by Hall Gardner
If all sides can cooperate, a concerted internationalized control over the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint by means of US, French, Indian, Japanese, Saudi, and Chinese naval deployments in Djibouti appears in the making. Yet as Djibouti is China's first overseas “support facility,” the United States believes that China is engaging in military expansionism to protect its overseas trade and investments.35
IRAN AND SAUDI RIVALRY
For its part, Iran, as the strongest ally of Syria, condemned the Tomahawk attack as “dangerous, destructive and a violation of international law.”36 Iran condemned the US attack even if it should likewise be concerned with Syria's alleged use of chemical weaponry after Saddam Hussein used such weaponry against Iranian, Iraqi Kurdish, and Iraqi Shi'ite forces during the Iran-Iraq War.
And, angering Iran, Trump has additionally begun to escalate the war in Yemen in support of the Saudi position against the Houthis. While the United States has ostensibly focused its airstrikes and Special Forces operations on al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen, it has also provided considerable military support to Saudi Arabia. Obama transferred more than $100 billion in over forty different arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And President Obama made a major military sale to Saudi Arabia just as the US Congress overrode his veto and adopted the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA). The latter permits US citizens to sue Saudi Arabia for the damages and death caused by the September 11, 2001, attacks. This bill was passed on the still-unproven presumption that Saudi officials may have supported al-Qaeda or that Riyadh may have known something about the attacks. Saudi Arabia is now facing a $6 billion lawsuit. US attorneys are also investigating whether Iran may have assisted al-Qaeda members by letting them pass through Iranian territory, for example.37
Obama had tried to veto the JASTA bill in the belief that it could further alienate Saudi Arabia from US policy and thus intensify the conflict in the wider Middle East. In addition, Riyadh had threatened to pull hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and investments out of the United States in response to the lawsuits. Perhaps most crucially, the law opens the United States itself to lawsuits from people in other countries who have been impacted by US military interventions.
For his part, Trump had strongly opposed Obama's veto of JASTA. Yet Trump then opted for a major arms sale to both Saudi Arabia and Bahrein, which had initially been delayed by the Obama administration on account of human rights concerns resulting from the unconventional way Riyadh is fighting in Yemen. In 2015, Trump had tweeted, “Saudi Arabia should be paying the United States many billions of dollars for our defense of them. Without us, gone!”38 On his trip to Riyadh in May 2017, however, Trump opted to sell Saudi Arabia seven THAAD missile defense batteries, over 100,000 air-to-ground munitions, and billions of dollars’ worth of new aircraft, among other weapons and satellite systems, in addition to assistance in border security and counterterrorism, maritime and coastal security, air force modernization, and cyber-security and communications upgrades. This deal, initiated by Obama, is potentially worth a total of $110 billion, assuming the US Congress does accept all proposed sales to the kingdom.39 Yet Riyadh, seen as hedging its bets on long-term US support with the particularly fickle Trump presidency, also raised eyebrows in Washington when it sought to purchase the Russian-made S-400 antimissile system.
THE RUSSIAN RESPONSE
Putin's immediate response was to call the April 2017 Tomahawk strikes on Syria a violation of international law and a “significant blow” to the Russian-American relationship.40 The strikes were not necessarily interpreted by Moscow as a legitimate means to punish the Assad regime for its alleged use of chemical weaponry against its own population. Russian diplomats furthermore condemned the United States for being a “partner of Daesh [that is, IS] and al-Nusra Front terrorist groups operating in Syria.” Former US Defense Intelligence Agency director Michael Flynn, who lost his post as one of Trump's National Security Advisors, had affirmed that Washington, along with its Arab Gulf allies, had made a willful “decision” set up a “Salafist principality” in eastern Syria to counter the Assad regime.41
One Russian diplomat described the US Tomahawk strike as a ploy to distract attention from the “tragedy” that the so-called US-led Coalition Against Daesh has created by targeting Iraqi civilians in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev stated the strikes had been only “one step away from military clashes with Russia”; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated: “It reminds me of the situation in 2003 when the United States and Britain, along with some of their allies, attacked Iraq.”42 Yet Lavrov hoped that “this provocation will not lead to irreparable damage” to the ties between Washington and Moscow.
One of the reasons for Moscow's direct military intervention in Syria in 2015 was to compel the United States and Europeans to recognize Moscow as a strong equal partner and to better respect Russia's perceived “vital” national security interests. Moscow hoped to signal that it does not want to lose its spheres of influence and security either in the Black Sea region or in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant region. In essence, Moscow has feared that the collapse of the Assad regime could permit pan-Islamist movements to undermine Russian controls not only in the Northern Caucasus but also in Muslim areas of the Russian Federation and in Central Asia.
The Russia intervention in Syria also represented an effort to help deflect US and European attention away from its fait accompli in Crimea—while also hoping to use Syria as a form of bargaining chip to press the United States and Europeans to put an end to the political and economic sanctions that were placed on Moscow after the annexation of Crimea.
NATO MEMBER TURKEY AND RUSSIA
With respect to the states closest to the conflict, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu affirmed that Ankara saw the US intervention in Syria as appropriate but that if the intervention was limited only to a missile attack on a Syrian air base, then it represented only a “cosmetic intervention” unless it eventually removed President Bashar al-Assad from power. NATO ally Turkey welcomed the missile strikes as “positive.”43 Syrian relations with Turkey and the Arab Gulf states had begun to deteriorate in 2011 when the Assad government engaged in a brutal repression of Arab Spring protesters, who were seen by Damascus as supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, among other pan-Islamist groups. At that time, Ankara abandoned its ties to Assad when it began to implement its idealist policy of “zero problems with its neighbors.” In November 2015, after Moscow entered the Syrian conflict, Ankara shot down a Russian military aircraft that was flying out of Turkish airspace, after it had ended its mission over Syrian territory near the Turkish border. The Russian jet had struck Turkmen villages that Moscow believed were engaged in the war against Assad. It was the kind of incident that could spark World War III—if NATO had backed Turkey.
Nevertheless, NATO member Turkey, despite previous Turkish opposition to Moscow's support for Assad, began to look toward Moscow for several reasons. First, Turkey began to turn against the United States in the belief that Washington was behind the failed Gülen coup attempt in the summer of 2016. Fethullah Gülen, who lives in the United States, is a self-exiled Islamist who used to be Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ally when the two were engaged in curbing the political power of the military in Turkey's secular “deep state.” But Erdoğan broke with Gülen in 2013—who was accused by Ankara of masterminding the coup. Erdoğan has subsequently initiated a major purge of an estimated 150,000 civil servants, teachers, prosecutors, judges, journalists, army officers, and police who have been suspended or dismissed. At least 52,000 have been put in prison. In April 2017, Erdoğan was able to pass a close and disputed referendum that augmented the powers of the presidency by revising the Turkish constitution.44
TURKEY, RUSSIA, AND THE KURDS
Despite his unexpected rapprochement with Moscow since 2016, Erdoğan stated that he did not see Trump's strikes as going far enough. Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Assad's gover
nment “must be removed from leading Syria as soon as possible, and the best way to do that is by starting the transitional process.”45 In addition, Ankara called for the United States and its allies in the Global Coalition against Daesh to set up a no-fly zone in Syria in the wake of the April 2017 US Tomahawk cruise missile strikes. Yet this proposal has not been realized.
Second, US support for Kurdish factions in Syria to fight against IS also has also enraged Turkey. Ankara believed correctly or incorrectly that Kurdish political parties and militias in Syria, such as the Democratic Union Party (PYD), are linked to the radical Kurdish PKK in Turkey. These Kurdish groups have been seen by Turkey as demanding independence and not “autonomy” as they claim.46 When US airstrikes helped the Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG)—whom Ankara saw as aligned with the Kurdish PKK inside Turkey itself—to defend the town of Kobani from the Islamic State, Erdoğan suddenly flipped sides. Turkey then began to align more closely with Russia in the fear that US support for Kurdish opponents of the Syrian Assad regime could ultimately result in the formation of independent Kurdish state that could break away from Syria and then support the PKK inside Turkey.
US support for Syrian Kurds then led Turkey to bomb US-backed Kurdish fighters in northern Syria and in Iraq, in April 25, 2017, for example, as Ankara also did in October 2016.47 These actions were denounced by Washington, which stated that these strikes were not approved by the Global Coalition against Daesh. And despite strong Turkish objections, the Trump administration decided in early May 2017 to provide weaponry for the Syrian Kurds of the YPG to take on fortified Islamic State fighters in Raqqa, Syria.48
Third, Turkey was also impacted by Russian blackmail: Moscow could also threaten support the PKK and Assad against Turkey much as Moscow did in the past—if the two sides are not able to reach a compromise. Accordingly, Moscow has wanted Ankara to begin to work with Assad again, as Ankara had done prior to the 2011 Arab Spring movement. Moscow would then reopen mutually beneficial trade, tourism, and energy deals that had been cut off when the two sides broke off relations in November 2015 after Turkey shot down a Russian military aircraft. Russia had also threatened to cut off the South Stream energy pipeline that would provide rents for Turkey.
This situation has been made even further complex by the fact that the Turkish government considers as “terrorists” the Syrian and other Kurdish factions that are supported by the United States to fight IS. At present, the main focus of the United States is not Assad but the Islamic State (IS). In the past two and a half years, as of mid-2017, Washington has spent some $12 billion in fighting IS alone. The United States has hoped to defeat IS but by putting the fewest boots on the ground as possible. This means that not only has the Pentagon bombed IS positions since 2014, but it has also worked with both Shi'a groups in Iraq and Kurdish groups in Syria and Iraq.
The dilemma is that US support for Syrian and Iraqi Kurds has raised Ankara's fears that the United States could purposely or inadvertently be supporting Kurdish independence movements inside Turkey—even if the Pentagon has promised to closely monitor its supplies of weapons and ammunition to the Kurds. The Turks have accordingly moved across the border into Syria to control Syrian Kurdish forces and prevent them from linking to the PKK. They have periodically bombed PKK forces in northern Iraq. Turkish attacks against the Kurds come at a time when the Turkish PKK ostensibly no longer claims “independence” from Turkey. Instead, it is the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) leadership that has begun to demand independence. In mid-September 2017, Massoud Barzani, the president of the KRG, held a nonbinding referendum on independence of Iraqi Kurdistan; this was done against the advice of the US government, and it is strongly opposed by Iran, Syria, Turkey, and Iraq itself—but it has been backed by Israel.49 Also in September, the US Senate blocked the sale of $1.2 million in small arms to Erdoğan's personal security guards after accusing them of using excessive force against primarily Kurdish protesters in May. This was seen as another pro-Kurdish step by Washington against Ankara's interests.
The “threat” of an Iraqi Kurdish independence movement accordingly opens a new can of worms that could further splinter Iraq, Syria, Iran, if not Turkey itself, and can exacerbate ongoing regional conflicts, since Turkey has threatened an energy blockade and Iran has purportedly mobilized troops along the Iraqi-Kurdish border. The more the United States is seen as supporting the Kurds, the more Turkey will threaten to turn to Moscow. In addition, given growing sociopolitical tensions between Germany and Turkey in part due to immigration and human rights issues, plus the fact that the European parliament threatened to suspend EU accession talks with Ankara in mid-2017 after President Erdoğan cracked down severely on the alleged Gülen coup attempt, likewise presses Turkey closer to Russia.
Close ties to Moscow are moreover indicated by Turkish interest in purchasing Russian-made S-400 antiaircraft missiles. These weapons, which would require much closer Turkish-Russian military training and cooperation, could permit Ankara to diversify its military capabilities so that Turkey is not entirely under NATO oversight.50 Such a sale could also open Russian arms sales to the Arab Gulf countries or to other US allies. The sale would have proved much more acceptable to Washington and NATO, that is, if the United States, NATO, and Russia were on better terms, but it now threatens the relationship between NATO and Turkey.
Because the United States and Europeans, with their close ties to Saudi Arabia, were unable to reach an accord with Russia and Iran over Syria, Turkey joined with Russia and Iran for peace talks in Astana, Kazakhstan. The three countries then brokered a cease-fire for Syria in the effort to create “de-escalation” zones, which took effect (more or less) on December 30, 2016.51 But these talks took place without US, European, or Saudi participation, raising questions as to whether they can be successfully implemented. By not working with both Russia and Turkey, Washington risks letting Moscow control the show. Washington also risks the rupture of relations with Turkey—in exchange for the not entirely certain benefits of working with Syrian Kurds to try to defeat the Islamic State. Washington will eventually need to work with both Russia and Turkey, and the Kurdish factions, if not Iran as well, in the effort to find mutual accords—if a Syrian settlement is to be found.
Despite the above concerns, Trump nevertheless claimed that the Turkish president “is becoming a friend of mine” and that “he is running a very difficult part of the world.”52
INDIA: A MORE NEUTRAL RESPONSE
India made no strong comments about the US cruise missile attacks, so as not to offend the United States. India also did not want to offend Russia, its traditional ally. But New Delhi additionally does not want to make statements that could possibly enrage Muslim populations inside India itself.
New Delhi has generally seen Assad as an ally; for example, when in 2016 there was a UN vote on a Syrian cease-fire, New Delhi abstained from voting. Despite the ongoing conflict, Syria has sought contracts with Indian companies in the effort to build electrical plants, iron and steel mills, and oil and gas refineries. Syria has also sought Indian financial support to help reconstruct the country—which will prove a daunting task.53 India appears to be trying to balance itself between the US and Russian positions. But for how long it can do so remains to be seen. (See chapter 6.)
THE IRAN NUCLEAR ACCORD AND THE THREAT OF US INTERVENTION
In addition to intervening militarily in Syria and striking an IS target in Afghanistan with the Mother of all Bombs, Trump has likewise threatened to strike Iran, which is directly involved in defending the Syrian regime and in supporting Hezbollah—if the latter does not fully comply with the Iran nuclear accord, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which seeks to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.
In effect, the JCPOA took at least a decade for the UN Security Council plus Germany to negotiate through concerted Contact Group diplomacy. The Obama administration argued that the JCPOA was absolutely crucial in that it woul
d limit the chances of a regional nuclear arms race. And it would also limit the possibility that Iran would develop a covert weapons-grade enrichment program.54 Trump, however, has claimed that the Iran JCPOA nuclear deal puts “limits on [Iran's] military nuclear program for only a certain number of years, but when those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-sized, military nuclear capability ready to go and with zero provision for delay, no matter how bad Iran's behavior is.”55 The truth, however, is that the Iran nuclear deal promised fifteen years of Iranian compliance, plus international inspections. Trump's concerns appear to be less about the Iran nuclear accord itself and more about his opposition to Iran's actual foreign policy toward Israel and Saudi Arabia, and its support for Syria.
Iran further angered Trump with the testing of a new intermediate-range missile in January 2017.56 For its part, however, Iran claimed that its missile test did not violate UN Resolution 2231. The missile was ostensibly not designed to carry nuclear weaponry and was only to be used for purposes of conventional “deterrence.” The JCPOA nuclear deal is strongly backed by the Russians, Chinese, and Europeans. The problem is that Iran's missile test violated the spirit, but not the actual letter, of the JCPOA accord. Neither Russia, China, nor the Europeans would permit Washington to apply language that would prohibit all kinds of missile tests. Only tests for those missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads would be prohibited.57
A possible Trump-Pence administration or a US congressional decision58 to reject the JCPOA accord could (1) undermine US credibility; (2) start a new nuclear arms race in wider Middle East with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and possibly with Egypt; and (3) make it more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a nuclear arms accord with North Korea. Alienating Iran so that it does decide to engage in a nuclear weapons program could furthermore make it more difficult to find ways for Teheran and Riyadh to establish a modus vivendi that would seek to dampen the “terrorist” proxy wars between the two rivals and thus attempt to achieve regional political settlements. A rejection of the JCPOA not only would threaten to undermine Trump's promises to achieve a positive relationship with Moscow but also could further alienate Beijing, if not the Europeans—who are just as close as Israel to a possible Iranian missile attack. And a possible US or Israeli attack on the suspected Iranian nuclear program could work to mobilize the Iranian population against the United States, as it did during the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War.