Robert D. Kaplan on Syria and the Middle East (Agenda)
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Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, Stratfor cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Video Transcript:
Colin Chapman: The cover of the magazine I picked up said, "The Tragedy of the Middle East." But when I look to the date of the copy of Foreign Affairs, it was 10 years old. If there was tragedy then, what do we have now?
Welcome to Agenda, and with me to discuss the slow death of Syria is Stratfor's Chief Geopolitical Analyst Robert Kaplan. Robert, European foreign ministers were about to discuss the Middle East again and President Obama's two top men John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have just returned. But there's no sense of optimism about.
Robert Kaplan: Yes, diplomatic opportunities are few and far between. We've had fighting in Syria's civil war for our roughly two years now. And unless there's a sudden development like a palace coup or something of that order, the fighting could go on and on, for years even. The reason is though Bashar al Assad doesn't control all of Syria, he may not be functionally any longer the president of Syria. He is still very much the country's leading warlord, and a very tough one at that. The Syrian military, you know, Bashar al Assad's military, seems to have stopped trying to fight to control the whole country -- that's impossible. It's like withdrawn inward, it's concentrating its forces around a defined corridor and in that kind of fighting it has advantages that the rebels don't have. The rebels are infernally divided between Islamist elements, less-Islamist elements, between elements supported by this country and that -- Saudi Arabia and Qatar and others. The agreements papered over in places like Doha to provide some semblance of rebel unity are just that -- a semblance of unity that has very little reality on the battlefield. So while al Assad can no longer control all of Syria, it seems hard to see how the rebels can decisively defeat him. And the Russians moreover -- and this is very important -- the Russians seem to be supporting al Assad with weapons through arms transfers by sea and otherwise to Iran and to Iraq that makes its way to Syria. So al Assad is being supported by Russia, and frankly the Israelis may see advantages in that. Because for Israel, the al Assad family is the devil you know. Since Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy of 1974, the Israelis have had a de facto agreement of sorts with the al Assad family. There have been redlines -- each side has known what to cross and what not to. And when the Syrians do cross the line, like when they tried to develop a nuclear capability about half a decade back, the Israelis bombed Syria and the Syrians got back into line. So the Israelis may be in no rush to topple al Assad. They may like the situation as it is.
Colin: And I think I'm right in saying that about one-fifth of those rebels are jihadists.
Robert: Yes, exactly. Remember the Obama administration has to defend the proposition of not going full-bore into aiding the rebels because the Obama administration is frankly nervous that if al Assad were to be completely and suddenly toppled by rebels with significant pivotal U.S. support, the United States may then morally and politically have some responsibility for the on-the-ground reality in a situation that may be much more chaotic than Libya was. So the Obama administration is in no rush to do that. Therefore, Washington diplomacy has limited credibility.
Colin: And this is because the U.S. and others have seen the product of intervention in, say, Afghanistan and realized that this is the kind of chaos that can't be settled by drones (unmanned aerial vehicles).
Robert: Exactly. The Obama administration's strategy for the Middle East seems to be to kill specific terrorists with drones but do not put boots on the ground in significant numbers. The Washington elites may complain about this strategy but the American people seem satisfied with it because it's no risk, very little pain. And this is something that is hard for elites to accept but which the administration accepts because once you're in bureaucratic power in Washington, you immediately become a realist in that many problems, especially ones in the Middle East, simply have no solutions.
Colin: But Syria threatens every goal of peace in the Middle East, ranging from containing or eliminating jihadism to solving refugee problems -- I think there's about a million refugees from Syria -- to securing energy supplies.
Robert: Well on the first issue, the Middle East, the United States and Israel had a very tolerable situation for many decades, since the end of World War II when the Middle East was controlled by dictatorships of one sort or another that provided order, provided predictability and where there was one address, one telephone number, one fax machine, one fax number, one email address, in case there was a crisis. One person ruled each country and by dealing with one person, you could avert or alleviate crises. As these dictatorships crumble, you don't get automatically, like flipping a switch, this stable democracy. What you get is quasi anarchy because there are no institutions built under this carapace of dictatorship. So you have quasi anarchy where you have dozens upon dozens upon dozens of actors who have to be theoretically consulted in each country rather than just one address. So stable dictatorship was easy to denounce as undemocratic, but it was also very convenient for both Washington and the Israelis. Now you have quasi anarchy. Yes you have a million refugees and the issue of energy resources, but keep in mind the United States is getting less and less oil from the Middle East. The United States is on its way to becoming virtually energy independent within greater North America and its the Indians and the Chinese for example who are going to be needing increasing amounts of oil from the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian Plateau.
Colin: Robert, so let's look at Israel. How does Israel deal with all this? Its problems are weighty -- not just Syria and with it Lebanon but also less-than-stable neighbors and its policy toward the Palestinians. The list goes on and on.
Robert: Yes, the situation of stable dictatorships, there were possible solutions, such as peace treaties with Israel, with Jordan, de facto understandings like with the Haffez al Assad regime in Syria and later on with his son Bashar. But in an era of quasi anarchy where even the Jordanian regime survival in the long term is questionable, there are no solutions for Israel. What there is is limited periodic warfare against Hamas, against Hezbollah, where the Israelis hope that only once a decade they will have to go in with significant force to in the phrase they use "mow the lawn" to provide them with another six or seven years of relative peace.
Colin: And that doesn't go down well with their critics, especially in Europe.
Robert: Yes, I believe in talking to Israelis in the past few weeks and knowing the country intimately for years, that doesn't bother the Israelis. The Israelis have no regard for the Europeans, no regard for many others. The only people that the Israelis worry and have real regard for as far as the opinion of Israel is the American people. The Israelis feel as long as the American people have demonstrable sympathy for their plight, that's all that they need. They've written off Europe for years already.
Colin: Robert Kaplan, thank you for that painful reminder of where things stand. And thank you for watching us on Agenda. Until the next time, goodbye.
