How the U.S. Can Learn from Its Policy Failures During the Arab Spring

Soldiers shed their uniforms and slip away into the crowds. Families, jubilant and tearful, comb the dungeons of the old regime in search of loved ones, or traces of them. Bedraggled young men in sneakers and mismatched fatigues wander wide-eyed through the opulent salons of the former tyrant’s palace, astonished at the heaping fruits of decades of plunder. The exhilarating scenes last week in Damascus have revived hopes of freedom across the Arab world, but they recall painful memories, too. Baghdad, Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, Sanaa, Khartoum—similar tableaux have unfolded in other Arab capitals throughout the past two decades, and so far none of those stories has ended well.

The bleak odds of escaping authoritarianism or civil war are not limited to the Arab world. The happy “End of History” era, the years after the Cold War when the forward march of liberal democracy once seemed unstoppable, finished roughly around the time of the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. Since then, the number of democracies across the world—with durable governing institutions, peaceful rotations of power, and some semblance of law—has roughly flatlined. Successful democratic transitions, especially after periods of armed conflict, are vanishingly rare.

Nearly a decade ago, as Syria’s Arab Spring revolt collapsed into a sectarian civil war, Thomas Carothers, an eminent American scholar of political transitions at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offered an explanation for why political upheavals around the world had stopped trending toward democracy. U.S. policymakers still pictured themselves and their Western allies as the principal actors who might, for better or worse, reach in from the outside to shape the future of countries in turmoil. But lots of other players had entered the game—smaller and seemingly less powerful states that sought to advance their own interests by cultivating political factions or armed groups inside such countries. Some of those meddlers were foes, like Iran, in post-invasion Iraq, or Russia, in the former Soviet Union. But many were ostensible American clients or allies, such as the Persian Gulf monarchies, which exerted their influence across Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, sometimes with direct military force. Others were states that Western policymakers usually saw as charity cases or democracy-promotion projects, as opposed to spoilers who were simultaneously engaging in shadowy intrigues to undermine democratic transitions outside their own borders—as Pakistan did in Afghanistan, or as Egypt did in Libya and in Sudan. None of these new meddlers could match the capabilities or resources of the U.S. But they cared much, much more than anyone in Washington did about the targets of their meddling. In this new era, Carothers, with his co-author Oren Samet-Marram, wrote, “debates about what role the West should play in a particular country should not be framed as, ‘Should we support democracy?’ as though the choice is between Western countries engaging or the country in question moving ahead politically on its own.” The more appropriate question was “whether the West should engage or instead leave the field clear for other external actors.”

Syria is the paradigmatic case. From the start of the Arab Spring revolts, in early 2011, the movement for democracy in Syria was among the least likely to succeed. It was hard enough that centuries of colonialism and decades of brutal dictatorship had left deep antagonism among its many ethnic groups and religious sects. But, even worse, Syria was also encircled by predatory outside powers—including Iran, the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, Russia, Turkey, and Israel—who were all too ready to exploit those divisions by backing internal proxies in battle against one another, or even interceding with military force. The U.S., despite some lofty rhetoric from President Barack Obama about human rights and red lines, largely stayed out of it, leaving Syria at the mercy of others in the region, and more than a decade of chaos unfolded. Recently, Carothers told me that he saw Syria as “an incredibly severe case” of the internationalization of civil conflict that he had described nearly ten years ago. But it would also be “a telling case of what the world is going to be like” when any important hot spot becomes the center of a many-sided international scramble.

Robert Ford, the American Ambassador to Syria at the start of the Arab Spring, was among those who saw the trouble coming. By the start of 2014, two years after the Syrian uprising began—initially as a nonviolent stand for democracy—Iran had thrown its support behind President Bashar al-Assad while the oil-rich Gulf Arabs were cutting checks to the Sunni jihadists among his opposition regardless of their sectarianism or extremism. The U.S., meanwhile, had restricted itself to providing limited weapons and training to only a small force of carefully vetted, more or less liberal rebel brigades. That February, Ford resigned in frustration at the half-heartedness and ineffectiveness of U.S. policy. On June 10th, he warned in an opinion article in the Times that “more hesitation and unwillingness to commit to enabling the moderate opposition fighters to fight more effectively both the jihadists and the regime simply hasten the day when American forces will have to intervene against Al Qaeda in Syria.” Nineteen days later, ISIS, Al Qaeda’s offshoot, seized control of much of Syria and declared a new “caliphate” stretching across the border into Iraq. In August, U.S. forces began bombing ISIS fighters in Syria, as Ford had predicted. (About nine hundred U.S. troops remain in Syria to prevent an ISIS resurgence.)

In 2012, Ford, as Ambassador, also initiated the terrorist designation of an Al Qaeda-linked faction then known as Al Nusra Front. In an interview last week, he told me that the U.S. had had “good intelligence” about the group’s “organic links to Al Qaeda in Iraq, and we wanted to nip in the bud the Syrian opposition relationship to the Al Nusra Front.” Yet stomping out Al Nusra, he said, became “one of our many failures.” The same group, which publicly split from Al Qaeda in 2017, eventually merged with others to form Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. It has more or less controlled the Syrian province of Idlib for the past several years, and in recent days led the lightning takeover of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus that toppled Assad.

Yet Ford, who is as familiar as anyone with the failures of American policy in Syria and the Arab Spring, told me he was hopeful that, by learning from those mistakes, the United States could still help give the Syrians a fighting chance at stable self-governance. He argued that Assad’s sudden collapse—“one of the moments when something unexpected and extraordinary happens, when things are in a state of flux and people are making things up as they go along, in situations they hadn’t planned for”—had opened a rare opportunity, “when diplomatic council, delivered directly, can have the most influence.” Western diplomats could never be “directive” to the Syrians on the ground, Ford told me, but they could nonetheless call the attention of the rebels now running Damascus to examples of what has and has not worked in other political transitions—so the diplomats would be “trying to help them work something out in a positive direction.” (The remains of the Syrian government is out of money and desperate for aid, which may give Western governments leverage in cajoling the transitional authorities toward negotiation and compromise.)

As a first step, Ford told me, the U.S. should begin where it has the most clout: the Kurdish forces who control northeastern Syria. The Kurds, operating under the name Syrian Democratic Forces, have worked closely with U.S. military and intelligence services during a decade of battles to help defeat and contain ISIS. In other words, in the patchwork of foreign-backed proxy forces that are now threatening to carve up Syria or undermine a stable transition, the Kurds are ours. Yet the Syrian Democratic Forces are also linked to a fairly undemocratic Kurdish-nationalist movement. They are an offshoot (if not an arm) of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K.; the U.S. and European Union have designated that parent organization a terrorist group. The government of Turkey, whose population is about twenty-per-cent Kurdish, considers the P.K.K. an almost existential security threat and insists the American-backed Kurdish forces in Syria are little more than a P.K.K. front. And Turkey is now poised to play a decisive role in Syria’s future. The Turks were a major backer of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and the Turkish intelligence chief, in an apparent victory lap, landed in Damascus just days after Assad fled. Turkey is also the sole sponsor of another Syrian militia, under the misleading name Syrian National Army, which has worked for years to contain the Kurds. Turkish jets started striking Kurdish forces almost as soon as the rebels rolled into Damascus, and the American-backed Kurds and Turkish-backed militias in northern Syria began exchanging fire—an ominous start to the post-Assad era.

Ford, who is now a scholar at the Middle East Institute and stays in close contact with many inside Syria, told me that so far the American message to the Kurds has been “we’ve got your back.” That, in turn, has encouraged the Kurds to “dig in,” push to expand their territory, and resist Turkish demands. Instead, Ford told me, American military and intelligence liaisons should tell the Kurds that “things have changed and this is a time when you need to make some concessions.” He added, “It would be reasonable to ask the new government in Damascus to make some concessions in exchange, and to ask the Turks to make some concessions, but they need to engage in bargaining, to build consensus.” (In a U.S.-brokered deal with Turkey, the Kurdish forces recently withdrew from one predominantly Arab Syrian town, Manbij, which Ford called a hopeful first step.)

Second, Ford told me, U.S. diplomats need to start talking to the many other players now seated at the table—from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army to small factions like the Dara’a Free Syrian Army to the leaders of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the strongest of the many armed forces now operating in Syria. “If we can’t pick up the phone to the people in Damascus, I don’t know how we are going to deliver any message, because depending on a third party risks misrepresentation of our message, or misrepresentation of the response back,” he said. “We need to be on the ground and engaged with all the actors.”

The conundrum of whether and how the U.S. should deal with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham has preoccupied public discussion of American policy toward Syria. The group’s current leader, who is best known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, joined Al Qaeda in Iraq during its insurgency against the U.S. occupation. He spent five years in American military prisons there, and the U.S. is still offering a ten-million-dollar bounty for his capture. But Ford, who first sanctioned Jolani, told me he has been persuaded by accounts that Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and its leader have become “interestingly pragmatic in a way that they were not in 2012.” The group governed their territory in religiously conservative Idlib with a strong hand toward its political rivals but also with bureaucratic efficiency and, over time, a measure of tolerance, and Jolani has recently opened negotiations with representatives of the Alawites, a religious sect linked to the Assads that Al Qaeda and ISIS had deemed apostate. “That, to me, was shocking, in a positive way,” Ford told me. He noted that Jolani had also welcomed Western assistance in securing chemical weapons supplies left over after Assad’s fall—a move that would be almost unthinkable from a jihadist like Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (Jolani has now resumed using his civilian name, Ahmed el-Sharaa.)

The Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said on Saturday that the U.S. had made “contact” with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, signalling that the Biden Administration may be testing that pragmatism. But Dareen Khalifa, an Egyptian senior adviser with the independent International Crisis Group, told me that the U.S. urgently needed to rethink many of its other punitive measures toward Syrian players, as well. She said that after more than a decade of all-out civil war—one that largely pitted Sunni extremists against an Iranian-backed dictator—“the U.S. has imposed a whole web of sanctions and designations on virtually every key actor and every sector in Syria today,” including the institutions of the holdover government. The economic sanctions continue to punish the post-Assad economy. And the terrorist designations of Jolani, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and others cut them off from coöperation or negotiation with Western-friendly Syrian expatriates, who could risk expulsion from their foreign havens. Khalifa urged the Western governments “to put in place waivers or carve-outs for negotiations,” potentially on a contingent six-month basis, so that they could be restored as a penalty for abuses.

Ford warned that the U.S., in opening communication with various unsavory Syrian actors, should learn from its experience in Iraq by adopting both realistic expectations and demands for accountability. “When security forces commit atrocities—which I think is almost a certainty in the case of Syria—we should not just say, ‘Oh no, we told them not to do that!’ We need to say to the commanders, ‘That is not acceptable. When is the trial and when will you announce it?’ And of course it is going to be public, so there is an element of naming and shaming.” If history is any indication, many rebel-militia leaders may now have their eyes on formal positions in a new government—as ministers, members of parliament, or ambassadors, perhaps—giving them an interest in fortifying their own credibility.

And yet Ford acknowledged that the biggest obstacle may be outside Syria’s borders: interference by regional powers, especially the ones who have already sponsored internal factions or conducted military operations—the ones who fuelled more than a decade of war. Restraining such external meddling is the third necessary step. Ford noted that both Iran and Russia, the two open adversaries of the U.S. who were involved in Syria, appear to have pulled back, removing potential obstructions to American input. By far, the two most influential neighbors are Turkey, which backed Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, and Israel, which indirectly helped push Assad from power by crippling his Iranian-backed allies. Israel has already conducted military operations to destroy much of the remaining Syrian military and occupy what had been a buffer zone in the Golan Heights. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially justified those actions as a preëmptive strike to keep weapons and territory out of the hands of Islamist extremists, then issued a triumphant statement from the top of Mt. Hermon, in newly captured Syrian territory, indicating that Israel intended to establish a base there—a step certain to provoke backlash in Damascus and Ankara. Israel has also historically coöperated with Kurdish forces in Iraq, stirring suspicions in Damascus that Israel could now strike an alliance of convenience with the Syrian Kurds.

Ford told me that Turkey and Israel, “the two rising powers” on opposite sides of Syria, “both operate out of a deep sense of moral superiority and historical legitimacy but also acute fear.” To achieve stability, any new Syrian government must guarantee Israel’s security from cross-border attacks by Islamist fighters and guarantee Turkey’s security and territorial integrity against Kurdish separatists. But both Turkey, a member of NATO, and Israel are American allies, putting the U.S. in a position to broker negotiations and urge restraint.

Of all the potential regional spoilers, Ford told me that “the first ones to talk to are the Turks and the Israelis.” Then, he continued, “you also need to talk to the Emiratis and you have to talk to the Saudis and the Jordanians and the Iraqis and the Russians.” Talks with the Iranians would also be useful but require an intermediary, perhaps in Iraq.

Ford spent a day last week answering questions about Syria at the State Department, and there are signs, like Blinken’s comments about making contact with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, that the Biden Administration agrees with at least some of his advice. The attitude of the incoming Trump Administration, though, is a wild card. At one point during his first Administration, President-elect Donald Trump sought a full withdrawal of the remaining American forces from Syria as an apparent favor to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, even though Erdoğan was threatening to crush the U.S.’s Kurdish allies if the U.S. troops got out of the way. Pentagon and State Department officials managed to stave off Trump’s avowed withdrawal; Trump’s statements since the takeover of Damascus have suggested he’d still like to wash his hands of Syria and leave it to Turkey. In a social-media post days before the toppling of the Assad regime, Trump showed little interest in any American role in Syria at all, no matter what other players might seek to fill that vacuum. “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” he wrote. “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” At a press conference this week, Trump appeared to congratulate Turkey on what he called a relatively bloodless “unfriendly takeover” of the country next door. Yet his strong bond with Netanyahu may yet exert an unpredictable countervailing force on a second Trump Administration.

Trump’s hands-off instincts, of course, match the U.S. approach to the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolts, including Syria’s. Anas el-Gomati, a thirty-eight-year-old Libyan political analyst I met in Tripoli after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi, told me that the recent scenes in Damascus “echo in the Libyan memory—the prison searches, the palace raids, the revelations from the archives. It is the same architecture of tyranny with a different address, the same euphoria.” For a time, he said, the flood of international news media into Tripoli had given Libyans the impression that the West for the first time saw “their humanity” and cared about their future. But attention drifted, the United States “stumbled” and backed away, and “the proxies started shopping,” he said. Rival militias, seeking money and weapons, turned to the Emiratis, Egyptians, Qataris, or Turks—all nominal American partners—even as they carved up the country, its security forces, and its oil wealth. ISIS established a beachhead, until American air strikes and British commandos helped to drive it out. In time, an ambitious but frustrated warlord turned to the Russians, who sent in mercenaries and established an enduring foothold. Gomati told me, “When it comes to the U.S., it’s not about limited capabilities. It’s about political will. But in Libya, and maybe in Syria, the West decided that chaos was acceptable, that it was too far away, that it won’t harm our European allies. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.” ♦