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What we failed to learn from Syria Russian belligerence and US incompetence are familiar

Welcome to Syria (Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)

Welcome to Syria (Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images)


March 23, 2022   7 mins

The 11th anniversary of the war in Syria passed earlier this month with little notice, eclipsed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the two wars are intimately connected. It was Russia’s entry into the Syrian war in 2013, at the invitation of the United States, that set the stage for its initial incursions into Ukraine the following year; the prequel to the full-scale invasion last month.

A year into the war in Syria, in 2012, President Obama declared that chemical weapons attacks there were a red line that, if crossed, would trigger “enormous consequences”. When the White House concluded “with high confidence” that Bashar al Assad’s forces were responsible for a Sarin attack that killed 1,429 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, Obama was placed in a bind. If he didn’t do something, it would look like a capitulation. But any reprisal risked drawing the US into another Middle Eastern war and jeopardising the nuclear deal with Iran that was the linchpin of Obama’s foreign policy agenda. That was where Moscow came in.

Russia volunteered to oversee the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons program in a deal that would allow the White House to save face without threatening its pivot towards Iran. It might have seemed like a win-win proposition. But Russia was hardly neutral: Moscow was both a key ally of Iran and of the Assad dynasty, and saw its role in the Syrian war as the way to acquire its long-sought-after naval base on the eastern Mediterranean. “Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran,” explains Levant analyst Tony Badran. Making Moscow a “peacemaker” meant that, “for all the moralising rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained [Obama’s] principal partner in the Syrian arena”.

American rhetoric on Syria was anti-Assad and pro-democracy. It emphasised funding “moderate rebel” groups fighting against the government while protecting humanitarian interests and pushing for a negotiated end to the war. But those goals were incompatible with the other US aim, which was to protect the Iran deal at all costs, a goal which, as Obama put it in 2015, “allows those who are allied with Assad right now — allows the Russians, allows the Iranians to ensure that their equities are respected”.

Normally, wars end when one side gives up or the parties reach a compromise that spares them further losses and satisfies enough of their interests to be worth taking. But whose interests were being served in Syria, where the US, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf Arab states all played a role and had “equities” to protect?

Syria, the bloodiest war of the modern era, provides the perfect example of what can happen when a series of poorly considered but urgent-seeming interventions by outside powers turn a local conflict into an international battleground. Something remarkably similar is now happening in Ukraine. In Syria, it took roughly two years before the local dimensions of the conflict were overrun by flows of foreign fighters, money, and weapons pouring in across its borders. A smaller version has unfolded rapidly in Ukraine.

In Syria, American strategic incoherence — effectively supporting both sides — made the conflict more transactional and open-ended. Blurring the local stakes invited a greater number of outside countries and substate groups to enter the war and pursue their own interests, creating a seemingly intractable multiparty conflict that was eventually settled through Assad’s Russian-backed campaign of brutal attrition war. It also emboldened Russia, which recognised that by treating Syria as a bargaining chip in its new partnership with Iran, Washington had set the precedent for a new era of great power conflict. Larger countries, it seemed, could carve out their claims from smaller nations with little fear of reprisal from the US led “international community”.

Less than a year after entering Syria, in February 2014, Russia launched its initial invasion into Ukraine targeting Crimea and the Donbas. Encountering little resistance, Russia stepped up its campaign in Syria, where in September 2015 Putin ordered airstrikes to rescue his embattled ally Assad. Of course Putin declared that these were “preventitive” measures, necessary to “destroy militants and terrorists on the territories that they already occupy, not wait for them to come to our house”. The same rhetoric is now used to justify the assault on Ukraine, another preventative war according to Putin, but this time a campaign of “denazification” and “demilitarisation”.

Play the full sequence out from 2013 to the present and Russia’s arrival as a “peacekeeper” in the Syrian war, becomes the first step in a series of expansionist military interventions that led to the invasion of Ukraine last month. The experience in Syria, which intensified after 2015, provided the Russian military with “priceless combat experience”, according to the Chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. Russia’s repeated attacks on anti-government rebels and Syrian civilians gave its military the chance to test out “more than 320 types of different weapons” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu bragged last year.

While Ukraine’s relationship with the US is far stronger than American ties to Syrian rebel groups, there are parallels. Washington has been dangling Nato membership in front of Kyiv for more than a decade, despite having no intention of ever bringing Ukraine into the alliance. The coy approach to Nato membership, in which no concrete steps were taken but the offer was never taken off the table, appeared to provide Ukraine’s political leadership with a symbolic chip to play while putting Moscow on the defensive. That strategy has backfired, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently acknowledged in an interview in which he said that Nato leaders told him directly, “you’re not going to be a Nato member, but publicly, the doors will remain open”. This in-between status had set the stage for Russia’s invasion, Zelenskyy said.

As deals such as the Nord Stream II pipeline — hence Europe’s energy dependency on Moscow — made the limits of the West’s commitments to Ukraine clear, the gamesmanship over Nato helped shift Putin onto the offensive in his pursuit of restoring a “Greater Russia”. In a replay of Syria, the US aggravated a conflict in which it has no immediate security interests by making promises it had no intention of keeping, causing Ukraine to dangerously overestimate the level of support it could count on in the event of a Russian attack. And once again, as the Biden administration tries to revive the Obama nuclear deal with Iran, Washington is using the same diplomatic doublespeak, sanctioning Russia for its role in Ukraine and warning about chemical weapons, while simultaneously offering the Russians sanctions relief to support the new Iran deal.

Meanwhile, foreign fighters are arriving to support both sides of the conflict. Ukrainian officials put the number of volunteers who had arrived in the country at 20,000 by the second week of March. Russia appears to be following the playbook used by Iran when it imported thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, and other Iranian-backed militias including the Fatemiyoun Army, made up of Shia ethnic Hazaras from Afghanistan, into Syria. Last Sunday, Chechnya’s Putin-loyalist authoritarian leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, posted a message online saying that he was in Ukraine and claiming to have deployed 10,000 Chechens soldiers to join him in the war there. There are additional reports, so far unconfirmed, of Russia hiring as many as 20,000 Syrian soldiers to fight Ukraine.

The numbers on both sides may be exaggerated, but thousands of foreigners pouring into Ukraine is one sign that the process of internationalisation that took years in Syria is happening now in mere weeks. As the conflict globalises it becomes harder to resolve — there are now many parties who feel they have a stake, instead of only two — and more susceptible to unpredictable escalations.

The size and fervour of the online war complicates matters further. Syria may have been the first “very online” war but the phenomenon has gone into overdrive in Ukraine. While twitter users splintered into bitterly opposed factions during the war in Syria, today Western social media is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. Some of this consensus is surely a result of the bans and blocks that silence “pro-Russian” accounts or those spreading misinformation; but the structural inducements to social conformity on social media play a role as well. As the emotional drive to support Ukraine automatically filters out “bad” news, it could have the perverse effect of discouraging a settlement. If Ukraine is really crushing the Russian invaders, as the generally optimistic accounts of the war on social media suggest (in contrast to the consensus among military experts), it reduces the incentives to make difficult compromises necessary to end the war.

At the moment it appears that the shared desire to avoid a siege on Kyiv, taking tens of thousands of lives while levelling the city, may create the pressure necessary for both parties find that settlement. But that scenario shouldn’t blind us to the parallels with Syria. The dangerous combination of Russian belligerence and US strategic incoherence is once again on display. But Ukraine carries a far greater risk of existential catastrophe because it involves a nuclear-armed Russia that is now at war, not only with other states but with decentralised digital networks.

The spontaneous boycott against all things Russian, which has included bans on ballet performances, university courses on Dostoevsky, and ordinary Russian civilians ability to use their bank cards, provides an example of a digital network in action. No individual organised the boycott or delivered instructions on what was to be banned. The boycott spread  like other online “cancellation” campaigns, rapidly scaling up through the hyper-connectivity of digital social networks in a self-perpetuating phenomenon. These networks are borderless, leaderless, and operating at speeds far exceeding the capacity of individual actors to calculate their consequences.

“The legacy state is becoming a laser pointer,” the cryptocurrency pioneer Balaji Srinivasan observed. “The centralised entity points, the decentralised actors shoot.” But what if the laser pointer is wielded by a leader with an unsteady hand or an actor unsure of their goals? Could the state accidentally provoke a digital swarm attack that triggers a nuclear war?

“Prior sanctions regimes took years to get to the place that we got to in just a few days,” Ari Redbord, a former sanctions official in the US Treasury Department told me. He described the level of sanctions placed on Russia as “the nuclear option”. Redbord was only talking about official government measures. The “nuclear” economic strike of state sanctions only accounted for the official measures in what was a far larger economic attack on Russia that also includes the actions taken by dozens of private corporations. Once the first corporations such as Google, Mastercard, and Visa began taking steps to cut off and penalise Russia, it triggered a cascade with no clear goal or end point. Suddenly, companies which didn’t take action against Russia were seen as suspect. So far, little attention has been given to the consequences of the cascade but the global economy may be feeling the repercussions into the next century.

Sanctions have pushed Moscow closer to China while also threatening the dollar’s continued dominance. “We have entered a geopolitical depression that will have massive economic and financial consequences well beyond Ukraine,” says the economist Nouriel Roubini, in an essay pointing to the prospect of stagflationary recession and the increased probability of a hot war between major powers over the next decade.

There is reason to hope that the war in Ukraine will not be as drawn out or catastrophic as Syria. But even if settlement is swiftly reached, the impact of having disconnected the Russian economy from the rest of the globe will have a profound long-term effect on global stability. It would be a good time for great powers to step back from the abyss and recognise the danger of globalising local conflicts. There are only so many chances to learn that lesson in wars with nuclear powers.


Jacob Siegel is Senior Writer at Tablet Magazine

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John Barclay
John Barclay
2 years ago

Liberals will be the death of us all.

Milos Bingles
Milos Bingles
2 years ago
Reply to  John Barclay

Give over.

Last edited 2 years ago by Milos Bingles
Tim Duckworth
Tim Duckworth
2 years ago
Reply to  John Barclay

Trouble is most of them have been nowhere and write all this sanctimonious and pseudo intellectual stuff about other cultures with no real data. I was in Tunisia either side of its Arab Spring event, I used to live in Syria and have travelled quite widely in the ME generally. Syria’s disaster could be seen coming as soon as the Obama axis began to meddle and so we go…… If Assad had not survived the sort of cataclysm threatening now would have already occurred.

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago
Reply to  Tim Duckworth

I agree about the meddling. However the US war party is spread across both parties, not one.

A Spetzari
A Spetzari
2 years ago

Aware that the media spent 2016-2018 crying into their soy lattes – but is there a collective amnesia about the administration after Obama’s who didn’t enable and encourage Russia?
This analysis is missing a key part of the Syrian conflict where the US did ensure no further red lines were crossed – the 2017 Sharyat strikes and Ja’Din incidents to name but two.
A lot of the points still stand in this article but its arguments are weakened by the glaring omission of instances where the US did redress their mistakes and reset the balance for nearly 4 years, long before incidents in Ukraine.
Not a Trump fanboy but it’s ridiculous. “We” did learn the mistakes – but rapidly “unlearned” them.

Last edited 2 years ago by A Spetzari
R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

Remember when Hilary Clinton publicly ‘reset’ relations with Russia after they invaded Georgia? Twitter doesn’t.

Last edited 2 years ago by R Wright
Richard Pearse
Richard Pearse
2 years ago
Reply to  A Spetzari

Excellent point: you don’t have to be a Trump zealot to realize how awful Obama and Biden have been at everything they touch. Trump’s agents were able to secure a kind of peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia UAE, standing against Iran (which Biden has summarily botched), the Nordstream II was stopped (which Biden summarily botched), and the US was energy-independent (which Biden botched on Day 1 of his reign of error).

Shouldn’t the lesson of Syria/Ukraine be to root out Obama/Bidenism by the roots?

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago
Reply to  Richard Pearse

Between Saudi and Iran, the US should be neutral.

AL Tinkcombe
AL Tinkcombe
2 years ago

Once again, we find that the US is ultimately responsible for everything that goes wrong in the world. The underlying assumption here seems to be that if only the US were “competent,” it would intervene when appropriate and in an appropriate way, abstain from intervention when appropriate, and the world would as a result tick along like a well-adjusted clock. This assumption and the analysis that results from it denies agency to all other actors; it sounds ridiculous when stated baldly, but is implied by a lot of commentary on international affairs. Importantly, it ignores the fact that no one knows in advance how anything will turn out. It’s tempting but misleading to read later events back into history. State and non-state actors act based on assumptions that may be inaccurate and information that is only partial. Things then happen that no one could have predicted. Analysis that connects results to later consequences tends to be tightly argued when causation is multiple. On top of which, critics often start the timeline of criticism at a point useful to them. One example: the many indictments of NATO ambiguity on the subject of Ukrainian admission, leading to blaming NATO for provoking the invasion of Ukraine, neglect the reason why countries formerly part of the Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact might want some protection against the state to their east. There is little about US foreign intervention in the last fifty years I supported at the time; I see no reason to change my mind. But blaming the US alone is too easy.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
2 years ago
Reply to  AL Tinkcombe

Thank you! That is one of the best comments I have ever read on UnHerd! There was the long-term success of Kennan’s Cold War containment policy, but that example is very much the exception, at least in the West. All sides generally put far too much emphasis put by of the role of deliberate long-term policies, intended consequences and even conspiracies on the outcome of complex events. These have multiple actors interacting with each other and having to read each others’ intentions. This is not easy when a key human attribute is the ability to dissemble, even to ourselves!

Warren T
Warren T
2 years ago

“If Ukraine is really crushing the Russian invaders, as the generally optimistic accounts of the war on social media suggest (in contrast to the consensus among military experts),…”
Doesn’t that sentence summarize the world we live in?

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago

Relatively good article there. Although the whole US alliance with moderate rebels (very few were moderate) was elided, and the US invited Russia into Syria? Did they have that right?

Anna Bramwell
Anna Bramwell
2 years ago

Assad invited Russia into Syria.

Franz Von Peppercorn
Franz Von Peppercorn
2 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

I know. The article said that the US was the country doing the “invite”, although I feel the author was keen to blame Obama for this.

Clyde Smith
Clyde Smith
2 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

I remember this clearly – Assad invited Russia into Syria and then Russia told the US that the US was there illegally since Russia WAS invited into Syria by Syria and the US was NOT invited into Syria by Syria

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
2 years ago
Reply to  Anna Bramwell

US agreed to and supported Russia taking charge of Syrian chemical weapon problem.

Martin Logan
Martin Logan
2 years ago

The article fails to highlight the main difference between Ukraine and Syria: here, Russia is one of the two main antagonists–not an ally of the main antagonist, who can shift the balance decisively.
As Assad was in 2013, Putin is now bogged down in a war he cannot win on his own terms. Moreover, that a world-wide recession has been triggered is not due to the US or western elites. It’s the inevitable result of Putin’s invasion. Ditto for the likely food crisis.
This is not to excuse the many mistakes made by the US and the West in Syria. But unless China somehow intervenes significantly, as Russia did in Syria, any resemblance to that earlier conflict is at best tangential.
As Assad would have had to do before 2013, Putin now looks set to accept an unpleasant compromise–if not a defeat.

David McKee
David McKee
2 years ago

Fascinating article, and well worth reading. The link to Tony Badran’s article is worth a read.
This has the ring of truth to it. America is desperate to stop Iran getting the atomic bomb. It’s a praiseworthy goal, but the price gets bigger all the time.
It’s not just Israel and Saudi that’s been thrown under a bus (those Russian arms will find their way to Hezbollah and Iran’s clients in the Yemeni civil war), but the whole of Eastern Europe has been destabilised.

Tim Duckworth
Tim Duckworth
2 years ago

Where did my comment go