Opinions #51/24

Ten years ago, Syria was a humanitarian testing ground for Europe. Millions of people are fleeing the war. A war provoked by the great mistake that was the Arab Spring. It was 2011, and the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia, then Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt seemed to outline a horizon marked by democracy for this vast crescent that dared to expand from Morocco to the heart of the great Middle East. A mistake, indeed. The winds of rebellion against Western-backed regimes have turned into a storm. Repression and restoration at best. Endemic conflicts in the worst of them, e.g. Libya, Syria, Yemen. “A great power can’t do anything. It is better to make mistakes than to stand still,” a vision supported by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, despite President Obama’s doubts and reservations. Ten years later, in a region engulfed in fire, we start again with Syria. Not just Europe struggling with the risk of sending back to their homeland Syrians fleeing the conflict at the time, but strategists across the Atlantic. With a double and mirrored doubt that confounds a bewildered world revolving around Brussels and a world in search of an author awaiting Trump’s inauguration at the White House in Washington. To summarize, for the Europeans: is post-Assad Syria now a safe country and can refugees accepted in Europe or placed at high cost in Turkey, enriching Ankara’s budget, be sent back to their country? The second, which tickles American think tanks and their sponsors, directly concerns the new leadership in Damascus: those terrorists of the jihadist galaxy (ISIS, al Qaeda, al Nusra) who, mixed with the opposition, have turned Syria into an unlimited battlefield to topple the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad, a dictatorial president once well represented in European chancelleries, from Paris to Rome to London, where, as a student, he met his future wife Asma, a seasoned partner in international relations. In Washington, the debate has been driven to its core: what to do with al-Jolani and his gang? The alternative is to treat them as they were: ferocious thugs shouting “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great) or to treat them as new interlocutors who will gain unexpected room for maneuver in a sector that has so far been the prerogative of Russia and Turkey. The sound of the tam-tam seems to indicate a strong temptation to choose the second scenario. Principles and values will be parenthesized in this case. Just as the judgment of the Israeli prime minister’s militaristic extremism ended in parentheses. Netanyahu, first empowered by Biden and now over-confident of Trump’s support, is the perpetrator of unprecedented bulimia. Having increased the number of military fronts after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, striking the West Bank and Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran, in recent days he has begun to conquer territories that never belonged to the Jewish state, occupying ever larger tracts of Syrian territory after destroying all its air and naval forces. On a “preventative” basis. It is a test of strength that reinforces the other tests and increases tensions with the other challenger in the region, Turkish President Erdogan. And all this with the complete silence of European governments. Which in no particular order is limited to declaring the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State. The jabs to which Netanyahu is responding in his own way, as is his administration. For example, the closure of the embassy in Ireland to punish the Dublin government, guilty of supporting South Africa’s lawsuit to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, seeking details of behavior against defenseless civilians that may have occurred in Gaza as genocide. Friends can be criticized but not questioned, this is the logic in the West. Thus, the sentence for South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who declared martial law to counter the North Korean communist threat, remains lenient. It is easy to imagine what the political/diplomatic/media/military mobilization would be in the event of such a risky initiative taken by an unfriendly leader. Polarization leads to these excesses. Take, for example, Zelensky’s complaints at face value when he talks about ten thousand North Korean soldiers coming to the aid of Russian troops, because they are now annihilated, and take at face value the assessment of the same wordy Zelensky when he talks about some eight hundred thousand (!) Russian soldiers stationed in Ukraine. Alberto Bradanini, former ambassador to Beijing and a deep expert on Far Eastern reality, focuses on the fog of war fueled by such rhetoric. While the analysis and predictions of a prominent political scientist like Mark Lazar evolve from the concerns of Emmanuel Macron, a president who seems to have accelerated the decline of himself and France with his solitary and counterproductive decisions.