It should have come as no surprise that the Arab League voted overwhelmingly to restore Syria’s membership after more than a decade of suspension. The move is not unanimous, with Qatar remaining the primary holdout, and Washington registering muted objections. Yet, while the outrage the vote has provoked is more than understandable, it has long been inevitable.
The protracted isolation of Syria was motivated by clear moral and strategic reasons. The brutality with which the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad put down what began as peaceful, pro-democracy protests has few parallels in the 21st century. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, including through widespread use of chemical weapons.
Torture and summary execution have been systematic, as thoroughly documented by whistle-blowers like the former government photographer known as Caesar. Nearly 7 million Syrian refugees have been forced to flee abroad, with about the same number displaced within the country.
Because of this incredible record of brutality, much of the world, including many Arabs, are dismayed at the practical re-embracing of the dictatorship. Yet there really has not been any long-term alternative for the Arab states ever since the rebel-held parts of Aleppo fell to pro-regime forces at the end of 2016. That functionally ended the main part of the war for what the dictatorship has called “necessary Syria,” the central swath of the country running from the Lebanese border up the Mediterranean coast and inland far enough to encompass all the major cities.
The regime did not survive on its own. In the summer of 2015, high-level Iranian delegations traveled to Russia in a bid to convince Moscow that only an intense, coordinated military intervention could save their mutual ally, al-Assad. That fall, Iranian forces and militias they controlled, including Hezbollah from Lebanon, made a decisive intervention on the ground, with Russia providing crucial command-and-control, air and intelligence support.
Rebel groups were no match for this new coalition and within a little more than a year the war more or less ended when eastern Aleppo fell to forces loyal to al-Assad. Fighting continued in peripheral areas, involving Turkey, Kurdish fighters and a small number of US troops in the north; Iranian, Kurdish and US forces in the east; and significant remnants of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
However, re-engagement by the major Arab countries was always a matter of time, because they continue to have significant interests in Syria, but no way securing them. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which have led the reintegration of Damascus into the Arab League, have legitimate concerns involving undue Iranian and Hezbollah influence in the country, Syria’s role in Lebanon, Turkey’s role in Syria, refugee return, and drug smuggling and other crimes associated with the regime, to name just a few.
Although Arab countries have made tough-sounding demands of the regime on many of these issues, it is unlikely that functional reintegration will be contingent on their implementation.
Arab governments were hoping to see the back of al-Assad after the uprising broke out in 2011, but with his survival, they are not prepared to walk away from Syria permanently, and do not feel that they can rely on outside forces like the US, Turkey and Israel to contain the dictator and his foreign supporters.
They have concluded that their only real option is to hold their noses and try to use diplomatic, political and commercial leverage — was well as aid in helping Syria rebuild its shattered infrastructure — to regain influence in where that country is going.
As usual, the UAE — a small power unburdened by regional and global leadership roles — acted first. This opened the door for Saudi Arabia, a much more important country with regional Arab and global Islamic leadership aspirations, and much more complex domestic politics.
This same pattern applied to recent Gulf Arab rapprochements with Iran.
They have been joined by a set of countries including Algeria, Egypt, Oman and others that never really turned their back on the al-Assad regime no matter how bloody things got in Syria.
Qatar wants to sit this out because it feels it can rely on Turkey to pursue their common interests, and it wishes to avoid annoying the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups with which it is aligned.
However, that changes practically nothing.
Washington clearly is not happy, but it did not provide the Arab League with any practical alternatives to ensure its interests. Hence the rather attenuated US protests.
Al-Assad leads a regime soaked in blood. Sadly, the balance of power on the ground in Syria, combined with always-heated regional politics, made this distasteful reintegration inescapable.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident academic at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS