LABOTT: Thanks, Will. And thank you, everyone, for joining this media briefing. We’re also joined by some of our general members and also our corporate members on this very timely topic.
The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime really marks a pivotal moment not for just Syria, but the broader Middle East. So this discussion will explore the implications of what’s happening in the region, touching on governance challenges in Syria, regional dynamics, and the role of the international community and the U.S., particularly the incoming administration.
So we have a dream team of experts to join us.
Elliott Abrams, senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Steven A. Cook, Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies and director of the International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars here at the Council. He’s also the author of a new book, End of Ambition: America’s Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East. He’s currently talking about that all over the country, and it’s certainly very timely right now.
And we also have Ray Takeyh, the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle East studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Thanks to all of you for joining us.
Steven, let’s just jump in. I mean, wow, this collapse of Assad’s regime was kind of shockingly swift. Many talk about this being a black swan event. But you know, what factors made this kind of sudden victory by HTS and the other allied forces possible? And to what extent did external pressures—obviously, Russia and Iran’s weakening positions, whether it’s Israel campaign against Hezbollah or Russia in Ukraine—playing into it?
COOK: Well, thanks, Elise. It’s great to be here with everybody today. It’s great to be with my two close colleagues Elliott Abrams and Ray Takeyh to talk about this very important issue.
Elise, to answer your question, you know, this was quite a surprise, and I think it was a surprise initially for HTS—Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—and the Syrian National Army. From what we know and from what my contacts within the U.S. government have suggested is that the HTS and SNA were initially, with Turkish—a nod from the Turkish government, intending to take a kind of limited operation against Syrian forces and Russian forces positioned in and around Aleppo. And in fact, there is some indication that the Syrians and the Russians knew this was going to happen and had warned HTS and SNA. And when the operation actually unfolded, the Syrian army collapsed in Aleppo and it became a catastrophic success. And HTS continued the operation throughout Syria while the SNA peeled off to confront Kurds in Syria’s north, and all the while at each major point—Hama and Homs and, finally, Damascus—the Syrian military collapsed under the pressure of this onslaught.
But it wasn’t just HTS. I think this is what is important, is that, sure, HTS sort of demonstrated that the Syrian army didn’t have much fight in it. The Russians proved that they were not coming to the rescue. The Iranian position had been greatly weakened as a result of what Israel had done to Hezbollah. But also, the Syrian people came out in an uprising that had been frozen by the militarization of this uprising in 2012 with the application of unimaginable force against the Syrian population that took the lives of 500,000 people. With the successes that the HTS had in Aleppo and Hama and, ultimately, Homs and Damascus, Syrians came out of their homes once again, and said we’re not afraid, and demanded the end of the regime. And so it was the combination of this military operation and the demonstration of military capability by HTS and military incapability on the part of the Syrian army and its patrons, as well as the popular opposition to the regime by the Syrian people, that made this possible and made it so swift. Because the Syrian security forces were clearly—were outnumbered. They couldn’t handle the number of people who were coming out in the streets in the wake of the successes of HTS.
So—
LABOTT: Was it—were they outnumbered, or did this—were they also, the Syrian forces—like, you hear, you know, reports of them just kind of taking off their military uniform and—
COOK: Well, I think it was two things.
LABOTT: Were they just, like, tired—you know, was it just like they were tired of fighting for this regime?
COOK: I think there’s two things. I think that there are certainly units and security forces that remained loyal to the Assad regime to the end, but were overwhelmed. But you—there’s a certain number of people when they come out all at the same time that you just cannot manage. And then there were these poor conscripts who had been pulled into the Syrian—hadn’t been paid in months, barely had food. Why would they fight for a manifestly unpopular regime that had killed their neighbors and their friends? So I think it’s a combination of the demonstration of HTS and SNA’s military capabilities, the catastrophic success; the inability and unwillingness of conscripts in the Syrian army to fight; and the fact that those units that were loyal to the regime just couldn’t manage an entire country in an uprising against the regime, all at once.
LABOTT: Right.
So, Ray, obviously bad for Assad, but his fall is also another significant blow to Iran and Hezbollah after what’s happened over the last couple of months, and so it’s further disrupting or degrading what has been referred to as this Shia Crescent. So talk about—tell us how this shifts Iran’s calculus and how it alters the dynamics for how it deals with its proxies and its ability to project power in the Levant?
TAKEYH: Yeah. Thanks very much.
To suggest that this is a profound setback for Iran seems almost trite and repetitious, so allow me to be trite and repetitious. (Laughter.) It’s probably the most significant setback since the—
LABOTT: Last week. (Laughs.)
TAKEYH: Since last week. I mean, the obvious is the obvious. Syria was the indispensable land bridge to Lebanon and Hezbollah, despite the fact that the Israeli military has done much interdiction of those military encampments and transfers. Now Hezbollah is decapitated, largely irrelevant. There is no land bridge. Iran is now a subpar, subregional power, significant in the Gulf and certainly embedded Iraq whilst cut off from the Mediterranean. The sort of Axis of Resistance imperial reach that was supposed to make it the most relevant actor in many capital(s) has now shrunk. Hamas is no longer valuable. Hezbollah is degraded to the point of possible military extinction. And whatever new government emerges—if new governments emerge in Syria, they’re likely to remember that Iran was complicit in killing of half-a-million Syrians with its participation in the Syrian civil war.
Thirty billion dollars was spent by the Iranians on this civil war according to their own estimations that are now being released as they’re having their internal recrimination about who lost Syria debate. You’re going to see more of that happening as different actors are blaming each other.
In the near future, the ramifications of this will unfold in a lot of different ways. First of all, they have to figure out their regional policy and whether, as an ideological regime, it can still maintain that imperial reach.
Second of all, this has all kinds of domestic ramifications. The role of the Revolutionary Guards is now possibly a diminished one, given the fact that when you lose wars things don’t go well for. What this means for succession—the leader is eighty-five years old, and there’s a politics of succession taking place right now. What does this mean in terms of its relationship internally? There’s a population in Iran that’s hard-pressed and repressed, and now is seeing deliberation, at least for now, of Syria and people power. Does that have a demonstration effect for Iran as internal controls? And what does this mean for its nuclear project, relationship with the United States, and so forth?
So these are all issues that the regime has to deal with, has to sort out. And at this particular point, they’re in as much shock as everybody else in terms of what has taken place in Syria and the alacrity of the Assad regime’s collapse.
I should say the relationship with Bashar Assad and the Iranian regime was never seamless or smooth. They had a lot of disagreements over the years. But that’s the most significant Arab partner Iran has had since the inception of the revolution. The father was one of the only Arab leaders that supported Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. And, of course, his son offered Iran a pathway for influence in the Mediterranean and the Levant area.
So all that’s gone. Now they have to sort out what happens from here. And that’s going to be very difficult. As I said, there’s a lot of internal recrimination about who’s at fault. Almost all of them agree, though, that it’s Assad. (Laughter.)
LABOTT: You know, obviously it was—no one predicted what happened this week. And, of course, we don’t know. But if you had to predict, would you say that this is—that the regime is the next domino to fall in the region? Do you think that this kind of whole tectonic shifts in the region will lead to the fall of the regime?
TAKEYH: It’s very hard to say that with any measure of confidence. The Iranian regime has managed to hold onto power through internal insurrections, through Arab Spring, through convulsions that the region has gone through since 9/11. But this is certainly the most difficult position it’s been. It’s economically depleted. There’s limited confidence, if any, in the political system.
Its military is emasculated and has lost the war and seems incapable of reacting to Israeli penetration of airspace or preventing the collapse of its ally that it has spent so much money on. So the only thing the Iranian military is now good for is repressing fourteen-year-old adolescents who want to take their scarves off. That’s not a good look.
LABOTT: No.
TAKEYH: So, you know, the regime’s legitimacy was in tatters before that. It has certain imperial grandeur that’s also been diminished radically. And how soon the fortunes changed. On October 7 the regime was celebrating Hamas’s attack on Israel. Now it probably wishes Hamas had not attacked.
All the relevant actors that the regime relied on—Nasrallah, Sinwar—they’re all dead, so that they all have the name Shahid in front of their names now. That’s not good. Nineteen Iranian military officers, generals, were killed in Syria over the last year by Israeli attacks. So there’s a lot of empty seats around the table.
LABOTT: Yeah. I want to get to Israel in a minute. But just picking up on what Ray said, Elliott, I mean, when you talk about how weakened Iran is now, this really is—and we’ll talk a little bit more about the U.S. kind of role going forward—but when it comes to Iran, this is a real opportunity for the United States to take advantage. Iran has kind of never been so weakened in so many years.
ABRAMS: Right. I just want to start back a bit. We can’t have a discussion of the Middle East without having a couple of good conspiracy theories.
LABOTT: Go for it.
ABRAMS: So I want to offer one or two. We were all surprised, Iran shocked. I’m not sure how shocked Erdogan is, because some of my people—
LABOTT: Right. We’ll get to that.
ABRAMS: —in Lebanon and Syria have been saying to me this is Erdogan. This is Erdogan saying to HTS the time is now, and giving them a kind of failsafe. You get into trouble; we’re here, we’ll help you. So, I mean, Erdogan is clearly one of the great beneficiaries here. And what I’m hearing is he may have had a very significant role in this happening, and the timing of it as well.
Second conspiracy theory: Why didn’t the Iranians do more to help save Assad? One thing I’ve heard is, well, Assad had been talking to the Emirates, to the UAE, about this idea of maybe he’d shift from Iran to the Sunnis and they’d give him lots of money. And the mere idea that he would think about such a thing and talk to them about it led the Iranians to sort of think, OK, how far are we going to go to rescue this guy, who is not even a reliable ally anymore?
So I present—
LABOTT: Neither one of them sounds that farfetched even. (Laughs.)
ABRAMS: No—and very Middle Eastern, yeah.
LABOTT: Right.
ABRAMS: I’m also struck by the fact that the United States—admittedly, we’re six weeks away from having a new president—but under this president we are already taking advantage, in a way. It appears that we have stepped up the hits at the Houthis, and it appears that we have stepped up the American strikes at ISIS, particularly in the last couple of days against ISIS.
So just as the Israelis have moved in the Golan in the last day or two, it may be that we have been taking advantage of this vacuum to say, well, now’s a good time, for example, to strike ISIS sites harder, because there is no Syrian sovereignty to prevent it.
LABOTT: What about Iran, though? It’s also a huge opportunity for the incoming administration on Iran, right?
ABRAMS: It is. And I would imagine that the Israelis are already talking to the Trump team about whether this is not the exact perfect moment to strike the Iranian nuclear-weapons program. And that would perhaps require a green light from Washington. They’d certainly be thinking about, well, how much can the Israelis do, and what will the Iranians potentially do in response?
There would also be questions about the Houthis and about Iraq, because Israel has been struck from Yemen and Iraq. They may want to do more against that. They may want the United States to do more against the Houthis. And again, we’ve been doing more against the Houthis under President Biden in the last maybe month, since the election, actually. Perhaps there’s even more coming there.
The signaling from Trump, of course, unsurprisingly, has been, quote, this is not our war, closed quote. One very interesting question here. I think it’s plausible that a reelected Joe Biden would have planned to take that roughly 1,000 American troops out of Syria. And certainly Donald Trump, I think you would have said a week or two ago, would take them out.
I am wondering now whether he’ll still do that. The argument would be, hey, you know, there’s no Assad. This whole thing is ridiculous. Let’s get those people home. The counterargument which, if I were talking to Donald Trump, I would make, is they’re there for ISIS, our troops. They’re basically there to fight ISIS and to keep people imprisoned who are imprisoned, former ISIS fighters.
If those people get out and commit a terrorist attack against Americans, you get the blame. Don’t do it.
LABOTT: Well, that was the argument the last time when he tried to—
ABRAMS: Yeah.
LABOTT: —when he tried to take them out. I remember traveling with John Bolton and he was trying to get him to keep them.
ABRAMS: Yeah. So I don’t know which way this will actually cut with Trump.
LABOTT: Just to Steven to put a fine point on what he was saying about Turkey, you can really see that Turkey was instrumental in this; you know, Erdogan’s fingerprints. And it kind of suggests that this is an opportunity for Turkey to reshape northern Syria to its advantage. So, you know, how does Turkey’s goals, particularly regarding the Kurds, affect the stability in the broader region? And then I want to move on to, you know, HTS itself.
COOK: Yeah, let me just address Elliott’s two conspiracy theories for a moment.
ABRAMS: (Laughs.)
COOK: Both have, you know, some validity. And I think the Turkish one has much more validity than the Emirati one. The Emiratis have been courting Assad for the better part of the last few years in order to pull him away from the Iranians. Remember, he has visited Dubai. The Emirati foreign minister has visited in Damascus with Assad. And this has been a long-term strategy on the part of the Emirates to pull Assad away from the Iranians, something that the Turks did in their early AKP period in 2005-2006. That was the theory behind the, you know, bear hug between Erdogan and Assad.
I think the story about Turkey that articulated, there is a lot of truth to it. But let me put a finer point on it, based on what I know about what’s been going on in Ankara. The idea was to have a limited operation to put pressure on Assad to negotiate more seriously with the Turks over normalization.
The Turks have traveled this incredible road in Turkey (sic; Syria), going from Assad’s patron, to being the leading country that wanted Assad to go, to arming and supporting groups like the Syrian National Army, and HTS by the way, to seeking normalization—all in an effort to resettle the millions of Syrian refugees, most of whom are Kurds, back in Syria, because this is so unpopular in Turkey. And Assad had consistently rebuffed the Turks and said, you want to talk about normalization? That’s fine. We’re happy to talk about normalization. But you have to get out of the territory of Syria that you occupy. And we’re going to say that to the Israelis and we’re going to say that to you also, Turks. And this was going nowhere. And the Turks were really working at this idea of normalization, to return all of these people.
And so the idea was to have a limited operation to put pressure on Assad to negotiate. And then it turned into this catastrophic success. And once it turned into a catastrophic success, Erdogan couldn’t help himself. The idea—the opportunity to now shape a new regime in Damascus—you know, forget just the northern part of Syria, but in Damascus—is too much of an opportunity for Erdogan to pass up. And so that’s why he said at one point, I hope this march across the country goes without incident. I mean, that was basically saying, we support taking down Assad. And so clearly Erdogan believes that he has the ability to influence, and manage, and control these two main rebel groups, the SNA and HTS.
But with Assad gone, they need him a lot less than they did two weeks ago. And this is a recurring problem in Turkish foreign policy. They think they have some sort of cultural affinity with the Arab world and they understand these people better than anybody else, and then they get involved in something and they realize that they actually have no control and no influence, and they’re going to be in the middle of a mess in the middle of Damascus if, in fact, that’s what Erdogan thinks he’s doing, is recreating a government in, basically, Turkey’s image. That was the goal when Erdogan was out there publicly demanding that Assad must go, and privately asking the Obama administration to invade Syria but from Jordan. So it’s entirely believable that the Turks have been deeply, deeply involved in this, especially after Aleppo went from limited operation to catastrophic success.
LABOTT: And, Ray, that kind of raises the question of HTS itself. It saw to rebrand itself as a more moderate and inclusive group. And there are reports of, you know, tolerance and outreach. Obviously, there’s a lot of skepticism. And there is fears of a resurgence of kind of ISIS. They had ties to Nusra and Al-Qaida and other extremist groups. How realistic do you think the threat is? And what can everyone do to mitigate it?
TAKEYH: I would actually defer to Steve on anatomy of Islamist movements, which he understands better than I do, better than most people. I would just say one thing, as a preface to his comment. I tend to be skeptical of idea of reformist jihadis. (Laughs.) I tend to be skeptical of the idea of reform Taliban. (Laughs.) These are deeply ideological entities. And they’re essentially trying to pursue their ideological designs, which are, to me, in contrast. I would just say, before turning over to Steve, I think Syria is going to go over to the medieval period, where it’s going to be truncated between a bunch of fighting principalities and all the external powers trying to have some kind of a stake in this, in addition to Turkey.
But, Steve, go ahead.
COOK: Let me just say, on HTS, I share Ray’s skepticism that HTS is, you know, somehow, you know, progressive and inclusive. Certainly, this is something to—you know, they have learned the—obviously, the lessons from ISIS that, you know, the grisly kind of rule is not some way in which to garner support, either within the Syrian population who are skeptical of them or among those in the West. So what Abu Muhammad al-Julani is doing by saying this is Syria for all Syrians, and welcoming people back now that the Assad regime is gone, is making himself more palatable so those who are skeptical of him within Syria, it removes an argument from them. It removes an argument from the external powers that are deeply skeptical of him. But, you know, much has been made about his alleged change, that he has eschewed jihadist extremism.
LABOTT: He wears a suit.
COOK: Right, but really he broke from ISIS when he led Jabhat al-Nusra because ISIS wanted to absorb Jabhat al-Nusra, which would have essentially put him out of a job. It had really nothing to do with doctrinal issues as it had to do with organizational issues and who—and a power struggle between him and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And so Hayat Tahrir al-Sham broke away. And if you look at his rule in Idlib, it’s hardly inclusive. While he was busy letting people out of Assad’s jails, people—there was testimony about the horrors of HTS’ jails in Idlib. Perhaps, as I said, his rule may not be as grisly as that of the Islamic State, but it is certainly repressive. It’s definitely not democratic. And it’s definitely—skepticism about HTS, and what its intentions are, are warranted. When he showed up at the Umayyad mosque, he said, this was a victory for Islam. Wasn’t a victory for Syrians. Wasn’t a victory over dictatorship. It wasn’t—it was a victory for Islam. He has said that Islamic rule had been implemented incorrectly, implying that he can implement it correctly.
ABRAMS: Can I just add to that?
LABOTT: Yeah, I was going to go to you next, Elliott.
ABRAMS: I do think if you assume that he’s intelligent, and he’s looking ahead at trying to consolidate his own rule, he needs a lot of money. To keep the Syrian people, maybe sullen but not mutinous about his ruling the country, he needs billions—
LABOTT: Well, and also to help them rebuild. And he needs to get donor money, right?
ABRAMS: Yeah, he needs billions—he needs billions of dollars from the Gulf. He’s certainly not getting it from Donald Trump. He needs billions of dollars from the Gulf. And if they’re going to ask some things of him. They will probably not ask of him that he created Jeffersonian democracy. But they probably will ask that he not rule as a Muslim Brother, or as a radical jihadi.
LABOTT: Well, OK. So and he also emphasized the Golan Heights in all of this rhetoric. So what does this mean for Israeli security? And how should Israel approach the prospect of an Islamist-led government in Damascus.
ABRAMS: Well, it’s clear, I think, that any successor regime to Assad—jihadi, non-jihadi, democratic—would be saying, we want all of the Golan. The Golan is Syrian. So that is not really a surprise. And he—of course, his family comes from the Golan, though he himself does not.
COOK: That’s his nom de guerre, Julani.
ABRAMS: Right. I don’t think it—I don’t think it tells you terribly much about what they’re going to do in the near future, because he’d have to be quite an idiot to think that it would be useful to him—as, again, he’s trying to consolidate power—to bait the Israelis into striking his forces. The Israelis have already moved into the buffer zone, which is certainly a signal: Don’t do it.
I mean, I think there’s an interesting kind of thought experiment here. What if—assuming that he becomes the head of government, what if he says: We need to restore Syrian sovereignty. Foreigners out. That would mean the Israelis, from his point of view, and the Americans, and the Russians. Of course, it would also mean the Turks. That would be biting the hand that fed him. But it will be an interesting thing to watch. How much—how much Syria is—as Steve just said, he wasn’t talking about Syria. Will he start?
LABOTT: Well, what if he goes towards the Gulf and the Gulf is, like, hey, we’re on the—I mean, this is another, you know, wild idea. But, hey, it’s been—the last few weeks have been, you know, kind of wild. What if he says to—the Gulf says to him, you know, come with us to the light, let’s join the Abraham Accords? (Laughs.) I mean, is that out of the—is that out of—completely nonsensical?
ABRAMS: It’s a bit out of character—it’s a bit out of character for him, given his adult life. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I think what the Gulf will say to him—again, and he needs that money—is, don’t be a troublemaker in the region. They don’t want jihadis. They don’t want wars, except possibly Israeli attacks on Iran.
COOK: Let me just jump in here for one second, Elise. And, you know, Elliott makes a good point, but I’m somewhat skeptical about the willingness of at least the Emiratis and the Saudis of dealing with Abu Muhammad al-Julani. If only because they have been motivated for more than a decade—and you can just look at what happened in Egypt in 2013. They are deeply, deeply concerned about the accumulation of Islamist political power and deeply, deeply concerned about popular opposition to regimes and protest. And you have the combination of both in the outcome in Syria, with Assad leaving—the accumulation of political power combined with a frozen uprising that suddenly returned as places were liberated. So the Gulf states may be talking to Julani and saying, you know, don’t be a troublemaker. But I don’t see them working with him or giving him money, if only because they’re unlikely to trust—unlikely to trust him.
TAKEYH: Well, I’ll just say one brief thing. The possibility of score settling in this country—this country went through—a lot of people thought that the Assad regime would maintain power simply because Alawites were afraid of extinction. Well, that—and there’s been a lot of Alawite immigration out of the country in Europe and elsewhere. But there’s a real possibility of this country actually doing score settling with various minorities. You know, whether it’s Alawite, whether it’s the—sort of the Shia deviationists, which tends to violate all aspects of this doctrinal fight that they may be having. So this is hardly—consolidation of power without score settling an aftermath of a grisly civil war like that is only possible when the national leader is one of forbearance and tolerance. That’s not what comes to your mind when you think of the current leadership of HTS. (Laughter.)
ABRAMS: But on the positive side, there should be—at the end of a despicable, brutal, bloody regime like this—what in most contexts you’d call transitional justice. That is, if there were a democratic regime to be established in Syria, it would want some form of justice. It would ask Russia to extradite Assad for trial for his many, many crimes against the Syrian people. So, I mean, there’s supposed to be a kind of legal score settling in addition to or in place of the kind where we’re almost certainly going to see instead.
LABOTT: What about the chemical weapons? Ray, do you want to take that one? I mean, you know, we need—obviously, there’s a lot of concern. And, you know, what happens to that?
ABRAMS: Can I just say, they’re being incinerated as we speak by Israeli bombings.
LABOTT: This is true, but I’m sure there’s some other stockpiles that they don’t know about.
TAKEYH: That could only been cleaned up if there’s some sort of agreement with the international community to come in and actually help in this process. I don’t anticipate that, but maybe Israelis have their own way of dealing with these situations.
LABOTT: OK. I think we have a couple of questions. We have a lot of people joining us, almost about 400 on this media briefing.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
Will, let’s go to the first question.
OPERATOR: We will take our first question from Aaron David Miller.
LABOTT: Hi, Aaron.
Q: Hey, Elise. Great panel. So I guess this is to Steve.
You know, history can be a good teacher or a bad. And the track record for getting rid of Arab authoritarians, whether they’re acquiescent authoritarians with which the United States cooperated or adversarial authoritarians, or enemies of the United States—it’s not an uplifting story. In Egypt, you ended up with repression, Abdul Fattah el-Sisi. In Tunisia, aspiring democracy went south. In Libya, it ended up in dysfunction. In Yemen, Abdullah Saleh fell, you have the Houthis. Iraq, I mean, maybe that’s the most functional dysfunctional story, but in wake of Saddam it didn’t work out well. And I’m hoping for the best, but is this the Syria—is this the Syria exception to what has become a rule? And I know it’s not—I’ve got to be humble and respectful in terms of what’s in store here. But are there factors that make Syria different than the other five or six unhappy precedents?
COOK: Yeah, it’s—
LABOTT: Well, just let me pick—let me—let me tack on to that. It does kind of feel a little bit like Iraq, in the sense that, like, the forces just kind of melted away. And I don’t know that there’ll be an insurgency along those lines with the Iraqis, but.
COOK: Yeah. Look, I think—I think there’s two questions inherent in what—Aaron’s single question or statement. One is, what is the proper role for the United States in addressing this issue? And, two, are the Syrians able to do it themselves? And let me—let me take the second part myself. And will they be successful? Certainly, in the early going, there’s, you know, a tremendous amount of jubilation, and ideas, and optimism about what is possible. I think that people are just thrilled that the Assad regime is gone, the Syrians that I’ve spoken with. They’re thrilled that the Assad regime has gone, and it really hasn’t—and I think people are—some people are waiting with bated breath to see what HTS does.
I think the problem is, is that there is—as Ray articulated, there are now people who are going to want to settle scores. There are people who, like in Iraq—which was, I think, a very different situation than Syria. The Syrians did it themselves, unlike in Iraq where the United States did it. But still, like in Iraq, there are people who have not a lot left to lose. And what happens with those remnants of supporters of the regime? Where is Maher Assad? What is he trying to do? Who is he trying to rally? Then, if you look at the ethnic and religious composition of Syria, it’s not that different from Lebanon. And Lebanon is a failed state. So if the country were to fall into warlordism, it would be, as Ray said, kind of medieval. It would take an enormous amount of wisdom and charisma on the part of Abu Muhammad al-Julani to pull this country together in order to create some sort of decent regime. And, as I said before, he has never eschewed Islamic, quote/unquote, “Islamic” rule. I’m skeptical that, you know, jihadis in their twenties can change. This is a—this is a total worldview.
Now, as far as the United States goes, you know, I was—I was quipping to some folks I was speaking with today, I’d like to take both Biden’s statement and Trump’s truth-out on his social media and combine the two. And they seem to me that together they make a kind of decent policy. If you assume, one, that what Biden was talking about was that there is a real risk of the return—a major return of extremist groups in Syria, and that’s why the United States needs to be engaged here, to keep ISIS and al-Qaida at bay. Great. That is something I think we can get behind. If what Trump meant, that this isn’t our fight, is that it’s not the U.S. place to engineer Syrian politics from 6,000 miles away, I think that’s pretty wise too, given our record as you articulated it, Aaron. That is, I think, something that we should.
It doesn’t mean that there should be no role for the United States. Like I said, there is this concern about the return—the real return of ISIS and al-Qaida. I think that that’s an important issue that the United States needs to—needs to consider. As far as getting involved in arranging the politics of Syria, I think that no good can come from it.
ABRAMS: There’s one other—just one other—
LABOTT: Elliott, let me just—yeah, let me just—
ABRAMS: I was just going to say, there’s one other thing here. We have an interest in getting those Soviet—Soviet—those Russian bases out. It’s in our interest that Russia not have bases in Syria, in the Eastern Mediterranean. And if we have goals in Syria, that should be one of them.
COOK: Good point, Elliott. Very good point.
LABOTT: But, just to follow up, Elliott, I mean, OK, you know, Trump said, let it play out. Do nothing. You have this limited troops presence that, you know, we alluded to. But, like, what should the—what should the U.S. presence or the U.S. role be? Jake Sullivan yesterday said, don’t let this allow for a resurgence of ISIS, assuring the security of partners and humanitarian. I mean, and what risks arise from leaving this to regional powers?
ABRAMS: Well, there’s—you know, the risk is that they blow it, right? That they handle it badly, and that jihadi groups grow in influence. Of course, are we going to do better? I mean, that’s the question. I agree with Steve, that for us to try to, you know, manage this—particularly in the middle of a transition—from Washington, I don’t—(laughs)—I mean, it’s not reassuring as to our potential for making this come out right. I would rather have us say, OK, what’s our real interest here? We have an interest in the security of Jordan. We have an interest in the security of Israel. We have an interest in getting those Russian bases out. What else? We’d like to see a good outcome in Syria. We always favor a peaceful, democratic outcome, in principle. But what we can do to achieve that, I think, is quite limited.
LABOTT: OK. I’m told we have a lot more questions. Will, over to you.
OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Janine di Giovanni.
LABOTT: Hi, Janine.
Q: Hello. Hi, everyone. I’m Janine Di Giovanni, the executive director of The Reckoning Project. We’re a war crimes unit in Ukraine, but I’m a former Murrow fellow at the Council and I spent many, many years on the ground in Syria.
So I’d like to ask a question about your thoughts on international justice for Syria. Steve, you know that Syria was the most documented war because everyone had an iPhone, everyone took photographs of the barrel bombs in Aleppo, the Syrian archive emerged, the Ceasar photographs, the IIIM that came out of the General Assembly—so we’ve got everything there. But what in your view can we do with it? Can the ICC be effective on universal jurisdiction, which is a mechanism—
COOK: Yeah, you know, look, this is not really my area of expertise. Elliott is a lawyer and brought up transnational justice. But what I would say is that, look, it’s abundantly clear that, you know, Assad is a war criminal if there has ever been a war criminal. And it is the most well-documented.
If Syria were to turn out and—and, as Elliott alluded to, if there was a democratic regime that emerged, there would be a reckoning. Until that time, I don’t think that there is. But I think that those archives and photos and videos are all extremely important for bearing witness to what happened in Syria.
You know, events over the course of the last fifteen months have really overtaken what was the world’s most horrible humanitarian crisis and disaster: 500,000 Syrians—half the population displaced, the Syrians and Russians preventing humanitarian aid from coming into the country. This is horrifying. So at the very least, all of that documentation bears witness to what happened there, even if there is no—even if there is no justice because it’s impossible under the circumstances that, you know, we’re envisioning are entirely plausible in Syria.
TAKEYH: I’ll just say one thing about this: All the evidence that Steven talked about and others, there’s likely to be more. More dungeons are going to be exposed. More prisons are going to be exposed. More children underage five that are in prison are going to be exposed. I don’t believe looking at this that the current cast of characters coming to power in Syria have much regard for international tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions. I have a feeling they’re going to take matters into their own hands, and this is going to create another situation where international community has to look at how humanitarian abuses happened before and are being—retribution for it. That’s the direction that I suspect this will take, and I suspect it will take that direction rather soon.
LABOTT: Will, next question?
OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Christopher Isham.
LABOTT: Hi, Chris. Chris? Chris Isham, are you muted?
Alright, we’ll try and get back to Chris. Next question?
OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from John Negroponte.
LABOTT: Hi, Ambassador Negroponte.
Q: Hello. You know, this is really fascinating because it’s almost like a huge gift to us, all the different things that have happened and that we’ve been striving to do for so long. We’ve got a weakened Hezbollah, we have a weakened Hamas, the regime in Syria falls. I guess we’ve got to give Mr. Netanyahu a lot of credit for what’s happened.
I don’t see any difficulty with dealing with some of the local situations that we’re talking about, like maybe the U.N. Security Council taking up Syria. Maybe you could have a special tribunal with Syria to deal with the war crimes there. I mean, you know I think you have to throw it into the hopper where you can get some adult debate about what to do about a situation like this, and this one I would have thought was a natural for the U.N. Security Council.
But more broadly speaking, haven’t we been watching a deteriorating strength of both Iran and the Russians in the region? And what are we going to do to consolidate what could continue to be a much larger gain than just here or there? And is there some global outcome that might be possible as a result of all of this?
LABOTT: Thank you so much, Ambassador.
Ray, do you want to take that?
TAKEYH: Sure. Why are we in this situation after decades of bemoaning that we have failed in the Middle East? Why are we in this advantageous situation? We are in this situation because Israelis didn’t listen to us. (Laughter.) They didn’t settle for an armistice but decapitated Hezbollah. They refused to sit down and have another ceasefire in Gaza and went ahead and cleansed that enclave of Hamas. They demonstrated how weakened Assad regime has been by essentially decapitating the Iranian infrastructure.
A question was asked: Why did Iran not intervene? According to sources that I see, and that’s only in print, the Israelis had warned them that if they essentially bring military contingents into Syria, they will use force against them. That was one of the deterrents, especially as the situation was rapidly disintegrating and the Iranian military coming in there to be decapitated by Israelis was a deterrent and a factor.
So having said that, Bebe Netanyahu looks good to me as a geostrategian—(laughter)—more so than anybody thought so. I think at this point—and we were talking about this earlier—whether we are—and I know Steven doesn’t’ like this stuff—an inflection point in the Middle East, whether it’s sort of a—as Bret Stephens said, “a ’67 moment” where things have essentially gone very much differently, and what role the United States has.
We have said two things all along: we want to succeed in the region but we don’t want to be involved. Well, the Israelis have demonstrated that they can essentially be an effective surrogate of American power in the region. I’ll just leave it at that.
LABOTT: Elliott, do you think it’s, you know, Netanyahu and the Israelis—are they finally going to get the credit for kind of reshaping the region and kind of staging this status quo like they said they would do at the beginning—right at the top of October 7? They said it was time for a change in the status quo.
ABRAMS: Yeah, I don’t think he’ll get the credit internally in Israel, but I think he will get it substantially among leaders around the world. And we—you know, how many times have we had the lecture that these problems have to be resolved diplomatically? They can’t be resolved through force of arms. Really? He changed the situation through—or the IDF did, through force of arms.
I think John Negroponte asks the right question, and I’d say, how do we consolidate? One way is again, get the Russian bases out. Critical way of weakening Putin and his global ambitions.
Secondly, the question of the Iranian nuclear program. Does Israel or do we want to put it to an end?
COOK: This is—look, that’s exactly where I was going with this. The question is, you know, and Bret has written it’s a “’67 moment,” and I agree. When I was in Israel in September it was abundantly clear to me that the Israelis had stopped listening to people who they considered couldn’t get it done in Iraq or Afghanistan, and that they were going to do it much differently. So we’re—now that we have had this very, very significant change—I’m not against inflection points; I’m against calling things that are inflection points that really aren’t inflection points. But this may—
LABOTT: Is this really an inflection point? (Laughter.)
COOK: This may really be one. I mean, look, the axis of resistance is gone. Hezbollah is essentially gone. The land bridge to the Mediterranean for the Iranians is gone. The Iranians are totally exposed.
So the question is now—what is available to the Iranians are two things: one, further consolidating their position in Iraq and expediting their nuclear development. And I think that they’re likely going to do both. And the question is, what will the Trump administration do to prevent those things from happening? And it’s very, very unclear to me.
In terms of, as Ambassador Negroponte said and Elliott echoed, consolidating our gains, if the president-elect wants to do maximum pressure to just get another agreement that he can say is better than the JCPOA, I’m not sure that is really consolidating our gains. If he’s going to do a deal with the Russians on Ukraine, he can give them on the chessboard the naval base in Tartus. So—but those seem to me his inclinations, and that’s how we blow a really advantageous situation and an “inflection point” doesn’t become a true inflection point.
LABOTT: Elliott, does the Trump administration have the strategic wherewithal to do what Steve has just—Steven is saying?
ABRAMS: We’ll see. (Laughter.) I mean, who knows?
You know, I just want to live this for a minute from the Iranian point of view. If everything we’re saying here is more or less right, I know what the Iranians ought to do. They ought to send messages to Trump saying that such a deal is possible, and drag out the negotiations, and drag them out, and drag them out while building their nuclear program.
LABOTT: OK. Will, next question.
OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Charles Lane.
LABOTT: Hi, Charles. Charles, are you muted?
(Pause.)
OK.
OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Kimathi Marangu.
Q: Hi there. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I’m Kimathi Marangu and I’m a corporate member.
I have two questions about money. One is around if anyone knows the whereabouts of Rami Makhlouf, who is, you know, Bashar’s cousin and ran most of the economy. I imagine a lot of the—
LABOTT: Oh, Rami—
Q: A lot of the resources that he has access to could be valuable right now.
The second question about money is—and this is for Steven—do we expect Turkey to support HTS going forward with fuel, medical supplies, such things? I mean, I’ve heard of oil tankers in the Red Sea from Iran now doing U-turns and returning back to Iran. So will Turkey be there to fill in the void, given the elements that they’ve had in this process?
COOK: Let me on that question suggest that the Turks, as I said, often overestimate their capacity to influence and kind of run these situations. I mean, that’s been their story in Syria all along, is that they’ve overestimated their ability. When the uprising began, they were going to get Assad to reform, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I think that the Turks don’t have the financial wherewithal to support HTS in the way that they need, but the Turks also have a strategy ally that might, and it’s called Qatar. And the Qataris have not been shy about supporting Islamist groups around the region, to their great advantage in their competition with Saudis and Emiratis, who really don’t like the accumulation of political power. That’s a factor that we have not considered, that the Turks and the Qataris could become more involved in it, as they were once before.
On this question of Rami Makhlouf, this is what I was saying about Maher al-Assad: We don’t know where these people are, wherever they’ve stuffed the money, where it is, and how they’re going to try to marshal whatever resources at their disposal in order to mount some sort of campaign against the new order that’s taking shape in Syria. But you can, I think, be sure that they will try to do that. And at least the Makhloufs and some of the Assads have a fairly safe haven from which to do this in the Emirates.
LABOTT: Yeah. Charles Lane was saying—his question was about Qatar, are they supporting HTS, and could that be a source of financing alternative.
COOK: To be honest with you, I’m inferring based on the strategic relationship between Ankara and Doha that the combination of what the two have tried to do around the region could—this could be an opportunity for the Qataris as well as for the Turks.
LABOTT: OK. Next question, please.
OPERATOR: We will take our next question from Robert Danin.
LABOTT: Hi, Rob,
COOK: Hey, Rob.
Q: Hello.
LABOTT: Lots of old friends here.
Q: Former colleagues. Great panel. Great discussion.
Seems to me you’re all maybe a bit optimistic, believe it or not—(laughs)—because the one thing you didn’t—haven’t really addressed to be a further spoiler in the room is that, you know, Syria is an extremely heterogeneic society in which you had a small, you know, Alawite community ruling through repression, but beyond the Alawites you have a large Kurdish population and other—a Christian population and whatnot. So what happens if HTS becomes a—you know, does not rule over a unified country, but rather rules over a highly Balkanized and fractured country? I mean, this was something—you know, in all the policy debates over the—with the Obama administration, you know, the opposition to toppling Bashar always was that Syria will fragment. So what if Syria fragments? What are U.S. interests here, I guess, is the first question to you. How much do we let it—you know, what do we do? And you know, what are the factions that matter?
ABRAMS: Well, this—if this happens, it happens during the Trump administration, essentially. He’s not going to use American force to keep Syria unified. I think he really will believe that’s not our fight. So it then devolves upon the neighbors to protect themselves, and Syria could look—could—if you want to be a pessimist, could look like Libya. There could be more and more and more fighting with different groups supported from their champions outside, with the central government in Damascus—as has been true for a long time—not controlling the borders of the state. So we would—you know, the Israelis will protect themselves. So will the Turks. We will help the Jordanians protect themselves. But it could—it could look like Libya.
COOK: Well, Elliott, what you’re essentially describing is Syria of 2012 to 2016.
LABOTT: I think we have time for one more question.
OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Arlene Getz.
Q: Hi. Yes. I’m Arlene Getz. I’m with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
I wanted to ask a little bit more about Russia, and what the panel thinks Russia’s role and endgame was in this. Were they just caught up in events, or was this a case of just deciding that there was too much going on with Ukraine? So, you know, any insights you can provide into, again, you know, did they pull back, were they—or was this part of some grander plan?
LABOTT: Thanks, Arlene. Who wants to take that one?
ABRAMS: I would just say one—I would just say one thing about it, which is that maybe five years ago they could have tried to airlift in a couple of thousand Wagner Group forces to lead the fight, to stiffen the resistance on the part of the Syrian army. But you know, after Prigozhin’s maybe-coup, Wagner ain’t what it used to be. And it is very striking—and we talk about Russia as a great, you know, world power—they were completely unable to do anything useful to help Assad after fifty years of close Syrian-Russian relations.
TAKEYH: Well, I think they probably ran out of North Koreans to—(laughter).
But I would say one thing about both Assad’s external supporters, Russia and Iran—and I think I know a little bit more Iran case than I do about Russia—is they were both surprised by the speed by which the Assad regime disintegrated. And there wasn’t just enough sufficient time for them to mobilize resources at a time when those resources are stressed—Russia in Ukraine, Iran because of everything that has happened in the region. In that sense, I think they may have overestimated or perhaps bought into Assad’s own misperception of his rule and of his own steadiness.
COOK: I think the—I think the combination of the speed with which this happened really hamstrung the Russians in particular, and I think they came—at some point relatively quickly came to the conclusion that they don’t need to be so invested in Bashar al-Assad or Syria itself beyond its naval base, which is actually important to Russian operations in Africa and elsewhere as Elliott has pointed out. So that is what they—I think they believe—and speaking to Russian experts—that they can somehow negotiate a situation where they get to hang onto that naval base.
And you know, they—Bashar al-Assad was difficult for the Iranians as well as the Russians. So, in cutting their losses and the inability to mobilize given the speed of events, or not having the manpower to do so, they decided to try to salvage what was most important to them in Syria, which is that naval base.
LABOTT: All right. I’m going to—I think that’s all the time we have. Right now I’m just going to end on asking the panelists very quickly to—as we consider the regional and global impact of the moment, what’s the most critical factor that will determine Syria’s future is stable or chaos? Elliott, start with you.
ABRAMS: Well, the one-word answer is Syrians. That is, the actual balance of forces within in the country and the ability of groups within the country—Alawites, Druze, et cetera—certainly to protect themselves.
LABOTT: Ray.
TAKEYH: I will say I share Rob Danin’s pessimism. I suspect Syria will essentially be party to an internal struggle between various faction(s), various Kurdish factions. When a multiconfessional (ph) sectarian state breaks down, it doesn’t cohere together with the alacrity that people seem to think.
LABOTT: Steven.
COOK: Agree with Ray and Rob. And I would also say external powers who overestimate their ability to manage events in Syria.
LABOTT: OK. Well, I’d like to thank my panelists. I’d like to thank everybody for joining us, as always. Oh, and just a reminder, this was on the record. You’ll be able to find the transcript and video on CFR.org, along with a lot of other excellent and up-to-date resources on this rapidly evolving situation. Thank you all for joining us.
COOK: Thanks so much.
(END)
