“We failed,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said of the Barack Obama administration’s approach to Syria. “Not for want of trying, but we failed.”
A slew of Obama veterans who now fill the ranks of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy team say they got it wrong in Syria, where a decade of fighting has killed hundreds of thousands of people, spawned a new generation of extremist groups and caused the biggest displacement crisis since World War II. In the years since Obama’s “red line” debacle, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has only tightened his two-decade grip on power, clawing back much of the country using a mix of barrel bombs, chemical weapons and siege warfare with the help of his foreign sponsors, Iran and Russia.
