Assad and his creditors
How to get Iran out of Syria? Put sanctions on the table.
The summit in Warsaw, Poland last week “to promote a future of peace and security in the Middle East” made clearer, and more complicated, the divisions between the United States and Europe over Iran, as Laura Rozen writes. If the point of the summit was to bring the United States and its allies closer on Iran, the meeting was at best a non-event and more likely a flop. If it was to scold Europe to highlight, from a US perspective, how its allies are flagging in their commitments, as Vice President Mike Pence laid out in his speech at the summit, then mission accomplished. Maybe.
Unfortunately, there may have been a missed opportunity in Warsaw to take advantage of a trend to reduce Iran’s presence and role in Syria, one of Washington’s top objectives. But it first requires some history and context.
When Hafez al-Assad was president of Syria, he had the knack for keeping creditors at bay. He got what he needed from Moscow and Tehran — arms, strategic depth, trade deals — but he held the strings. Assad had the touch for keeping potentially meddling powers at arm's length. Under the old man, it was a two-way street. When you dealt with Assad and Syria, you were on Assad’s turf. Former US Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker came away from difficult engagements with Assad with wary respect for his formidable and often maddening negotiating style.
But the tables have turned, or so it seems. Under Hafez’s son, Bashar al-Assad, who became president after his father’s death in 2000, the creditors have seized the assets. Since the Syrian uprising of 2011, and especially since 2015, when Assad needed to call in the Russian and Iranian cavalries, the balance has faded from his dealings with Tehran and Moscow. Assad owes them too much, and they now have a lock, or so it seems, on the Syrian spoils. With all three countries under sanctions, there is little left to the imagination about the prospects for corruption and ghost deals in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, all at the expense to the Syrian people — especially if the United States, the United Nations and the European Union are all on the sidelines during the post-conflict and reconstruction era.
