March 16, 2022 | Tablet

Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine

The administration’s horror over Putin’s war is not merely performative, but functional—in the service of realigning with Iran
March 16, 2022 | Tablet

Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine

The administration’s horror over Putin’s war is not merely performative, but functional—in the service of realigning with Iran

The Biden administration has spent the last two weeks publicly censuring and sanctioning Russia over its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet even as it engaged in evermore shrill public denunciations of the undoubted evils of Vladimir Putin, it was simultaneously working hand-in-glove with the Russian dictator to finalize a new agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. So how do we make sense of the administration’s public campaign to isolate Putin at the same time as it partners with the vilest man on the planet to cut a deal with a Russian client state? The key to understanding this seemingly erratic set of zigs and zags is the recognition that Team Biden is following the template that former President Barack Obama created in Syria a decade ago. Let’s call it the “Syria playbook.”

To understand the Syria playbook, and its connection to Ukraine, we need to look back to Obama’s second term, and its all-consuming policy priority, the Iran deal—which remains no less urgent in 2022 than it was in 2013. Back then, Syria itself did not matter much to Obama, who mused about how one might weigh deaths in that country against deaths in the Congo—implying that if the latter was not a pressing U.S. national interest, neither was the former. Rather, Syria’s significance for Obama lay only in the risk that images of hundreds of thousands of people being tortured and murdered might interfere with his defining foreign policy initiative: reaching a deal that would realign the United States away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran, his new choice for regional hegemon.

Meanwhile, Syria did matter greatly to Iran, Obama’s sought-after ally. Along with Ukraine, Syria also mattered very much to Russia, then as now a key partner in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran; because the Russians saw the Assad family as a historical ally; and because Putin looked forward to restoring, enlarging, and entrenching the Soviet-era naval presence that would allow Russia to project power in the eastern Mediterranean.

It was in Syria that the Obama-Biden team honed the cynical duplicity we’re witnessing today. At the heart of Obama’s maneuvering in and around Syria was the practice of strategic messaging, which allowed Obama to hold both ends of the stick while speaking out of both sides of his mouth—or rather, letting cynical or clueless members of his administration strike seemingly contradictory poses, each of which allowed him to advance toward his goal. He could be simultaneously moralizing and a cold realist—whatever it took not to be distracted from his main objective of a deal with Iran. Achieving that goal in turn meant cooperation with Russia, a principal backer of the Assad regime.

The Obama administration alumni now in charge of the Biden administration currently pose as staunch defenders of NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance against Russia’s barbaric aggression in Ukraine. But in 2012 and 2013, it was NATO’s other members who pressed Obama to join, and lead, the European and regional states opposed to Assad’s butchery in Syria. Instead, Obama fended them off by turning to Russia, and using its veto power-by-proxy at the United Nations and other international forums in which the administration claimed to place stock. Anyone who wants something in Syria, the Obama administration told U.S. allies, should go talk to Putin.

In August 2012, Obama made the blunder that he has since repeatedly said he regrets most of all out of every decision he made as president, when he boxed himself in by laying down a red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons—a line Assad would cross repeatedly, all the way to a major chemical attack in August of 2013. Again, Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of a commitment he had no intention of keeping, as the rest of his presidency demonstrated quite clearly. At the time, Obama was on the verge of clinching the interim agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Plan of Action, which was signed in November 2013. There was no chance he would jeopardize that breakthrough by targeting Iran’s client in Damascus. He had now signaled that, for all the moralizing rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained his principal partner in the Syrian arena.

That Putin fully understood Russia’s importance in Obama’s Iran calculus could be seen by the fact that the Russian dictator immediately pressed his advantage by seeking compensation in Ukraine. In early 2014, he took the first small bite of the sovereign nation, invading and annexing Crimea. The United States’ reaction was rich in rhetorical condemnation and otherwise pointedly feeble. Aside from a profound historical critique from then-Secretary of State John Kerry about how “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion,” which must have sounded like a compliment in Moscow, the administration leveled some sanctions against individual Russians, froze the assets of a handful of Russian government officials in the United States, and canceled their visas—in other words, the kind of response that makes for palatable headlines, but has precisely zero effect on the calculations of Vladimir Putin.

Putin would continue ingesting additional amuse-bouches extracted from eastern Ukraine in return for his services in Syria well into 2015. But the main dish would be served to him later that year. As Obama drew closer to finalizing his deal with Iran, he was faced with a problem: His prospective Iranian ally and future candidate for Middle Eastern hegemony simply couldn’t get things under control in Syria. Assad and the Iranians were being bled badly, and were in danger of actually losing the war.

But first things first: In June 2015, Obama officially got his deal with Iran. Now it was time to protect what Obama called Iran’s “equity” in Syria. The following month, the commander of the Iranian forces, the late Qassem Soleimani, went to Moscow for help. At some point in 2015, an Assad go-between and Obama’s regional point man, Robert Malley (who is currently in charge of the Biden administration’s talks with Iran in Vienna), informed the White House that the Russians were preparing to intervene directly in Syria. And in September 2015, shortly after the Iran deal was done, the Russian military went into Syria.

Putin was now the protector of the equity Obama promised the Iranians. Moreover, in addition to safeguarding its base on the Black Sea, Russia was gifted with a long-sought strategic asset: a base on the Mediterranean, directly on NATO’s southern flank, and on the border with Israel.

Team Obama sought to cover its acquiescence to—indeed, its satisfaction with—Russia’s intervention by initially presenting it as a stupid decision on Putin’s part, which Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted would result in a quagmire for Russia. But that was just more “strategic messaging.” In no time, the Obama administration was coordinating with the Russians as they bombed opposition-held areas to dust in order to help Assad crush his enemies and win his war. Simultaneously, in one of the more grotesque examples of the Syria playbook, Samantha Power performed arabesques of moral outrage at the U.N., “shaming” the Russians for doing exactly what Obama had contracted with them to do, in support of the Iran deal.

Obama’s realignment policy took a hit in the Trump years, during which the United States withdrew from the Iran deal and facilitated the transition of the much-admired Soleimani back to the spirit world. But once Team Obama was back in power in the form of the Biden administration, Iran was back at the front of the line. Not coincidentally, so was Ukraine—the currency in which Iran’s Russian protector liked to be paid.

The Biden administration came into office with immediate gifts to both Iran and Russia. It removed sanctions on Iranian clients and stopped enforcing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. It also waived sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Putin’s dependence on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was Kyiv’s insurance policy against a further invasion. Russia needed that infrastructure to move gas to Europe, and Moscow couldn’t risk it being damaged or sabotaged. The purpose of Nord Stream 2 was to give Russia an alternative route, one that kept the same amount of gas flowing to Europe but eliminated its dependence on Ukraine. Once the pipeline was physically completed, Putin concluded that it was a fait accompli that the Europeans would eventually activate it, now that Biden had given it the green light.

As the talks with Iran entered their final stage, Putin began his preparations to move on Ukraine. No more amuse-bouches. Now it was time to Syrianize Ukraine—to consume it whole, as Russia’s main course at the Iran deal banquet.

Underneath all the anti-Putin rhetoric, and even the slew of sanctions that followed the Russian dictator’s invasion (which have increased only somewhat in severity as the fighting has dragged on), the posture of the Biden administration toward the Russian military operation has remained more or less the same—sanctions, sure, but nothing that puts friendly countries in an awkward spot, let alone starts World War III by giving the Ukrainians too many weapons, a policy that recalls Obama’s posture toward Moscow in Syria.

Putin is a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded.

Issues:

Iran Iran Global Threat Network Iran-backed Terrorism Syria