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What will Trump do on Syria?
| Aljazeera.com | - |
Russia
and its leader President Vladimir Putin is also the issue on which
Trump has spoken with perhaps the most clarity and specificity, amid his
otherwise vague and often changing foreign policy positions.
![Naming of Trump's foreign policy and national security teams should clarify his vagueness on foreign policy during campaigning, writes Khouri [Reuters]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ufNhfuHofYxbEN4AxWsZha3lx9UfnUdI0vCwwN_jAQQusttYTABwOzIg558A1RS2DYr-a6_ifM7tjojN_LrGIACJPeUuhkvEPf4buyRNN-MTsg1dBd3lkfZUbK9nLR3FG7zVe0QFu-kunYruA_Ufwk-mOTv7mD1FAmePFNbk8H01-rlbUVHiZfi-pT1BeXveTIOncuEyRoC54g8w=s0-d "What will Trump do on Syria?")
By
Rami G Khouri
Rami G Khouri is a senior public policy fellow in the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut.
Anyone
interested in how the United States president-elect Donald Trump will
fill in the many blanks in his foreign policy should keep an eye on the
Middle East - the most dramatic convergence point of ongoing American
military engagements and Russia's foreign policy.
Russia and its leader President Vladimir Putin is
also the issue on which Trump has spoken with perhaps the most clarity
and specificity, amid his otherwise vague and often changing foreign
policy positions.
Syria, in particular, is where Trump's emphatic
"America-first" principles and his disdain for promoting regime change
and nation-building abroad naturally line up with two of his expressed
views: The US should get out of the war in Syria and avoid destabilising
more Middle Eastern countries, and the US should work with Putin to
defeat terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL, also known as ISIS).
What to expect?
Putin was one of the first foreign leaders to
congratulate Trump on November 9, noting specifically that Russia and
the US shared a special responsibility to "sustain global stability and
security". It played well into Trump's statement from last summer: "Wouldn't it be nice if we got together with Russia and knocked the hell out of ISIL?"
Trump also has not explicitly criticised Russia's
invasion of Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea, suggesting that he
might be comfortable with returning to a Cold War-type unofficial
agreement on spheres of influence for the two great powers.
Trump's penchant to work with Putin, and even
Bashar al-Assad, aligns with another aspect of his anticipated foreign
policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, which is his respect or even
admiration for "strong leaders".
|
Trump has declared his desire to strike hard at ISIL in Syria and
Iraq, without offering any views on whether the US would play any
subsequent role in stabilising both countries. |
This could signal closer relations with President
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, or even
Assad in Syria. They might form the nucleus of a loose fraternity of
leaders in the Middle East that allows the US to continue its
decades-old policy of favouring "stability" under strong leaders to
democratic transformations and civil rights.
President-elect Trump's naming of his foreign
policy and national security teams should clarify further his foreign
policy direction, which has been quite vague on a number of issues
during the past 18 months of campaigning.
He has been clear, however, on his respect for Putin as a strong
leader, his desire to coordinate with Russia where possible (such as
fighting ISIL and "stabilising" Syria), his preference to refrain from
criticising human rights violations in increasingly authoritarian
regimes in the region and to keep the US out of local conflicts that
only destabilise countries (such as Libya, Yemen, and Syria).
Part of this posture reflects his own "America
first" attitude on alliances such as NATO, whose other members he thinks
should pay more of the alliance's costs, and on renegotiating global
trade agreements, so that the US benefits as much as others do. Part of
it also responds to a clear aversion among Americans to more foreign
wars and entanglements by the US.
The Syrian angle
One of the first places he could put this into
action would be Syria, by coordinating with Putin to attack ISIL and
also allowing Assad to remain in power, even in a rump Syrian state that
shares sovereignty with rebel groups in the north of the country.
Trump said
in one presidential debate: "I don't like Assad at all, but Assad is
killing ISIL. Russia is killing ISIL and Iran is killing ISIL,"
indicating that he would worry less about consistent American
relationships in the Middle East, and more about defeating ISIL and
getting the US out of the region.
Trump has declared his desire to strike hard at ISIL in Syria and
Iraq, without offering any views on whether the US would play any
subsequent role in stabilising both countries.
Presumably his incumbency will educate him on the
complexities of these situations on the ground. His main aim seems to be
to resume some calm in war-torn lands in a manner that allows the US to
withdraw its troops from them, even if this means maintaining regimes
such as Assad's and ceding big power influence there to Russia.
 |
He explicitly told an interviewer in October that he prioritised defeating ISIL over removing Assad from power.
What is not clear is how Trump would resolve the
contradictions of maintaining Assad in power, which Assad's ally Iran
would welcome, with its plan to renegotiate the nuclear agreement with
Iran.
He would also have to figure out how to
accommodate the desire of regional allies such as Turkey, Jordan, and
most Arab Gulf states, to topple the Syrian president.
Trump clearly will respond to such tests by
affirming what he feels is best for the US, regardless of the
consequences in the Middle East, perhaps, in part because he can focus
on addressing American domestic challenges only by ending the US'
expensive legacy of fighting non-stop wars in the region for the past 35
years.
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