Strategic Insights: After the Smoke Clears in Syria: Dilemmas for U.S. Strategy Remain

US Army War College Press

Dr. Christopher J. Bolan In the wake of recent U.S. and Israeli military strikes, the potential for expanded U.S. military engagement in the Syrian civil war is growing and U.S. policymakers will need to plot a smart strategic course ahead. In doing so, they will need to conduct an honest appraisal of America’s interests in Syria and wrestle with the many strategic dilemmas confronting them. Israel and Iran are clearly testing each other’s limits in Syria raising the prospect of a broader regional confrontation. Iran reportedly sent an armed drone into Israeli airspace in mid-April1 and in early May approved the launching of scores of rockets targeting forward-deployed Israeli forces in the occupied Golan Heights.2 Israel responded with overwhelming military force targeting virtually all known Iranian military facilities in Syria.3 Although it now seems ages ago, it is also worth recalling that the United States, Great Britain, and France conducted direct military action in Syria the early morning of April 14, 2018, by launching over 100 missile strikes destroying 3 facilities associated with Syria’s chemical weapons production and storage capabilities. These attacks were launched in response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons in Douma on April 7th outside the capital of Damascus in which over 40 Syrians were killed. At that time, U.S. President Donald Trump made it clear that the strategic purpose of U.S. missile strikes was to deter the future use of such weapons vowing, “We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.”4 Secretary of Defense James Mattis made it equally clear that these strikes represented the beginning of neither a broader U.S. military campaign nor a larger shift in U.S. strategy or objectives in Syria. Secretary Mattis specifically noted, “We confined it [the missile strikes] to the chemical weapons-type targets. . . . We were not out to expand this; we were very precise and proportionate.”5 Nonetheless, neither these limited U.S. military strikes nor the tit-for-tat Israeli military exchanges with Iran are likely to significantly impact the basic contours of Syria’s civil war. As the smoke clears from these attacks, U.S. policymakers and actions will continue to be constrained by several grim strategic realities of the conflict in Syria. First, the Syrian crisis will need to be managed within the broader context of many other global security challenges that are of greater consequence to the United States. These include addressing the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, managing the longer-term competition with an increasingly assertive China in Asia, confronting a resurgent Russia in Eastern Europe, and preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability. American military engagement in Syria has been primarily motivated by one central concern: the immediate terrorist threat posed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). At its peak in early 2015, ISIS dominated a taxable population of some 11 million people spread over 100,000 square kilometers, which is slightly larger than the territory of South Korea.6 That threat, however, has been significantly degraded through an aggressive U.S. coalition air campaign backed on the ground by a combination of Syrian Kurdish militia and Arab partners. The so-called ISIS “Caliphate” is now in tatters with its territorial holdings reduced by more than 98 percent according to Pentagon estimates.7 With ISIS a much-diminished threat, Syria will only temporarily and periodically resurface to compete for the attention of U.S. policymakers and the expenditures of U.S. resources. Furthermore, President Trump’s basic instinct in Syria remains to declare victory over ISIS and withdraw U.S. forces as soon as practical. In early April, the President openly declared his intent to bring U.S. troops back home within months: “I want to get out, I want to bring the troops back home,