Five Conundrums: The United States and the Conflict in Syria
Abstract
For the past 8 years, two U.S. administrations, the United Nations (UN), and numerous foreign governments have sought to end the catastrophic war in Syria and reach a negotiated political settlement to the conflict. Their efforts have repeatedly been complicated, even thwarted, by the highly contested and violent politics underlying the conflict, the sheer number of conflict actors inside and outside of Syria, and those actors' diverse and often irreconcilable objectives. Many of the complications for U.S. policy have stemmed from the need for policymakers to focus on three separate but intertwined dimensions of the Syrian conflict, even while policy options to deal with one dimension of the conflict had significant but often unpredictable effects on the others. The first dimension has been the campaign to deal an enduring territorial defeat upon the so-called Islamic State (IS), an element of U.S. policy that enjoyed near unanimous international consensus and adequate means to accomplish the task. The second is the central conflict between the Bashar al-Asad regime and its opponents, an existential power struggle that drew in multiple foreign powers and yielded nearly unimaginable destruction of Syrian property, infrastructure, and lives. And the third is the strategic challenge of Iran and its drive to eliminate U.S. influence in the Middle East. As the United States and other parties sought to navigate these three dimensions of the conflict, a set of paradoxical challenges - conundrums - emerged and, in some cases, made the situation in Syria even more intractable and a solution on terms favorable to U.S. national security even more elusive.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 01, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1149591
Entities
People
- Michael A Ratney
Organizations
- National Defense University