The rapid fall of the oppressive Assad regime after a prolonged civil war has elicited a variety of reactions. One such measured response expresses “hope that the process of power transition be carried out in a manner aligned with the aspirations of the Syrian people, paving [a] path for the establishment of an independent […] government.”
A more jubilant take argues that "the fall of a brutal dictator is rare enough that we should take the opportunity to celebrate it and pay tribute to those who brought it about."
Indicative of the bizarre parallel motives that this war has created, the Taliban issued the former statement and neoconservative Bill Kristol the latter. Kristol fails to mention that among those “who brought it about” were America's enemies during the Global War on Terror (GWOT), specifically that the new governing authority of post-Assad Syria is Hayʼat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization and offshoot of Al-Qaeda.
This irony, however, has not been lost on foreign policy dissidents, most of whom have warned for years that in attempting to oust the Assad regime, the U.S. was making common cause with its enemies from the GWOT. The bifurcated domestic responses to the ouster of the Assad regime and subsequent developments are the latest example of an elite/public divide on U.S. foreign policy and competing visions for America's role in the world.
The foreign policy class has largely downplayed the moral complexities of the Syrian civil war and has narrativized these latest developments in an ahistorical vacuum. Foreign policy critics, however, and especially veterans, have viewed developments in Syria with skepticism, if not alarm.
Among them was Vice-President-elect (and Iraq War veteran) Senator J.D. Vance, who noted that "[m]any of 'the rebels' are a literal offshoot of ISIS. One can hope they've moderated. Time will tell."
This gulf in narrative understanding threatens to undermine further public confidence in American foreign policy and the institutions that implement it.
The crux of official government responses and commentators like Kristol has been to play up the liberatory outcome of Assad's ouster while downplaying the strange bedfellows and contradictory geopolitics that led to this moment. True to neoconservative form, Kristol ahistorically cast these events as an example of "the arc of the moral universe [bending] toward justice," a bastardization, of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights dictum.
Similarly, while Kristol makes no mention of the jihadist elements within the anti-Assad coalition, he internationalizes their efforts and praises "the Ukrainians and Israelis," who, in his telling, "bent that arc over the last couple of years."
Rather than view the new political reality in Syria as one fraught with dangers to be kept at arm’s length, Kristol asserts that “we have national interests at stake in Syria.” Among them, Kristol asserts, are “regional interests that would be furthered by having a peaceful, non-terror-friendly government in Syria” and the “further weakening [of] Iran and Hezbollah.”
He does not treat his readers to an argument as to how “regional interests” align with American interests. Instead, Kristol dismisses President-elect Trump’s pledge of noninvolvement as “foolishness.”
In Washington, policymakers from lame-duck President Joe Biden to members of Congress, such as Senator Tim Kaine, have signaled a willingness to work with Syria’s new jihadist government. Senator Kaine said he is “open” to the idea, but efforts have “to be based upon the performance of this group.”
While Washington officials are outwardly less sanguine than pundits like Kristol, they are nevertheless signaling no desire to remove U.S. troops currently stationed in eastern Syria and, according to Politico, engaged in “a huge scramble to see if, and how, and when [they] can delist HTS.”
Conversely, critics of American foreign policy in the region, as they did consistently throughout the Syrian Civil War, have warned that further involvement in the crisis inherently places the United States in an alliance with its opponents from the GWOT and presents a significant risk of sinking Americans into another quagmire. While think tankers and Washington politicos, detached from the costs of their preferred policies, may be eager to turn the page, thereby shifting their preferred narrative, those who bore the brunt of said policies have longer memories.
The difference in narrative framing is stark, as evidenced by Concerned Veterans for America's statement on developments in Syria.
Rather than view the ouster of Assad as an event without a recent history, they see the crisis as a potential repeat of the GWOT, asserting that "Americans know too well how regime change can lead to endless wars." Concerned Veterans for America echoes an earlier consensus among the American people, one that presented little appetite for intervention in the Syrian crisis. They argued that President Biden’s comments on Assad's downfall indicated that he risked “repeating the mistakes of the past.”
Former CIA analyst and National Security Council chief of Staff Fred Fleitz similarly viewed developments in Syria through the lens of the past and cautioned restraint. Citing HTS’s ideological baggage and the region’s tangled geopolitics, he argued that it was “deeply irresponsible for Biden officials to start meddling in this crisis.”
Outside of the echo chamber of the foreign policy establishment, HTS's Al-Qaeda pedigree and dependence on foreign jihadists have received greater attention. Marine veteran and public policy advisor for Defense Priorities Dan Caldwell similarly remarked on X that "I find it bizarre (yet revealing) that there are U.S. think-tankers cheering on Al Qaeda-linked Salafists."
This turnabout reveals that the foreign policy establishment has learned nothing from many failed regime change experiments or has cynically moved on from those old conflicts to focus on a new geopolitical goal. Defeating global jihad is out; defeating Iran's regional ambitions is in. Their eagerness to pivot to new priorities in alliance with old enemies is the latest example of their detachment from the general public.
Admittedly, this is far from the first time the U.S. has teamed up with odious actors and former adversaries to achieve its foreign policy goals. During the Second World War, the United States fought alongside the Soviet Union, against whom it sent an expeditionary force to depose two decades earlier.
However, such a comparison does not hold water as the United States government was not forced into a partnership with jihadism in Syria by the material realities of geopolitics. The Assad regime, despite its numerous abuses, did not remotely pose a threat to the United States or its security interests. No Assadist armored columns rolled through Western Europe. No Assadist carrier group bombed Pearl Harbor. Regarding U.S. policy toward Syria, no existential American security concern demanded such a Faustian bargain.
If the United States government is to formulate a foreign policy for the future, it must refrain from sweeping under the rug the legacies of foreign policies past. Such is especially the case for America's recent history in the Middle East, where Americans, who have yet to forget the legacies of the Global War on Terror, are opposed to further entanglements.
Policymakers ought to tread lightly lest they discover that when they attempted to export democracy abroad, they had inadvertently rekindled it at home.
