The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s rule is an opportunity for the US to overhaul its bankrupt Syria policy. The US should have abandoned this policy years earlier, but now there are no longer any pretexts for continuing the collective punishment of the Syrian people and the illegal American military presence on Syrian soil. The time has come for rapid sanctions relief and immediate withdrawal of US forces. The US must finally leave Syria alone.
US troops currently in Syria have no good reason to be there. Successive administrations have kept troops in Syria in the name of combating the Islamic State, but it has been clear for years that their real unstated purpose has been to oppose Iranian influence. Iran withdrew its forces from Syria prior to Assad’s departure, and it is unlikely that a new Syrian government will be welcoming them back anytime soon. Now Washington can’t use the specter of Iran to excuse keeping hundreds of soldiers in a country where they have no business being.
Whatever form the Syrian government takes, it will be within its rights to demand the departure of all foreign forces from its territory. The US shouldn’t wait to be told to leave. It would be a good idea to remove US forces quickly from the country to avoid any chance of conflicts or accidental clashes. Once US troops are out of Syria, there will be no reason to have a US military presence in Iraq, either.
The US has been illegally at war in Syria for the last nine years. Congress never authorized any use of force or deployments in Syria, and there is no international mandate for US forces to operate in Syria. The US has been flagrantly violating international law and trampling on Syrian sovereignty for almost a decade. That needs to end at once.
Now that Assad is no longer in power, there is no possible justification for keeping punishing broad sanctions in place. These sanctions were always destructive and mainly harmed the civilian population by throttling the economy and preventing reconstruction. Sanctions have exacerbated the country’s severe humanitarian crisis and impeded the delivery of aid. Broad sanctions were a terrible policy when Assad was still in control, and they are completely indefensible now that he is gone. Congress should repeal existing sanctions legislation, and the next administration should lift or suspend as many sanctions as they can.
The US must not make the same mistake it made in Afghanistan when it penalized the Afghan people with economic warfare after Washington’s client government collapsed. The worst thing that the US could do right now is to delay sanctions relief for Syria or attempt to use sanctions as leverage to try to influence the direction of Syrian politics. Syria’s future is for its people to decide, and the US should butt out.
Trump has signaled that he has no interest in US involvement in Syrian affairs in the future. That is welcome news if it holds true. The last time that Trump indicated that he wanted to get US forces out of Syria, he met significant resistance from within his own administration and from the military and he ended up leaving a military presence in the country. This time nothing should stop a complete withdrawal from happening. It cannot be framed as a concession to Assad, because he is no longer there. It cannot be misrepresented as a gift to Iran, since Iran has already pulled out of the country.
The Syrian war proved beyond any doubt that outside intervention intensifies and prolongs conflict. If not for the endless and destructive meddling of the US, European states, Russia, Turkey, the Gulf states, and Israel, the war in Syria might have ended much earlier with far fewer casualties. The people of Syria were made to suffer for the disastrous ambitions of these outside powers. If Syria’s neighbors and other powers had respected Syria’s sovereignty, both Syria and the wider region might have suffered much less violence and upheaval.
The US should be prepared to assist in humanitarian relief efforts when asked, but otherwise Syria has received enough “help” from Washington to last a lifetime. The US should move quickly to remove all impediments to foreign investment and reconstruction that it has set up. Then it should keep its hands off a country that it has done so much to devastate.
Daniel Larison is a columnist for Responsible Statecraft. He is contributing editor at Antiwar.com and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLarison and at his blog, Eunomia, here.
