Professor Raymond Hinnebusch Syria’s Geopolitics I. Introduction Syria has one of the world’s longest recorded histories and was the centre of a mighty Arab empire, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750), in medieval times; but the modern state was created only in 1920 by Western imperialism on a truncated part of historic Syria. This truncated state became a battleground on which regional geo-political struggles were played out; Syria only became an actor rather than a pawn of regional politics after 1970 when the state was consolidated under Hafiz al-Asad. Since then, Syria has achieved a geopolitical importance out of all proportion to its relatively small population, area, and economy because of its military power, independent foreign policy, and a location that gives it a central role in the Middle East. In the 2000s, Syria was contiguous to and involved in three major Middle East conflicts, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. However, the 2011 Uprising made the country once again a battleground for rival regional and global powers. II. The Durable Determinants Of Syrian Geopolitics II.1 History and Identity The frustration of Syria’s identity through its state formation has had enduring consequences. Historic Syria (bilad ash-sham) might, despite having no history of independent statehood, have become the focus of a Syrian identity after the fall of the Ottoman empire; however, the country’s dismemberment by Western imperialism fostered an irredentist dissatisfaction with its borders. The small state that remained after the separation of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan from the Damascus-centred Syrian rump was regarded as an artificial creation by many of its citizens. Pan-Arab and Pan-Syrian nationalism were natural reactions to this fragmentation, each seeking to make little Syria a part of a greater Arab nation and/or inspiring Syrian assertion of a sphere of influence in the lost parts of historic Syria, above all in Lebanon. Syria has been the most consistent center of Arabist sentiment and actually surrendered its sovereignty – in the 1958 union with Egypt – in the name of Pan-Arabism. Regimes legitimized by Arab nationalism must, to retain 1 8 credibility, be seen to succeed or at least attempt to defend Arab causes, above all Palestine.1 By the late 1960s, Syrian Arab nationalism was focused on the struggle for Palestine; this climaxed in the effort of the radical wing of the Ba’th Party (1966-1970) to make Damascus the bastion of a war of liberation in Palestine. The consequent 1967 loss of the Syrian Golan Heights to Israel gave a specifically Syrian territorial dimension to Syria’s Arabism. The recovery of the Golan became the single most important objective in Syrian foreign policy, a matter of honor and regime legitimacy that was non-negotiable. This intensified Syria’s Arab nationalism, yet, in also focusing it on the recovery of Syrian land, at the expense of the pursuit of Arab unity and the Palestine cause, it also made it more Syria-centric. Syrian Arabism was now expressed in the claim that the Arab states made up a nation with an overriding national interest in the struggle with Israel, and that Syria as the most steadfast of the frontline states, was entitled to Pan-Arab support. Its military and security needs in this struggle even justified its violation of conventional PanArab norms, such as Syria’s alliance with Iran against Arab Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war (19801988) and its late-1970s conflicts with the Palestinians in Lebanon. By the 1990s, a further transition toward a more distinctly Syrian identity had been driven by the gap between the Pan-Arab ideal and reality: the failure of Pan-Arab unity projects and sixty years of separate statehood. The persisting dilemma for Syria, however, was that the idea of an exclusively Syrian nation-state, not essentially Arab, still held little credibility and the content of Syrian identity therefore remained Arab. II.2 Location Syria’s geopolitical location dictated an exceptional vulnerability and the country normally faced an unfavorable regional power balance that necessarily tempered its wish to act on irredentist grievances. Syria’s relatively small size and population provided a limited manpower base and strategic depth; it was largely unprotected by natural boundaries and exposed on all sides to countries that, at one time or another, constituted threats. Iraq and Jordan had irredentist designs on Syria and the country is vulnerable to Turkey’s control of Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Attempts at Creating a Political Community in Modern Syria,’ Middle East Journal, v. 26, n. 4., 1972, pp. 389-404; A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria. London: Macmillan, 1969, 241-378. ORIENT III / 2012 Syria’s Geopolitics the flow of Euphrates water. But Israel has been Syria’s main enemy, manifest in a chronic border conflict until 1967 when the loss of the Golan Heights further locked Syria into a struggle to recover this territory, first in the 1973 war and, when this failed, in an ongoing proxy war in Lebanon meant to strengthen Syria’s hand for a negotiated recovery of the lost territory. Additionally, Israel’s permanent military superiority made it a security threat against which Syria sought a balancing deterrent. Yet, because of Syria’s ‘swing’ position between conservative and revisionist camps (as in the case of the Baghdad Pact or the Gulf war) and its pivotal position in the Arab-Israel conflict and peace process, international and regional powers seek influence in Damascus.2 While this has destabilized weak governments, a strong Syrian regime can use this status to strike alliances and acquire material resources, allowing Syria a balance against the threats it faces and evade the isolation or submission its enemies frequently seek to impose. Faced with multiple threats, Syria has always had to seek protective alliances. After independence, President Shukri al-Quwatly (1947-49) aligned with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to balance Hashemite ambitions to absorb Syria in the Greater Syria and Fertile Crescent schemes. From the mid-fifties, nationalist governments aligned with Nasser’s Egypt and/or with the USSR for arms and protection from Western and Israeli threats and conservative Arab subversion. Under President Hafiz alAsad (1970-2000), Syria attempted to make historic Syria its sphere of influence. In struggles for control of Lebanon and the PLO, it aimed to bolster its standing against Israel, its US backer, and Arab rivals. He also maintained parallel alliances with ‘moderate’ states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt (with their links to the US), and also with Islamic Iran and Lebanon’s Hizbollah. Under Bashar al-Asad (since 1970), a US drive to isolate Syria and its alienation from its former “moderate” allies increased its dependence on the Iranian alliance and Bashar compensated by pursuing a new alliance with Turkey. II.3 State Formation If identity and geopolitics shaped a fairly constant agenda for Syrian policy makers, their 2 3 4 5 capacity to pursue it varied according to Syria’s level of state formation. The weak newly independent Syrian state’s permeable artificial borders and Pan-Arab sentiment invited penetration by rival external powers, each seeking to shape its alignment, which was seen as pivotal for the regional balance of power. Thus, the refusal of the beleaguered government of al-Quwatly, constrained by a nationally aroused public, to either sign a peace treaty with Israel or agree to the construction of a US-sponsored oil pipeline from Saudi Arabia, inspired US intrigue in the army, producing the country’s first military coup.3 In the fifties, Syrians were deeply divided between supporters of pro-Western Iraq, which advocated security through membership in the Western-sponsored Baghdad Pact, and followers of Egypt’s Nasser, who opposed the pact in the name of a non-aligned Arab collective security. Since the fate of the Baghdad Pact was believed to turn on Syria’s choice, a regional and international “struggle for Syria” took place (1954-1958). The mobilization of Syria’s nationalist middle class swung the balance in favor of Egypt while Nasser’s rising stature as a Pan-Arab hero, especially after the Suez war, weakened conservative proWestern and pro-Iraqi politicians and strengthened those – above all, the Ba’th party – aligned with Cairo, who in 1956 formed an anti-imperialist National Front government. The West’s sponsorship of several abortive conservative coups against it and a 1957 attempt to quarantine Syrian radicalism under the Eisenhower Doctrine, backed by Iraqi-sponsored subversion and Turkish threats, precipitated Soviet counter-threats against Turkey and a backlash of pro-Communist feeling inside Syria. External siege and internal polarization, plus widespread unionist sentiment, swept Syrian elites into a brief union with Egypt, the United Arab Republic.4 The coup that brought the Ba’th Party to power in 1963 ushered in a new era of instability. Driven by ideological militancy and a search for nationalist legitimation, the radical Ba’th regime supported Palestinian fedayeen raids into Israel, which, ignoring the unfavorable balance of power with Israel, brought on the 1967 defeat and the Israeli occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights.5 With a wing of the Ba’th also in power in Iraq, the two regimes tried to outbid the other in militancy toward Is- Alasdair Drysdale and Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria and the Middle East Peace Process, New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1991, pp. 1-9. Andrew Rathmell, (1995). Secret War in the Middle East: The Covert Struggle for Syria, 1949-61. London: I.B. Taurus. Patrick Seale (1965) The Struggle for Syria, London: Oxford University Press. Avner Yaniv (1986) “Syria and Israel: The Politics of Escalation,’‘ in Ma’oz, Moshe and Yaniv, Avner, Syria under Assad: Domestic Constraints and Regional Risks, London: Croom Helm. ORIENT III / 2012 9 Professor Raymond Hinnebusch rael and Western imperialism. In 1970 Defense Minister Hafiz al-Asad ousted the ideological radicals and set Syria on a new, more realist foreign-policy course that took account of Israel’s military superiority. Syrian elites had learned the realist rules of the state system the hard way. The consolidation of the Ba’thist regime under Asad was, in many ways, a product of Syria’s beleaguered position in its external environment. The Ba’th state, the product of a nationalist party and an army radicalized by the conflict with Israel, developed, under Asad, into a huge national-security apparatus designed to confront Israel. Concentration of power in Asad’s hands was accepted within the political elite as necessary to deal with the 1967 defeat and occupation brought on by a factionalized regime. At the same time, Asad’s state building depended on external resources: the Soviet arms with which he rebuilt the army and the Arab oil money by which the bureaucracy was expanded and the bourgeoisie co-opted, both accessed via Syria’s role as a key front line state confronting Israel. It was only as the state was stabilized and the regime attained relative internal cohesion that foreign policymakers achieved sufficient autonomy of domestic constraints to effectively adapt foreign policy to the changing geopolitical power balance. They were also now enabled to mobilize the capabilities needed to make Syria a player rather than a victim in the regional environment. II. Syria’s Power Base Hafiz al-Asad parlayed limited means into a greater capacity to shape outcomes than would be expected from Syria’s base of national power. But however adept Syria’s diplomacy, what the country can do is constrained by its limited power base and by external dependencies which the Ba’th regime has persistently sought to overcome. Syria’s turn to statist “socialism” from the late 1950s was, in good part, driven by the belief that a nationalist foreign policy required diluting economic dependency on the West. State control over the economy allowed the regime to harness it to foreign policy and security goals. Socialism realigned economic dependency toward the Soviet bloc and helped win Soviet aid and protection. By the 1970s, Syria, with oil, food 6 7 10 self-sufficiency, no dependence on foreign investment and no significant debt to the West, had attained relative economic sovereignty, which explained its exceptional ability, in contrast to other Arab states, to sustain a nationalist foreign policy. Syrian military power steadily expanded under Asad’s rule. The 1967 defeat stimulated a massive rebuilding and professionalization of the armed forces, which paid off in improved performance during the 1973 war. Thereafter, Egypt’s separate peace, leaving Syria facing Israel alone, and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon set off further rounds of military buildup aimed at enough parity with Israel to constitute a deterrent and give backing to Syrian diplomacy. During Syria’s (eventually failed) drive for parity with Israel (1976-86), as much as half of public expenditure was devoted to defense. 20 percent of manpower served in the armed forces at its height in the 1980s. If one includes the value of arms imported on credit, Syria’s military spending climbed to 30 percent of its gross domestic product.6 By 1986, Syria had an enormous armed force for a state of its size: 5,000 tanks, 650 combat aircraft, 102 missile batteries, and over 500,000 men under arms. Although Syria lacked a credible offensive capability, the Syrian buildup produced mutual deterrence that relatively stabilized the Syrian-Israeli military confrontation.7 Syrian-Israeli rivalry was thereby largely diverted into political struggle over the conditions of a peace settlement. In these struggles, Syria’s deterrent meant that Asad did not have to bargain from weakness and could apply limited military pressure on Israel in southern Lebanon (via Hizbollah) at reasonable risk. But Syria’s slim economic base and feeble tax extraction capability could not, alone, sustain its enormous military burden and overdeveloped state, which contributed to a permanent resource gap. Hafiz used foreign policy to access enormous levels of external aid and loans largely from the USSR and Arab oil producing states. The struggle with Israel legitimized his claim on Arab aid, and much Soviet weaponry was delivered gratis or on cheap credit terms. The potential constraints on foreign policy from this economic dependency were eased by the diversification of Syria’s donors. Although Asad did occasionally exploit foreign policy to win economic relief, he had no record of taking decisions for eco- Clawson, Patrick, Unaffordable Ambitions: Syria’s Military Buildup and Economic Crisis, Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1989. Yair Evron, War and Intervention in Lebanon: The Syrian-Israeli Deterrence Dialogue, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1987. ORIENT III / 2012 Syria’s Geopolitics nomic reasons that would not otherwise have been taken on strategic grounds. In the late 1980s, however, the heavy burden of military spending from the reach for parity with Israel helped bringing economic growth to a halt, forcing a leveling off of Syria’s military buildup. Parallel with growing economic constraints, Syria had to scramble, after the 1990s collapse of its Soviet arms supplier, to prevent the degradation of its deterrent. The army’s combat strength deteriorated dramatically during the 1990s, its Soviet equipment increasingly obsolescent and Soviet/Russian demand for payment in hard currency denying it enough ammunition and spare parts; moreover, the United States threatened sanctions against Russian companies that sold Syria arms. Part of Syria’s armor and artillery was put in storage and manpower fell to 215,000. The army proved incapable of mounting a serious deployment on the Turkish border at the time of the 1998 war scare with that country. Although Syria did eventually obtain new infusions of advanced Russian tanks and anti-tank missiles, the growing technological and airpower gap with Israel, and the constraints (financing, supply sources) on Syria’s prospects of sustaining the conventional military balance, shifted its defense effort in non-conventional directions. Hizbollah’s capacity to fire rockets deep into Israel and to engage Israeli forces in asymmetric warfare became the first line of Syria’s new deterrent. Syria’s 1990 Gulf war aid windfall was invested in a second line missile deterrent in hardened sites with chemical warheads targeting all of Israel. The national-security state had enhanced Syria’s military capacity but ultimately helped enervate its weak economic base which sharply constrained its overall power. From the mid-1980s Syria began to suffer from periodic economic crises, symptoms of the exhaustion of statist import substitute industrialization and the inability of the public sector to mobilize the capital to sustain a state oversized in relation to its economic base. Hence securing the economic resources to support the state became a constant preoccupation and a matter of regime security. Austerity in the late 1980s was paralleled by economic liberalization that revived a statedependent private sector. In the half decade (1990-95) following Syria’s receipt of rent for its stand in the Gulf war and the influx of in- 8 vestment stimulated by its 1991 liberalization of investment laws, the economy boomed but when these inflows were exhausted, GNP growth fell to -1.5% in 1998; stagnant growth, combined with a burgeoning population resulted in dangerously high youth unemployment rates. Half the budget came to depend on oil exports, but these were set to decline in the 2000s. While the regime built up shortterm financial reserves from oil and rent windfalls, in the long term, only an influx of expatriate and Arab investment could sustain the regime’s economic base. No such economic revival seemed likely without a peace settlement with Israel that would give investors confidence, and allow the reduction of the national security state and re-integration of Syria into the world capitalist economy. Indeed, in the late nineties, Syria, in anticipation of a peace settlement, was gearing up for major economic reforms needed to facilitate an investment influx. But with the failure of the peace process, parallel with the succession of the new President, Bashar al-Asad, Syria had to look elsewhere for resources. Bashar found them in an opening to Iraq, which sold oil to Syria at subsidized prices, providing a billion dollar yearly windfall to the treasury while Syrian businessmen prospered on access to the Iraqi market. When this lifeline was shut down by the US invasion, accompanied by a major influx of Iraqi refugees, the regime accelerated its economic liberalization in a bid to get a cut of the wealth accruing to the Arab oil producers from the new post-2003 oil price boom. In spite of a fraught regional and international environment, the regime did enjoy an influx of Arab investment in the mid-2000s that stabilized the economy and fuelled the cronycapitalist network supportive of the regime. Very much in doubt, however, was how far Syria’s integration into the world market was compatible with a foreign policy that brought recurrent conflict with the US hegemon, whose sanctions sought to economically isolate it, and even with good relations with Europe, which obstructed its bid for an association agreement as a result of the power struggle over Lebanon. As a result, in the second half of the 2000s, Syria started shifting its economic relations eastward to Asia and especially toward China. III. Agency: Syria’s Operational Code8 Syria’s geo-political weight has also been a matter of agency, the acumen or lack thereof Moshe Maoz, Asad, the Sphinx of Damascus: A Political Biography, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988; Patrick Seale, Asad: the Struggle for the Middle East, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ORIENT III / 2012 11 Professor Raymond Hinnebusch of its leadership. Under Hafiz al-Asad Syria was widely seen to “punch above it weight” in regional politics. This reflected the realist worldview and modus operandi that Asad developed out of his many years of experience dealing with stronger hostile powers and which has largely persisted under his son; it also involves ways of coping with the gap between Syria’s identity aspirations and its limited resources and vulnerable position. Asad was a quintessential realist. He scaled down the highly revisionist goals deriving from Syria’s identity to fit the constraints of geopolitics. Pre-Ba’th governments were too weak to contemplate either war or peace with Israel, and the Ba’th radicals were driven by a dangerous ideology of confronting Israel irrespective of the unfavorable balance of power. Asad’s more realistic goal was recovering the occupied lands, above all the Golan, and achieving Palestinian rights, notably a state in the West Bank and Gaza, as part of a comprehensive peace under UN Resolution 242. The limited nature of Syria’s aims was evident in the 1973 war when Syrian forces attacking the Golan made no attempt to advance into Israel itself.9 No Pan-Arab revolutionary, Asad’s realist aims were the recovery of territorial losses, maintenance of a sphere of influence and a deterrent against threats. Yet the impact of Arab identity could be seen in his eschewal for a quarter-century of a separate settlement with Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. From much disillusioning experience, Asad viewed the world as a realist struggle for power, where the strong do as they will and the weak accept what they must. He and those socialized with or under him had a jaundiced view of contemporary international order, which they see as replete with double standards. Syrians observe that international law is selectively enforced, typically against Arab or Muslim states while Israel is routinely exempted from the standards expected of other states (notably, the prohibition of the acquisition, settlement and ethnic cleansing of territory by force). Syria sees itself as systematically treated unfairly, e.g. Syria’s chemical deterrent force was made an issue by the West while Israel’s nuclear one is accepted. As Damascus sees it, it is a Machiavellian world: whether a state’s interests are re- 9 10 12 spected depends on having the power to defend them. A Syrian leader must play by the rules of such a world, combining enough of the coercive power of the ‘lion’ with the guile of the ‘fox,’ as the Florentine writer advised. As such, great power-engineered demands, advanced in the name of the ‘international community,’ enjoy no moral high ground or normative legitimacy in Syria. A very durable Syrian behavior has long been its rejection of external demands and evasion of the dictates of great powers. What this means is that those who want something from Syria have to negotiate for it. The enhanced autonomy of Hafiz’s national security state permitted him to pursue his goals amidst this fraught environment, with remarkable consistency over the decades, while carefully adapting his strategies to the changing external power balance. His modus operendi, which continues to shape Syrian strategy and tactics included: (1) Diversification of defensive alliances to avoid isolation and acquire the financial and military resources to conduct coercive diplomacy; because, the regime cannot extract enough resources from the Syrian economy to fund its large military/security, patronage and welfare responsibilities, a constant preoccupation is to secure external economic resources; thus, Hafiz al-Asad simultaneously sustained alliances with the conservative Arab oil states and the Soviet Union, later supplemented by Iran. (2) Balancing the great powers: Given US backing of Israel, a close Soviet alignment was natural in a bipolar world. Soviet arms deliveries were key to Syria’s relative success in the 1973 war and thereafter in the drive for parity with Israel. The Soviet Union’s role as patron-protector had a crucial deterrent effect on Israel’s freedom of action against Syria.10 While the United States was the main backer of Syria’s enemy, Asad nevertheless sought to engage with it; he aimed to exploit US fears of Middle East instability to get the US to restrain Israel, notably during several confrontations in Lebanon. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, non-Arab but anti-imperialist Iran became Syria’s strategic partner. In the post-Cold Charles Wakebridge, “The Syrian Side of the Hill,” Military Review, v. 56, February, 1976, pp. 20-30 Helena Cobban, The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, New York: Praeger, The Washington Papers, no 149, 1991. ORIENT III / 2012 Syria’s Geopolitics War unipolar world, Syria sought to convey the message that it could help or hinder US interests in the Middle East depending on whether Washington respected its interests and was willing to restrain and broker an honorable peace settlement with Israel. (3) Rationality of matching means and ends: even as Asad scaled down Syria’s goals, he upgraded its capabilities. A recognition that how Syria dealt with enemies, above all Israel, had to depend on the balance of power made Asad cautious since it was usually unfavorable; when the balance of forces was negative, rather than concede principle, Asad preferred to wait until it improved, while actively obstructing schemes to draw other Arab parties into partial, separate settlements with Israel: thus he took great risks to obstruct the 1983 Lebanese-Israeli accord in defiance of US and Israeli power. (4) Coercive Diplomacy: although extremely wary of the pitfalls of negotiating with Israel, Asad realized he could not avoid diplomacy to recover the Golan and seized at opportunities to do so. However, he believed one should only negotiate if one had enough bargaining “cards” to give the stronger opponent an incentive to make an acceptable deal; such cards included the use of asymmetric warfare which was seen as best pursued via proxies and required a military deterrent so that the enemy did not bring his full retaliatory superiority to bear on Syria. Needless to say such a modus operandi entailed a delicate balancing act and the balancer was always liable to fall off the tightrope. Syria’s operational code could have been transformed after Bashar al-Asad’s succession to power.11 His political socialization took 11 place in a different environment from that of his father and the regime “old guard.” While the latter were socialized in the era of Arab nationalism, war with Israel, and non-alignment, their sons came of age in an era in which state-centric identities were fragmenting the Arabs, peace with Israel was accepted in Arab thinking and American hegemony had become a fact of life in the region. Bashar had acquired education in the liberal environment of the UK, married a British citizen of Syrian descent and, as president, traveled widely in Europe. To be sure, the father-son relation, a presumably powerful socialization mechanism, would have committed him to the preservation of his father’s Arab nationalist legacy while the apprenticeship he served under his father, including time within the military, would have socialized him into the code of operation of the establishment. And the legitimacy of Bashar’s presidency was contingent on faithfulness to the standard of national honor defended by his father, namely the full recovery of the Golan from Israel. Bashar came to power pulled between contrary tendencies. The modernizing aims of his new generation and awareness that regime survival depended on transition to a market economy dictated good relations with Europe and the US, hence conformity with their demands and norms; but the Arab nationalism Bashar transmitted from his father brought him in conflict with the West, thereby keeping alive Hafiz’s realpolitik tradition. Had a peace settlement been reached with Israel, the modernizing West-leaning side of Bashar’s socialization would likely have become the driver of his behavior; as it was, the main external threats Syria faced from the time of his succession put a premium on realpolitik and the son fell back on the operational code of the father. In dealing with the uprising that began in 2011, his regime has continued to display a Machiavellian determination to do whatever it takes to survive. Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005. ORIENT III / 2012 13