Mick Hartley

Armin Rosen – The Obama administration’s neglect of Syria is one of the rare policies of his predecessor that Trump can be expected to continue:

The battering of Aleppo has intensified in recent days: Airstrikes destroyed the last of rebel-held east Aleppo’s hospitals on Sunday, with one rescue worker telling Al Jazeera that the bombings in the city were the worst he had seen during the five years of the conflict. On November 21, the UN’s humanitarian aid chief said that conditions in the city were “barely survivable.” Syria, and not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, promises to be the next administration’s most flummoxing challenge in the Middle East.

Russia is largely to blame for the escalating carnage in the city, as Moscow and its allies in Damascus believe they are close to crushing the last rebel positions in what had been Syria’s largest city. The Trump administration raises the prospect of a second “reset” between Washington and Moscow, and Putin has reason to believe he’ll have a freer hand in Syria when the New York real estate mogul takes office in January. At the same time, Trump isn’t president yet, and Putin already has a basis for thinking that the U.S. has reached a certain, pragmatic acceptance of his moves in Syria: U.S. and Russian military planners were discussing the possibility of carrying out joint airstrikes against jihadists in the country as recently as this past September….

In its final days, the outgoing administration is making it clear that it believes the Syria conflict can be subordinated to other strategic concerns, whether it is the defeat of the Islamic State, or the survival of the Iran nuclear agreement. Cooperation with Russia and Iran might even seem like a free good from the perspective of the current White House: After all, potential Trump administration UN ambassador and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard warned of “the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government” in a statement issued after her meeting with Trump on November 21. Why shift policy away from the Assad regime’s allies, only for a Trump White House to shift it back again? And why risk existing areas of cooperation on terrorism and nuclear proliferation, just to pacify a country that’s largely been destroyed and where the combatants have no apparent short or even mid-term intention of making peace?

America’s policy towards Syria is likely to get even more pragmatic during the Trump years. But the U.S.’s coldly resigned stance towards Syria—and its decision that displacement, mass slaughter, the empowerment of US adversaries, and the Syria-fueled European migrant crisis weren’t America’s most overriding concerns in dealing with the country’s conflict—began long before November 8.