this coming? So I met him twice in 2004 and I think 2007 or 2006, you know, back at a time when there was still this potential for Syria opening up. I think.

thought he struck me as tentative, relatively weak, did not seem to have much of a vision of where he was trying to go, seemed to have a reaction to things and a set of instincts, but really didn't command a room the way I had heard his father had and the way other leaders I've met have. That being said...

This was a regime that until two weeks ago was able to beat back all of its opposition. Yeah, it was a frozen conflict. It was brutal. It was ruthless. There was no organized opposition within the country. 500,000 Syrians killed. And that's an old number, right? Yeah, that is an old number. The fact is we don't know the number. But the reality, this is a place, the functioning institution was a ruthless security apparatus.

And people were terrified. It didn't, there didn't seem to be a pathway to push Assad from power. And then it feels like it was all dry rot. That once, once it starts to go, everybody says, oh yeah, these guys are done. There's, you know, and we'd heard stories about when the movement started, that soldiers were all taking bribes.

From their troops to go on leave, nobody wanted to fight. Everybody thought everything was falling apart. They were running a multi-billion dollar drug smuggling operation to support the government. And they were sending drugs throughout the Middle East.

right, this Captagon operation. This was rotten, but there was a sense that there was no alternative. And, you know, when you talk about, I said, Assad didn't have much vision. Somebody on the Turkish side, along with a bunch of Syrians in the Northwest, clearly did have a vision of this could all go and it could go really quickly. And I think for people who look at a conflict that had been frozen for more than a decade, the ability to have the

creative energy to say this whole thing could fall apart. That was a big leap of faith and it moved faster than I think anybody, including the antagonists, thought it possibly could. It's a really good point. You know, there's a headline in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper today that really struck me. It said, post-Assad Syria is in danger of being run by out-of-control militias.

President-elect Donald Trump has said today, also he posted, the United States needs to stay out of it. We don't really know what the incoming Trump administration will do or not in this space. But what are some of the likely U.S. government approaches? So I think the first thing is the Biden administration is going to try to both build its leverage and maintain its agility. Ha'ad Taher Hashem is currently on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. They are.

I expect slow movement to get them off that list, see how they behave, hold out the prospect of better ties, but not to give up too much to suit. I think you're going to see a lot of diplomacy through both Turkey and Arab partners of the United States to try to move this in a constructive direction. You know, in many ways, it seems to me that

The Biden administration is going to lean into engagement. But as you note, the Trump administration seems to be leaning strongly against engagement. And as you recall, in 2019, President Trump withdrew U.S. troops from Syria after a phone call with President Erdogan. And then the decision was reversed.

We currently have 800 or 900 troops there now. But the instinct that President Trump has is, why isn't this a Turkish responsibility? How that plays out, whether the Arab states are willing to let it be a Turkish responsibility. I think they have their own instincts about what the Turks want to do and the acceptability and who the Turks are willing to work with. Again, there's a danger, not only that Syria could emerge as a point of a Cold War,

between Turkey and a group of Arab states, but that this happens in a context where you also have jihadis running around, ISIS and other kinds of groups running around taking advantage of chaos and security. These kinds of groups live for chaos and insecurity because you provide security, you protect

get a financial backing by running smuggling networks, right? That's what these groups really want. So there's a danger that if this really starts getting messy, that you have antagonists who try to create messes in other people's zone. The bad guys thrive on the messiness and you have a real failed state. And you have a failed state in Syria is different from a failed state in Libya. Syria is shaped like a keystone.

It is next to a NATO ally, Turkey, a strong U.S. ally, Jordan, next to Israel, next to the troublesome areas of Iraq, next to Lebanon. Some say it's the linchpin of the Middle East and we can't possibly ignore it. But it is this keystone. The shape is a keystone. And Syria has always been willing to both make trouble for people, but also...

to explore conciliation. That's what Hafez al-Assad did with skill. That's what Bashar al-Assad did with less skill. But the danger of all of this is it just all unravels. And the unraveling will not go inward. The unraveling will go outward. John, the final thing I want to ask you about today is Israel and this equation. Hafez al-Assad came into power in Syria in

Following, not immediately, but following the Six-Day War when Syria was defeated along with the other Arab nations that attacked Israel. This strikes me as a bit similar. Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, Hezbollah on October 8th. They've been fighting for 400 and I think it's 30 days now, something like that. There's hostages for 430 days.

Hamas has been degraded. Hezbollah has been degraded. Do you see any parallels here? And beyond that, what does Israel need to do now to protect itself from potential chaos crossing into its border? You know, I think we've talked about this before. I think one of the challenges for the Israelis is they mostly have military instruments, but most of what they want

is political. And they don't have a lot of good political instruments. They don't have a lot of good instruments to create a government in Lebanon that they find more congenial. They haven't done much to create an alternative to Hamas in Gaza. They've said the Palestinian Authority is beyond the pale, but they haven't filled the vacuum that the collapse in both Hamas's capacity, but also its legitimacy

has arguably created for Gaza. To me, this is the challenge the Israelis have, is the military instruments are awesome, but really the only way to secure what you want is political outcomes. I don't know what political outcomes are going to look like in Syria. I don't know who's going to determine them. I think my guess is that some of Israel's moves on the Syrian border are intended to give Israel opportunities

leverage or at least a voice in discussions about the future of Syria. But principally, those are going to be handled by others. One of the challenges will be getting Syrians themselves, not with all the complicated external parties and sponsoring their own Syrians. I think there's also going to be a very difficult problem getting Syrians to work with other Syrians. There's

Syrian expatriate groups that have been working since 2011 on a post-Assad political future for Syria have been locked in conflict. One of the, I think, really devastating results of all these authoritarian regimes is they produce publics who really have a hard time accommodating each other. And to me, this is the horrible legacy we've seen since

Iraq. It's a horrible legacy we've seen in Libya. And I hope it's not a legacy we see in Syria. After so many years of dictatorship, so many years of people feeling like they were exploited by their neighbors, how do we get to a point where Syrians are willing to accommodate each other at a time when so many outside parties are

have so many interests in Syria. So many outside parties have Syrians on their payroll, or Syrians they feel they can support to advance their interests and block other people's interests. This, I think, is maybe two-level chess and not three-level chess. But there's certainly, there's this profound problem of getting Syrians to come together, and a profound problem of not having outsiders

Pitting Syrians against each other to advance the outsider's interests. I think from a U.S. perspective, we certainly have an interest in helping that move in the right direction. But we don't have a lot of tools to help move in the right direction. And again, I think one of the challenges we have is we have a presidential transition. And while the Biden administration can do things in the very near term, you're not going to see the results of the steps it takes now.

for many months, if not years, into the Trump administration. How do you get continuity of effort, continuity of strategy across that? Very, very difficult. John, really appreciate your time today and pointing out all these really critical issues at this moment. Thank you so much. Thank you, Andrew.

If you enjoyed this podcast, check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts from Into Africa, The Asia Chessboard, China Power, AIDS 2020, The Trade Guys, Smart Women, Smart Power, and more. You can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like iTunes and Spotify. Visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog.