Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Syrians are rejoicing at the announcement on Tuesday by President Donald J. Trump that he will lift U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, at the advice of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, among others. Saudi Arabia gave Trump the quid pro quos he wanted for such a favor, including a pledge of $600 billion in investments in the US and the purchase of military equipment worth over $100 billion.
Regardless of why Trump is taking the step, it is a welcome one, though it is attended by dangers. Economic sanctions have not been demonstrated to have any significant success in overthrowing governments or substantially changing their behavior. They have been shown, however, to drive ordinary civilians in the sanctioned country into poverty and to worsen their health. Since middle-income countries (and above) are more likely to be democracies, crashing a country’s economy probably dooms it to dictatorship. The US government is obsessed with sanctions, having slapped them on fully one third of the world’s population. Sanctions creep is driven in part by politicians who want to be seen as doing something dramatic about some problematic government but who do not wish to actually do anything. Sanctions are the bravado of the pusillanimous.
US sanctions were were preventing Syrian reconstruction and discouraging investment in the country, which wasn’t good for anyone, as Christian Science Monitor correspondent Taylor Luck argued at the now-DOGEd Wilson Center. He pointed to sanctions’ effect on keeping cash out of people’s hands, making it hard to get needed medicines, and hard to reconstruct or remove landmines. Luck notes, “One of the clearest impacts of American sanctions is Syria’s energy sector, where one-third of electricity stations are completely destroyed and another one-third are in need of repairs and foreign-made parts.”
The US economic sanctions on the Baathist government of Bashar al-Assad had some rationale, since it was among the more murderous regimes in modern history. For those of us appalled by the Israeli total war on Gaza, it is worth remembering that Al-Assad killed many more Syrian civilians with indiscriminate “barrel bombs” and other forms of bombardment than the Israeli Air Force has killed Palestinians. The regime in Damascus is alleged to have tortured and killed over 10,000 helpless political prisoners, and substantial photographic evidence for this practice has been presented. Nevertheless, these sanctions did not overthrow the regime. It was kept in place by Russian aerial intervention, and when Russia put its resources instead into its war on Ukraine, it left al-Assad in the lurch.
Bashar al-Assad was overthrown last December and Syria now has a transitional government. The new government, admittedly, has worrisome characteristics. Its core is guerrillas from the Syria Liberation Council (HTS), some of whom formerly belonged to the al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (the Succor Front). The new self-annointed president, Ahmad al-Shara (nom de guerre: Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), is a former detainee of the US in Iraq, accused of terrorism.
So it is hard for most Americans to celebrate the take-over of Damascus by people who routinely referred to Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the masterminds of the attacks of September 11, 2001, in reverential tones with honorifics (Sheikh Osama and Sheikh al-Zawahiri).
On the other hand, HTS has evolved away from its al-Qaeda roots and spent years running the Syrian province of Idlib, with which it did a pragmatic job. Even though hard line Salafi fundamentalists of the HTS sort hate Sufism (mystical orders) and see its Syrian leaders as having been complicit with the Baath regime, they did not persecute the Sufis. They were harder on the small community of Druze (an offshoot of Ismaili Shiism). And they actively fought the leftist, feminist Kurds over territory. They are highly patriarchal and want to impose restrictions on women, though they are not Taliban and don’t oppose women’s education or entry into professions. Some of their elements at least are conducting reprisals against Druze and Alawi Shiites.
Because of Europe’s fear of Salafis, the European Union and member states such as Germany have tried to use the prospect of lifting the al-Assad-era sanctions as a carrot to get the new government to guarantee more personal freedoms for women and minorities and to commit to democracy.
Ahmad al-Shara, however, steadfastly refuses to let the word “democracy” pass his lips. He has postponed elections for three years, and who knows if the Salafis now in power will be willing to share power with the majority of Syrians who are not Salafis and don’t share their values. Some 35 percent of Syrians are religious and ethnic minorities (Christians, Alawi Shiites, leftist or Sufi Kurds, etc.). Of the 65 percent from a Sunni Arab background, millions in Damascus, Aleppo and other cities have a secular mindset from growing up under the Baathist socialist nationalists. Many rural Syrians are members of Sufi orders. Genuine democratic elections in Syria would not return a Salafi government.
You will note that there are sanctions on Russia to get it to stop its war on Ukraine. There are sanctions on the Taliban to make them step down. There are sanctions on Iran. There are US sanctions on a third of the world. They do not, on the whole, have the desired effect.
Photo of Damascus by Chermiti Mohamed: https://www.pexels.com/photo/rainy-day-stroll-in-historic-middle-eastern-market-30403096/
Israel and its partisans for their part hoped to leverage the sanctions by forcing the al-Shara government to recognize Israel. This tactic had been applied to Sudan by former Secretary of State Antony Blinken in the Biden administration. Blinken only lifted sanctions that had been put on the war criminal and long time dictator Omar al-Bashir once the military junta then cohabiting with a civilian interim government pledged to recognize Israel. The civilian prime minister complained that only an elected parliament representing the will of the Sudanese people could take that step, and promised to revisit it when the democratic transition was further along. The army, tinged with fundamentalism, subsequently made a further coup and reneged on its pledge to hold elections. Then the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, allied with the United Arab Emirates (which hates Muslim fundamentalism) rebelled and threw the country into civil war, threatening 14 million people with starvation. I couldn’t tell you whether Sudan actually recognizes Israel as things now stand, but I can guarantee you that the issue is the last thing on people’s minds. I think it is pretty despicable of Biden and Blinken to play on people’s weakness this way, and I know that they were planning to keep sanctions on Syria until 2029 at least, unless Damascus did as they demanded.
This business of blackmailing countries that have managed to overthrow their dictator into recognizing Israel or obeying some other Western diktat hasn’t worked out very well.
Israel also cynically took advantage of the Syrian revolution, for which Israeli politicians had long called, to destroy most of Syria’s military capabilities. This wanton destruction left the new government less able to project force and so made it much more feeble, even internally.
Trump has admittedly given up any leverage afforded by economic sanctions. But since the leverage is probably worthless, it likely does not matter. Since countries are afraid of third-party US sanctions, Trump just opened the flood gates for investment in and reconstruction of Syria. It seems to me more likely that an increase of prosperity and the establishment of business and NGO relationships with Europe and the US will pull Syria toward greater democracy and personal freedoms than that keeping it desperately poor and preventing the rubble from being cleared will.
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