What’s the Syria Policy?

As I’ve said before foreign policy happens to presidents. However urgent domestic and political needs are, they can’t escape it. It’s in the job description. In his latest Washington Post column Josh Rogin asks what the Biden Administration’s policy with respect to Syria is?

When he was elected, many Syrians had high hopes that Biden would come up with a comprehensive plan to marshal the international community to act on Syria and to hold Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad accountable for his war crimes, as Biden had promised. These hopes have been largely dashed. The U.S. government under Biden has neither reinvigorated U.N. diplomacy nor used American leverage and influence to significantly turn up the heat on Assad.

On the contrary, lawmakers and activists no longer believe the Biden administration’s claims that it is working to oppose the normalization of the Assad regime. They see it doing the opposite.

“I don’t know what the administration’s Syria policy is. And I say that as a criticism,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said last week at a conference on Capitol Hill hosted by a Syrian American advocacy organization called Citizens for Secure and Safe America.

The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is publicly saying that his own administration’s Syria policy is impossible to understand. Specifically, Menendez said he doesn’t know why the U.S. government hasn’t done more to push back against the normalization of the Syrian regime, including by U.S. partners in the region such as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. The confusion is bipartisan.

“Unfortunately, this administration seems to be turning a blind eye as our Arab partners push to normalize relations with the regime and pursue energy arrangements in contravention of U.S. law,” said James E. Risch (Idaho), the committee’s ranking Republican, at the same conference.

I don’t honestly know what our policy with respect to Syria should be and I don’t know how popular Assad actually is within Syria. I’m skeptical when I read the complaints of Syrians who aren’t living in Syria. I don’t place a lot of stock in the recent elections there. I’ve read reports of polls taken by the Russians that found very low approval ratings of Assad, completely out of line with his election results. On the other hand what is the alternative other than someone just as bad or even worse than Assad?

As usual I view the matter solely through the prism of U. S. interest and, sad to say, IMO a stable Syria with Assad at the helm is probably more in the U. S. interest than a Syria in chaos without him. And for goodness sake don’t take the Israeli view as gospel. Their take is tainted by the “Greater Israel” crowd who would probably prefer chaos over a Syria able to thwart their goals.

So, what should our policy with respect to Syria be?