Remember Syria?ASLI U. BÂLI, AZIZ RANAA summit such as the one in Helsinki between Trump and Putin should be oriented towards objectives that would advance sustainable and inclusive peace in Syria, including an end to airstrikes on all sides, rather than treating the country as a sideshow in a battle to confront Iran. Unlike in the spring of 2012, when a genuine commitment to negotiations by the United States might have made an inclusive political settlement in Syria easier to attain, today the balance of military power on the ground has placed Russia and Iran in the driver seat. Due, in part, to the faulty U.S. logic six years ago that militarizing the conflict further would enhance the position of its Gulf allies six years ago, the United States is now reduced to using its leverage to persuade Russia to turn its advantage into meaningful political negotiations for Syria’s future.
But calling for such negotiations must not become an occasion to merely sanction the continuation of Assad’s brutal rule. Rather the United States should support—and demand that Russia back—negotiations designed to allow a transition that incorporates a wide range of actors across Syria’s political spectrum.
Finally, the United States should facilitate an agreement with Turkey to withdraw from Syrian territory in exchange for assurances that Kurdish autonomy goals would be pursued within Syria’s current borders rather than through secession.
Those actors complicit in Syria’s destruction are obligated to help resettle refugees and provide basic needs to the nearly eight million displaced.
The key goal of all of this would be to limit the hostilities and restrain external interveners in ways that create the actual space for Syrians on the ground to pursue a transition process that they themselves direct. This is of course much easier said than done, given the transnational reality of the conflict, the extreme violence of Assad as well as his strengthened position, and the fragmented nature of the various militias across the country.
But in a context in which the militarized interventions of key states have transformed a local uprising into a regional proxy war, such an inclusive framework—facilitated by external restraint and the political space it creates—remains the only possibility, however tenuous, for refocusing transnational politics in Syria around local demands. As the other options have made clear, allowing regional actors to fight over the country has led to a might-makes-right strategy with terrible consequences.
The problem, of course, is that actually pursuing these policies—and holding states such as Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey accountable for their own violence—means seriously reframing the terms of U.S. regional alliances. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any capacity to do this.
Instead, opinion leaders on the Democratic side worry that Trump will give away U.S. “leverage” in Syria—by withdrawing remaining U.S. troops as part of a deal with Putin—while Republicans call for greater aggression against Iran. For those on the left, it is well past the time to press a shift in the U.S. approach to the Middle East.
But U.S. obligations do not stop there. Even if an inclusive political settlement were achieved tomorrow, the profound destruction of civilian infrastructure in much of Syria and the absence of a central body capable of ensuring public order, let alone reconstruction, is so great that repatriating refugees and internally displaced persons is not possible at present. In some ways, the talks in Helsinki and elsewhere are a diversion from the more urgent humanitarian crisis confronting the international community.
The overriding and immediate obligation of those actors complicit in Syria’s destruction is the resettlement of refugees outside of Syria and the provision of basic needs—subsistence, shelter, health and education—to the nearly eight million displaced within Syria.
Even if the conflict is drawing to a close, not all settlements are created equal.
The United States should follow its own past practices when civilians have fled conflicts the country was itself involved in. For instance, around 140,000 Vietnamese were resettled in the United States in 1975 alone, followed by more than 300,000 over the next decade. Given our role in Iraq and our participation from the beginning in ratcheting up violence in Syria, the United States should similarly commit to taking in 400,000 Syrians over four years—a figure that is less than 10 percent of the number currently absorbed by neighboring countries.
The United States should also raise the lion’s share of financing (some of it from the Gulf) for UN and international agency relief efforts for those in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. And it must organize international burden sharing arrangements to support frontline host countries and secondary countries at EU borders. Russia and Iran, in turn, must be called upon to persuade Assad to facilitate the provision of humanitarian assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) within Syria.
The tragedy in Syria is not some distant affair. It is partly the product of the disastrous Iraq war and it has been compounded by foreseeable errors made by three successive U.S. administrations. Even if the conflict is drawing to a close, it is critical to realize that not all settlements are created equal and that the United States’s diplomatic and humanitarian obligations remain just as pressing. It is therefore up to the leadership in Washington to fulfill its responsibilities.
The Trump administration has chosen, through orders such as the Muslim ban, to shut the door to civilians the country has actively put in harm’s way. In a sense, such measures are an extreme embodiment not only of the current administration’s moral culpability but also of the ethical blindness that has shaped seven years’ worth of policymaking.
If anything, the current conversation in Washington—whether to shut the door entirely or offer any assistance at all in reconstruction—is the exact inverse of what it should be: how systematically can the United States ensure the protection of an entire population subject to mass atrocity in part due to the folly of our own policies?
If Trump and his administration refuse to be held accountable for their actions in Syria—as they have similarly refused across a range of other issues—the very least we should require is that his political opponents in Democratic circles own up to U.S. complicity and agree to pay back this country’s debt.
