THE COLD WAR IS NOT BACK
In hindsight: Narratives of a new Cold War do little to help decipher the U.S. and Russian roles in Syria.
by Samer Abboud
The secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, recently stated that the “Cold War is back.” This sentiment has been repeated often by politicians, journalists, and pundits as the U.S. and Russia continue to clash on the international stage. In the case of the Syrian civil war, many analysts looking to decipher the conflict have used this narrative, as well as the fact that the U.S. and Russia appear to be on opposing sides of the war, to make the point that a “New Cold War” is upon us.
Framing the Syrian crisis as a new Cold War, however, depends on embracing a rather limited set of understandings about the Cold War and its legacies. In particular this New Cold War narrative suggests a political continuity between the Soviet era and today in which military and political entanglements bring Russia and Syria together as natural allies. But Syria is not and never was a Russian vassal; and the war in Syria has always been about much more than a challenge to U.S. power and prestige.
There’s an old saying that describes Soviet-Syrian relations during the Cold War: the Syrian regime was willing to import Soviet weapons but not Soviet ideas. Such a quip tells us a great deal about Cold War relations between the Soviet Union and Syria. It also undermines many of our assumptions about that era. Looking back at the complexities of the Soviet-Syrian relationship should make us cautious about recycling Cold War narratives to explain the current crisis in Syria.
Syria is not and never was a Russian vassal; and the war in Syria has always been about much more than a challenge to U.S. power and prestige.
Such an approach sums up the Cold War as a bipolar world in which states fell under either the Soviet or American umbrella. As contemporary Syria makes clear, such an approach not only ignores the presence of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) but the specifics of bilateral relations between the superpowers and their presumed client states. From the 1970s onward, the Syrian regime differed from the Soviet Union on a range of issues, including war with Israel, the Lebanese civil war, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 1991, and the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
In some cases, the Syrian regime found itself in alignment with the United States on regional issues. These Syrian-American alignments occurred at different stages of Lebanon’s civil war when Christian Lebanese factions were provided various forms of support by both countries and when Syria joined the U.S.-led coalition invasion against Iraq in 1991. In both cases, these policies contradicted Russian interests. The Syrian regime also prevented Soviet penetration of its military command and political structure and kept the Syrian economy independent of Soviet control.
In other words, Syria was far from a Soviet proxy during the Cold War. The Syrian regime often defied Russian policies in the region and even aligned with the United States on key regional issues, suggesting that the bipolarity of the Cold War was not as deterministic as many assume.
These confusions continue to run across the American political spectrum. Many progressive activists explain the current Syrian conflict as the outcome of an American-led project for regime change that Russian intervention sought to thwart. Foreign policy hawks bemoan America for losing Syria to the Russians. Liberal interventionists continue to argue that more vigorous American action would have prevented further bloodshed in Syria and prevented Russian dominance of the country. They often point to President Obama’s failure to intervene after chemical attacks in August 2013 as giving Russia the green light to take Syria over.
All of these narratives share the assumption that the conflict is occurring, and will be solved, along zero-sum terms. Syria will either be “won” by Russia or the United States. The other parties to the conflict remain peripheral to the superpowers whose “victory” or “defeat” thus holds the keys for Syria’s future.
These Cold War-inspired narratives are misleading for a number of reasons. First, they encourage us to think about the Syrian conflict in purely geopolitical terms. This approach denies its domestic causes as well as the interests of many actors, from Iran and Turkey to local militias. Second, American and Russian interests have often overlapped in Syria. Both Russia and the United States justified military interventions with a call to defeat ISIS. Other forms of military cooperation continue to exist either formally — joint combat operations in the Syrian northeast — or informally — when Russia refused to respond to a recent U.S. attack against Syrian chemical weapons installations. Finally, the Syrian regime has been forced to balance Russian intervention and interests alongside those of its other regional supporter, Iran.
The narratives share the assumption that the conflict will be solved along zero-sum terms. Syria will either be “won” by Russia or the United States. The other parties to the conflict remain peripheral.
In this tripartite relationship, Russian interests do not always prevail, and the Syrian regime has often exercised independence on key issues. Similarly, Russia has given the green light to sustained Israeli attacks against Iranian and Syrian targets by refusing to deploy its air defenses against Israeli jets. These attacks are not only materially destructive; they are politically embarrassing for the Syrian regime. In the Syrian context, the Cold War framework that imagines the United States and Russia locked in a zero-sum military conflict that plays out in other countries thus conceals more than it reveals.
An alternative way to understand the legacy of the Cold War as it relates to the Syrian conflict may be to return to the maxim at the outset of this essay. The joke reminds us that so-called client states exercise considerable autonomy from their patrons, as evidenced by major schisms between Russia and the Syrian regime over the presence of Iranian forces in Syria, Russian support for continued Israeli bombardment of Syrian military and government installations, and the future of political negotiations to end the conflict. Today, as during the Cold War, the Syrian regime seems happy to take Russian weapons and reject their ideas.
Samer Abboud’s column for the Lepage Center focuses on histories of security in the Middle East. He is Associate Professor of Historical and Political Studies at Arcadia University.
