Trump’s Syria U-turn: Is History Repeating Itself?

Charlie Avery | 20/05/2018

“I want to get out”, stated President Trump in a White House press conference in early April, “I want to bring our troops back home”. He was referring to his decision to withdraw American ground forces from Syria as the “task” of defeating Islamic State draws towards an apparent conclusion. Mr Trump, who generally opposes US military intervention as part of his ‘America First’ approach to foreign policy, indicated to aides that he wanted all two thousand US troops currently stationed in Syria to return home within six months.

However, just under two weeks later, the President had authorised a fresh round of missile strikes against Syrian government forces. This came days after President Bashar al-Assad, a close ally of Moscow, unleashed a suspected chemical attack against civilians in the rebel-held town of Douma, located just outside Damascus. 

            Such a sudden, and dramatic change in Trump’s position on Syria mirrors the events of almost exactly a year before, when he ordered strikes against the Shayrat airbase, following a sarin gas poisoning. In both cases, his statements were highly emotive, invoking images of innocence and family, justifying bombing raids on the grounds that such atrocities cannot be allowed to go unanswered. This time, though, it has triggered a stronger commitment from Washington to “sustain” military pressure against the Syrian regime.

Yet evidence of mass executions, torture and attacks against civilian targets is already widespread. According to humanitarian organisations from Amnesty International to the UN’s Human Rights Council, who have documented the seven-year conflict since it began, Syrian government forces have committed war crimes since as early as 2012.

The U-turn of early April was simply the latest development in an ever-unfolding history of American policy in Syria, a history characterised by inconsistency. This trend spans, not merely the seven years during which the complex and bloody conflict has ravaged the country, but seven decades of American interest in the Middle Eastern nation.

Democracy

Having taken a “special interest” in the nascent Syrian state after the Second World War, the US played an active role in training the newly formed national army. However, as regional tensions escalated in response to emergent conflicts in Palestine, all military support was withdrawn, for fears of American expertise and weaponry being used against Israel, their favoured new ally.

After supporting democracy in Syria since its independence in 1946, the Truman administration helped orchestrate a coup d’état three years later, replacing the democratically elected al-Quwatli with army commander Husni al-Za’im. al-Za’im, part of the Alawi minority, offered to further Washington’s strategic regional interests, namely acquiescing to peace talks with Israel and banning Communism. Most notably, however, he agreed to the installation of the trans-Arabia pipeline on Syrian territory, something his fiercely nationalistic predecessor would never have sanctioned.

Some historians have traced the origins of today’s civil war back to the 1949 coup, pointing to the resultant dominance of Alawite military leaders within Syria’s turbulent political affairs. Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Joshua Landis, writes: “The reason there is a civil war today is because much of the Sunni majority rose up in protest and wanted to get rid of this Alawite military dictatorship”

Islamic fundamentalism

In recent history, American Middle Eastern policy has been characterised by its staunch opposition to Islamic extremism, notably using Syria as a location for some of its infamous ‘Black Sites’ during the War On Terror. In coordination with the Assad regime, suspected terrorists were beaten, tortured and indefinitely detained for information which was allegedly passed to US officials on the hunt for Muslim extremists.

Although its stance upon radical Islam is now steadfast, documents uncovered from an elite CIA-MI6 working group in 1957 reveal that the former intended to “augment tension” in Syria through the militarisation of “political factions”. The strategy was later employed with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan under the Reagan administration. In this instance, “factions” referred to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood which, at the time, remained a largely peaceful organisation. US intelligence officials had hoped to use the context of violent unrest to justify a foreign intervention from pro-Western Jordan or Iraq, so as to destabilise the anti-Western Ba’athist-Communist government. 

            Despite the fact that the plans were subsequently cancelled, the documents shed light upon the America’s conflicted record regarding Syrian self-determination and its historical stance towards radical Islamic groups.

Timber Sycamore

Jumping forward to 2012, in spite of Obama’s initially firm stance against further covert intervention in the escalating civil war, the US changed its course of action once again. He sanctioned a CIA program (codenamed Timber Sycamore) which trained and supplied arms to rebel groups, aiming to blunt the advances of the Syrian regime.

Although it brought fleeting periods of success, the $1-billion-dollar plan has proven vastly ineffective, particularly since the relentless, overt Russian bombing campaign began in 2015. Critics point to the fact that Timber Sycamore has flooded the Middle Eastern black market with weapons, allowing guns to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda affiliates like the Nusra Front who often fight alongside rebel forces. The program was cancelled by Trump last year.

Charles Lister, a Syria expert at the Middle East Institute, concluded that the Obama administration “never gave it the necessary resources or space to determine the dynamics of the battlefield. They were drip-feeding opposition groups just enough to survive but never enough to become dominant actors.”

Few commentators can predict what the Trump administration’s next move will be: “his preferences are still unpredictable in the extreme”. Examining Syria’s relations with the United States over the years only serves to confirm such uncertainty. As George Bernard Shaw rather poignantly summarised, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.".

America’s erratic policy record towards this Middle Eastern state transcends presidents and their respective ideologies. Mr Trump may have actually named his approach to international relations “America first” but, regarding Syria, administrations past and present have demonstrated that this has always been the case. While its current conflict is undeniably complex, the constantly shifting stance of the US and its Western allies makes Syria’s future all the more unclear.