Despite President Donald Trump’s multiple promises to end U.S. involvement in endless wars, his administration is intentionally prolonging the civil war in Syria, which shows no signs of ending after nearly a decade of fighting.
Since it began, more than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country. Another 6.6 million Syrians remain internally displaced.
For the past four years, the Trump Administration has perpetuated the Syrian war by implementing a policy of stalemate. Its aim is to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad bogged down in an endless war that he can never win.
Administration officials hope to pressure Assad into leaving office. They have shied away from a larger military intervention because they want to ensure that the Syrian state does not collapse in the event that Assad is ousted.
“I think the stalemate we’ve put together is a step forward, and I would advocate it,” outgoing State Department official James Jeffrey said in an interview with Defense One last month.
The Syrian civil war began in 2011 when the Syrian government initiated a brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters. In response, multiple opposition groups organized armed resistance to the Syrian government, leading to an increasingly violent civil war.
So far, it’s estimated that half a million people have died in the war. Although a major turning point came in December 2016, when the Syrian government re-established its control over Aleppo, fighting has continued in various parts of the country, especially in Idlib province in the northwestern part of the country.
The war has caused one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Since it began, more than 5.6 million Syrians have fled the country. Another 6.6 million Syrians remain internally displaced. According to the United Nations, more than 13 million Syrians require assistance.
“Despite a large portion of Syrian territory no longer facing active fighting, the humanitarian situation has only worsened,” U.S. Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, said at a Congressional hearing on December 9. “More than half the Syrian population needs humanitarian assistance.”
Although Democrats have been highly critical of the Trump Administration’s handling of the Syrian crisis, officials from the Obama Administration are the ones who designed and implemented the stalemate strategy. As the war began, the Obama Administration sought to pressure Assad into relinquishing power by providing opposition forces with just enough support to resist the Assad regime, but not enough to overthrow the Syrian government. Administration officials feared that if the opposition succeeded in overthrowing the Syrian government, the Syrian state would collapse, leading to an even worse crisis.
Trump Administration officials, who are frequently critical of their predecessors in the Obama Administration, have implemented a similar strategy. Trying to keep Assad weakened, the Trump Administration has worked to prevent the Syrian government from reasserting its control over the parts of the country that it lost during the civil war, especially in the southwest, northwest, and northeast.
Syria is “going to stay part of rubble in a graveyard until the international community sees some kind of movement towards our list of issues and answers and policies,” a senior State Department official said last year in a press briefing.
As part of this strategy, the Trump Administration has been waging an increasingly aggressive economic war against Syria. Taking advantage of new powers granted by Congress under the Caesar Act, the administration has imposed crippling sanctions on Syrian leaders.
“I love the Caesar sanctions,” Joel Rayburn, the Special Envoy for Syria, told Congress at the hearing on Syria policy earlier this month. “The Syrian regime did not dream that it would be at the end of 2020 and would have its currency crashing, its regime economy failing, and its resources that it uses to fund its war against the Syrian people dwindling the way it has.”
While the Trump Administration boasts about its efforts to cripple the Syrian economy, critics warn that these sanctions could cause significant harm to the Syrian people. A worsening economic crisis is making it increasingly difficult for most Syrians to survive.
Although the Biden Administration could easily reverse some of the harshest aspects of the Trump Administration’s approach, the big question is whether it will do so.
Over the past year, a growing number of Syrians have struggled to acquire basic necessities, such as food and shelter. The number of people facing food insecurity has increased to 9.3 million people—an additional 1.4 million people from the previous year.
“Most NGOs working on the ground say our sanctions are actively hindering their ability to deliver assistance to the Syrian people,” Castro said at the hearing.
Critics also condemn the Trump Administration for its particularly cruel refugee policy. As the administration has worked to keep the war going, it has done little to assist the Syrian people who are suffering the most from the crisis. In the last year, the Trump Administration admitted a mere 481 Syrian refugees into the United States, in spite of nearly 600,000 Syrians who need resettlement.
“We’ve gone from accepting 5,500 refugees in the last year of the Obama Administration to 481 last year,” U.S. Representative Gerald Connolly, Democrat of Virginia, said at the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. “I think that’s scandalous.”
For now, it seems unlikely that the Trump Administration will change its approach, leaving it to the incoming Biden Administration to decide whether or not to continue with the same tactics.
Although the Biden Administration could easily reverse some of the harshest aspects of the Trump Administration’s approach, the big question is whether it will do so—or whether it will prolong the current policy of stalemate.
So far, few signs indicate that Biden’s foreign policy team is planning on taking a new approach, despite the widespread consensus that the Syrian people are continuing to suffer the worst consequences of this endless war.
“I’d like to think that we must do all the things that we can with empathy so that we can never lose sight of the Syrian people and the human tragedy that is taking place there,” U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks, Democrat of New York, said at the hearing. “They continue to suffer very terribly.”