Tony Badran
Tablet, Mar. 16, 2022
“Anyone who wants something in Syria, the Obama administration told U.S. allies, should go talk to Putin.”
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.
Tony Badran is Tablet magazine’s Levant analyst and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.
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