Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
The West’s decision to connive in its own decline can be traced to one precise moment: when, having lost the vote on supporting Franco-American air strikes against Assad, David Cameron stood up at the despatch box and said “I get it.”
He was preceded by a deeply mendacious speech by Ed Miliband, then Leader of the Opposition, and succeeded by Barack Obama pulling the plug on the operation, minutes, a French source told me at the time, before the Rafale jets were to take off from the Charles de Gaulle carrier.
That failure spawned the refugee crisis, assiduously exploited by the far right, and gave Russia and Iran (through Hezbollah) a free hand to put down the rebellion, first opening up space for ISIS (Daesh) and teaching Russia a further lesson that the West was a paper tiger with little resolve, and easily intimidated.
But Russia has overstretched itself — losing three quarters of a million men killed or injured, 20,000 artillery pieces, 10,000 tanks and almost 400 aircraft in its attempt to subjugate Ukraine. It has little to spare for Assad; and Hezbollah, has been eviscerated by Israel, quite possibly because opening its ranks up to cope with the scale of its involvement in the Syrian civil war, made it easier to infiltrate.
Without its allies under pressure, the Assad regime has had to withdraw from Homs under a pincer attack by the jihadist HTS (supported by Turkey) and the Kurdish-Marxist SDF (decidedly not supported by Turkey). If the rebels continue to push south and manage to cut off Hama, they will be able to isolate Russia’s naval base in Tartus. Unconfirmed reports suggest Russia may be putting its ships to sea, just in case.
The rout of Assad’s forces has two underlying causes – the first is that it rules by fear and so commands no loyalty from Syrians outside pro-regime circles when it is on the defensive. The second is because Russia’s strength was only relative to a Western lack of resolve. It exploited the West’s weariness to make its power felt in a relatively technologically backward region, but couldn’t summon the strength to hold off rebels who had regrouped.
Syria is once again divided into three: a zone held by broadly Islamist rebels in the north, in which Aleppo is the main population centre, that receives logistical support from Turkey. The north-eastern, oil-producing region, that contains ISIS’s old capital of Raqqah, now controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a largely Kurdish force, and hosting 900 US troops, and the regime base around Damascus.
The pessimistic view is that this will lead to more years of indecisive war, with the regime unable to control the country, but the rebels lacking the strength to depose it, while ISIS continues to destabilise the country in the East.
The more optimistic one is that, like the Croat-Bosniak advance in August 1995, which deprived the Bosnian Serbs of enough territory to force them to the negotiating table, this latest rebel advance, together with the conditions that made it possible, open up the most promising circumstances for negotiations in Syria in a decade.
The regime is now weaker.
Russia is sufficiently straitened that it might be willing to give up a burden it cannot afford (in exchange, for example, of being allowed to keep its Mediterranean naval base). Iran, principally interested in Syria as a bridge to Lebanon whence it could use Hezbollah to threaten Israel, has found Hezbollah thoroughly defeated. Erodgan’s government in Turkey is under heavy pressure to repatriate Syrian refugees. All that’s missing is the intensive US diplomacy that had, in the pre-Obama era, been able to impose deals that stuck.
If Obama (and later Biden) lacked the political will to impose the costs that make peace settlements stick, Trump, though he favours the appearance of deals, is missing the attention span needed to craft ones that work.
A wiser Israeli government might be able to nudge him, through the Republican Party, towards a more coherent agreement in Syria, that marginalised Iran, kept the regime in check, and reconstructed the country’s north sufficiently to provide a bulwark against ISIS. That this would also improve conditions in Northern Syria would, unfortunately be an afterthought, but we should be grateful even incidental improvements. Such a wise Israeli government, which incoming Secretary of State Marc Rubio would take seriously, does not currently exist. So while Syrian rebels’ progress is welcome, we should be expect the war to drag on.