On my last night in Damascus, some younger members of the Ministry of Information-sponsored delegation in which I was taking part decided to have a drink. It was late April, and the bars and restaurants were doing good business in the cool and breezy evenings. An inebriated Russian journalist, accompanied by a uniformed Russian soldier entered the bar opposite our hotel in the Old City where my colleagues were sitting. Words were exchanged. An altercation began.

At a certain point, the Russian journalist produced a pistol and aimed it at the forehead of one of the delegation’s participants. He then entered our hotel, and threatened one of the employees there, all with his uniformed colleague silently accompanying him.

How the incident ended says much about who truly holds power in regime-controlled areas of Syria today. After the two Russians had departed, the delegation’s participants sought to contact the authorities and report the incident. The representative of the Syrian security forces asked if the armed men were Russians. When told that they were, he replied that in that case, there was nothing the Syrian authorities could do.

Six years into the Syrian war, the survival of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is assured — but it has become something of a façade, and lacks a strategy for reuniting the country. The sometimes sharply differing interests of Russia and Iran from above, and the local concerns of a myriad array of pro-regime irregular militias from below, are the decisive factors — not the decisions of the country’s nominal rulers. This impacts the calculus of the “regime” side in the war, in determining its strategy in the conflict.

Just take a look at how the war has developed since late last year, when things seemed to be going well for the regime. The rebellion had been driven out of its last finger-holds in eastern Aleppo city, seemingly paving the way for the eventual defeat of the insurgency. But five months later, while the general direction of the war has been against the rebels, they appear still far from collapse. Idlib province, areas of Latakia, Hama, northern Aleppo, and large swathes of the south remain in rebel hands.

The rebels in the south received a boost this week when a coalition airstrike targeted forces loyal to Assad that were advancing on a base used by U.S. and British Special Forces. If the United States and its partners are willing to use force to defend allied groups in the area, it is hard to envision how the regime can hope to reestablish its rule there.

Further east, the war against the Islamic State is being prosecuted by a powerful, U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led force called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This force will shortly embark on the conquest of Raqqa, the last remaining city fully controlled by the retreating Islamic State.

In other words, the rumors of the death of the rebellion have been greatly overstated. And some of its component parts apparently possess considerable vigor and strength. Does the Assad regime have a strategy for the reunification of the country, or has Syria’s fragmentation now become an unavoidable reality?

In 10 days of meetings with mid-level and senior officials of the Assad regime in Syria, I sought an answer to this question. What I found was a considerable gap between the intentions of the regime and its practical abilities to bring these desires about.

Reconciliation Affairs Minister Ali Haidar, a businesslike and well-briefed official, is a central figure in the government’s attempts to increase the territory under its control. “Reconciliation” is the process whereby the regime and its allies offer rebels and their supporters “safe passage” to rebel-controlled Idlib or Jarabulus, in return for the ceding of the besieged area to government forces. In some areas, rebels and their supporters have not been forced to leave,but may stay as long as they accept the authority of the regime. The latest such “reconciliation” agreement saw the transfer of rebels and their supporters from the towns of Zabadani and Madaya in the western Damascus suburbs to rebel-controlled Idleb.

Syrian Reconciliation Affairs Minister Ali Haidar

The Ministry of Reconciliation Affairs, Haider says, could form the basis for a “comprehensive political resolution” of the Syrian conflict. More than 100 towns and villages have now “achieved reconciliation,” Haidar told our delegation, and 3 million Syrians have been included in the reconciliation process, constituting “40 percent of Syrians affected by the war.” The regime’s notion appears to be that the gradual and incremental continuation of these agreements will eventually whittle the rebellion down to nothing.

What Haidar failed to mention, however, was that this latest agreement was achieved with the mediation of Qatar, a strong supporter of the rebels. And the various agreements so far have served more to demarcate regime and rebel territory and create more cohesive enclaves, rather than to substantially further increase the territory held by the regime. The term “reconciliation” is a misnomer, of course. The regime is interested in the surrender of the rebels, not rapprochement with them. But given the balance of forces and the slow progress, there seems a gap between objective and method. In light of this, I ask Haidar: What is the regime’s strategy for victory and the reunification of the country?

What needs to happen, the minister suggests, is an end to foreign interference. “We ask foreign powers to stop supporting the terrorist organizations,” he said.

“Terrorists,” of course, is the regime’s description of choice for rebel forces. But if foreign supporters of the insurgency decline to withdraw their support, as currently appears to be happening, how can the regime coerce them into doing so? Haidar did not appear to have any answers.

I got no further with Mohammed Tourjman, Assad’s fluent and glib information minister. Tourjman is an articulate presenter of the narrative the regime likes to share with its supporters.

“There is a plan to divide Syria into cantons,” he told us. “[T]o keep us weak, to benefit the Zionist entity.”

If this is the plan, it seems in an advanced state of execution. Syria today is de facto divided into no less than seven identifiable enclaves – the regime, three separate areas of rebel control, two Kurdish cantons and the Islamic State area. What is the government’s strategy to reverse it, I ask? “We have absolute faith that this is a temporary situation,” the minister replied. “[T]he major reason for this faith is that the Syrian people start to understand the conspiracy against them.”

In other words, there is no strategy at all, but the kind of conspiracy theories that no self-respecting Baathist should be without. No evidence exists of any such worked out plan, nor do any of the major forces engaged in Syria support the country’s break up. Indeed all of them – regime, rebels, ISIS and even the Kurds, along with their backers, are emphatically in favor of the continued unity of the country, albeit under totally different systems of government. The current de facto division is a result of the inability of any force to prevail over all the others, not of design.

In private conversation with officials who prefer not to be named, however, I found more candid responses. A serving general of the armed forces, puffing on an enormous cigar in his office, noted carefully that “any decision to conclude the war cannot come without the involvement of ‘official Syria'” — meaning the regime.

This measured reply delineates the actual situation well. The regime cannot now be militarily defeated, a significant success for its diplomacy and arms. But neither has it any clear road to victory. I asked one Information Ministry official about the future of eastern Syria, given the growing strength of the U.S.-backed SDF in the region. His response summed up the underlying reality of the regime’s current position: “We don’t know.”

The reason for the regime’s lack of knowledge is that decisions made by Assad and those around him will not be the decisive factor in determining Syria’s future. As the fighting in east Aleppo showed, the government side only makes real progress when the Russians commit to ensuring its victory. So the crucial question is of Russian, not Syrian, intentions — and Moscow may well have already achieved most of what it came to Syria to achieve. It has ensured the safety of its bases in Latakia province and the survival of its regime allies, demonstrated the efficacy of Russian arms, and guaranteed there can be no diplomatic process to settle the war without Moscow’s involvement.

These are significant accomplishments. But it is also the case that a further Russian commitment to finishing off the rebellion could result in the unpleasant situation in which a cash-strapped Russia finds itself saddled with the responsibility for the reconstruction of a ruined Syria on the basis of “you broke it — you own it.”

The diplomacy emerging from Astana appears to suggest that Moscow is aiming to freeze the Syrian conflict more or less in place, followed by an ongoing political process. The formation of the four “de-escalation zones” looks set to leave the rebellion in control of large swathes of the country, while the upcoming assault on Raqqa by the SDF and the increasingly open U.S. commitment to this force raises the possibility of a U.S.-backed entity emerging east of the Euphrates.

All this raises the question of whether the diplomatic thinking on Syria is lagging behind the emerging reality. With the regime and rebels now effectively reduced to client status and no great desire on the part of the patrons to commit to absolute victory for their proxies, the diplomacy on the Syrian war should presumably begin to shift toward arrangements acknowledging the fragmentation of the country. Such arrangements would be built more or less around the status quo that will pertain after the destruction of the ISIS holding in eastern Syria. That is, the regime enclave in the west, the Sunni Arab rebels in the north west and south west, a Turkish-ensured rebel enclave in the north, the SDF/Kurds in the north east and some arrangement involving both the SDF and western-backed Arab rebels in the south east.

In the meantime, the Russians will continue to do as they wish by day and night in Damascus, the gap between regime rhetoric and reality will remain as gaping as ever, the rebels and the Kurds will continue to march in tune with their own patrons’ wishes, and the stark fact will continue to remain unsaid: namely, that the state still known as Syria has effectively ceased to exist.

Jonathan Spyer, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is director of the Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict (Continuum, 2011).

When President Donald Trump and other heads of state meet at this week’s NATO Summit it might be a good time to discuss the wisdom of keeping 50 U.S. thermonuclear weapons in Turkey, just 70 miles from Syria, the most intense combat zone on the planet.

Each of the B61 gravity bombs stored at Incirlik Air Base, 68 miles from the Syrian border have a maximum yield of 170 kilotons, or 10 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But these bombs also have a “dial-a-yield” capability that allows them to be set to explode at various levels, down to less than one kiloton of force. They are the vestige of the thousands of battlefield weapons once deployed by the United States and the Soviet Union to wage nuclear war in Europe. Almost all have been withdrawn from deployment except these at Incirlik and approximately 100 other B-61’s stored at NATO bases in Belgium, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

However, unlike those airfields, there are no aircraft based in Turkey capable of carrying the American nuclear weapons stored there. In a crisis, planes would have to fly from other U.S. bases, assuming they could be freed from their other assigned conventional missions. The actual strategy for their use is hazy at best.

“Today, the symbolism of these bombs is far more important than their military utility,” says nuclear historian Eric Schlosser. “Missiles carrying nuclear warheads reach targets much faster, more reliably, and with much greater accuracy.” Rather, the case for keeping the weapons is the nuclear equivalent of the old phrase about the purpose of NATO, “to keep America in, Russia out and Germany down.” In this case, the bombs are there to demonstrate that America’s nukes are in, Russian nukes will be kept out, and German nukes are unnecessary.

Is this symbolism worth the risk? Warning signs are mounting about the security of the weapons as U.S.-Turkish relations deteriorate and the war in Syria intensifies.

Just last year, the United States temporarily lost access to Incirlik during the attempted coup against Turkish President Recep Erdogan. Senior Turkish officers in charge of the base were said to be among the leaders of the coup, and were accused of flying missions from the base in its support. Turkish forces loyal to Erdogan surrounded Incirlik and cut off power for days, effectively trapping some 2,500 U.S. servicemen stationed there — and the 50 nuclear weapons. A week later, the base was again under siege, surrounded this time by thousands of anti-American protesters who burned American flags and demanded the government close the base.

Erdogan’s rule since the coup attempt has grown increasingly authoritarian. His forces killed over 250 people during the uprising, wounded more than 1,400 and arrested almost 3,000. Since then he has purged more than 2,700 judges, detained nearly 50,000 people, including many soldiers, journalists, lawyers, police officers, academics, and Kurdish politicians, sacked 120,000 public servants and vowed to “clean all state institutions of the virus of Fethullah Gülen supporters” loyal to the cleric Erdogan claims was behind the coup.

As Elmira Bayrasli wrote in Defense One, Erdogan holds his own country “hostage for his political benefits.”

Even if you believe the United States should keep tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, is Turkey a safe place to do so?

Since the attempted coup, Turkish forces carried out airstrikes in Iraq and Syria against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, who are armed by the United States to fight ISIS. If media reports are correct, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn blocked a plan to use Kurdish forces to spearhead an attack on the ISIS capital of Raqqa, perhaps at the behest of Turkey.

Most recently, during Erdogan’s visit to Washington, his personal bodyguards punched, choked, and kicked peaceful demonstrators outside the Turkish Embassy. Astonishingly, Turkey’s Foreign Ministry on Monday summoned the U.S. ambassador in Ankara to lodge a formal protest over the alleged “aggressive actions” of U.S. police in protecting the demonstrators, further straining relations.

Meanwhile, U.S. combat operations in Syria are intensifying. U.S.-led forces last week fended off an attack by Iranian-affiliated militia fighters operating in Syria and, according to the Pentagon, ignoring even Russia’s request to stand down. The battle for Raqqa is now back on track, and the most violent fighting of the war could occur in the coming months. As ISIS faces elimination, might it’s fighters strike out across the border inside Turkey?

Can we be sure that America’s nuclear bombs at Incirlik are secure? We cannot. There is growing concern that Incirlik is vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Last March, military families were evacuated from southern Turkey, mainly from Incirlik Air Base, as a result of security concerns from ISIS activity threatening the area. Major security upgrades to base are now underway, including around the vaults used to store the nuclear weapons. But new fences are not the answer. “The security risk of basing U.S. nuclear bombs in Europe,”  warns former NSC staffer Steve Andreasen and Isabelle Williams, “clearly demonstrate the case for consolidating U.S. nuclear weapons in the United States.”

Why risk it? No member of NATO will doubt our resolve or the credibility of our nuclear assurances if we pull 50 dangerously exposed nuclear weapons from Turkey. They may actually breathe a sigh of relief.

By Joe Cirincione // Joe Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late.

http://www.defenseone.com

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel aspires to permanent borders. Yet a nation, a homeland, a state, and permanent borders are not necessarily congruent, and this complexity is not unique to Israel. Israel should rethink the popular assumption that a homeland and political borders must be a perfect fit.

“Every house has a wall, every villa has a fence, every state has a border. Where is Israel’s border?” That was how Sefi Rachlevsky, in his book Ein Gvul (There Is No Border), expressed his desire for Israeli stability based on permanent borders. Architects, however, know how inaccurate that statement is: not every house has a wall; nor does every villa have a fence. Sometimes the opposite is desired. When a window is opened on a view, one wants continuity from the inner space to the outer, and out beyond the boundaries of the yard.

The yearning for permanent borders exists on the Israeli right, too; it is not only a phenomenon of the liberal left. The congruence between nation, homeland, state, and permanent borders is treated as something obvious. Yet in other countries, such congruence is unusual. The modern nation-state aspires to a civic, cultural, and sovereign homogeneity that would dovetail with political borders, but the dynamic in which reality emerges does not always accord with such a monolithic order.

The large Macedonian population in northern Greece, for example, has a dual affinity with Greece and Macedonia. The phenomenon is also found elsewhere in Europe and in the US. Israel, however, is anomalous in that no Israelis live in the neighboring states.

When the 1948-49 War of Independence came to an end, all the neighborhoods that remained beyond the armistice lines were abandoned. Full congruence emerged between a border and Jewish existence within a territory. Yet things were not always so clear-cut.

During the years of the British Mandate, pioneering movements did not cease their settlement efforts in Baron Rothschild’s lands in the Hauran and the Golan, even though those territories had been made part of the French Mandate in Syria. That approach was common to all the pioneering movements: their notion of territory rejected political borders as delimiting the scope of national aspirations that define a homeland. Similarly, when the 1947 partition plan was adopted by the UN, David Ben-Gurion was disinclined to evacuate significant neighborhoods that remained outside Israeli territory, such as Nahariya, the Western Galilee villages, and Gush Etzion in the Hebron Hills.

The complexity of these tensions between political borders and the territory of the homeland is not unique to Israel. Other examples include the complex status of Alsace-Lorraine for Germany and France, and of Transylvania for Hungary and Romania. After the Soviet Union fell apart, the Russians, too, had to confront the challenge of the incongruity between their recognized borders and lands outside those borders that included substantial Russian populations. From this crisis, Moscow fashioned a new military approach that came to be known as “hybrid warfare” in the West and “new-generation warfare” in Russian.

The most recent campaigns – in Georgia in 2008, in the Crimea, and in Ukraine – made use of traditional Russian concepts in updated forms. These campaigns made deliberate use of a combination of military force and civilian measures. When the Russian troops made their way back to the Russian-Georgian border, President Putin was left with a significant achievement: while his forces had indeed withdrawn fully and evidently from Georgia, the Russian civilians in Abkhazia had, thanks to the campaign, acquired autonomy. In accordance with international law, Abkhazia remained under Georgian sovereignty, without Russia having violated the status quo regarding international borders. Yet the territory, with its national, cultural, and economic affinities, had become a de facto Russian province.

In a reality where the preservation of international borders has become a cornerstone of the law of nations, Israel should reconsider the old notion that a homeland and political borders are not always a perfect fit. When vacillating, for example, between formally annexing Maale Adumim and building 100,000 housing units from Maale Adumim toward the Dead Sea, it is worth asking: if the new border would not be recognized in any case, what purpose would annexation serve? Large-scale building would do far more to promote Israel’s interests.

By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen

First published in The Liberal, May 9, 2017 (Hebrew)

Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen is a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served in the IDF for forty-two years. He commanded troops in battles with Egypt and Syria. He was formerly a corps commander and commander of the IDF Military Colleges.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

For all intents and purposes, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – the foundation for American security for the past seven decades – ceased existing on May 25, 2017.

While attending a highly anticipated (some might say dreaded) meeting with NATO heads of state and government in Brussels, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a speech railing against member-states who have failed to meet economic obligations to the defense pact, going so far as to indirectly abrogate the alliance’s cornerstone: the provisions for collective defense under Article V of the treaty.

Article V is the backbone of the NATO alliance: that an attack against any individual member will be treated as an attack against all members, and will be met with a requisite response. Article V is perhaps the biggest piece of what incentivized the Europeans to resist Moscow throughout the nuclear-tinged threat of the Cold War era. But after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Europeans steadily gutted their militaries, redirecting funds to ballooning social programs and pensions.

I cannot emphasize enough that while the breach between the United States and the rest of NATO is happening on the Trump administration’s watch, this is not a position that will change once Trump is gone.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration made it clear to the NATO allies that future relations would be viewed through the prism of cooperation on anti-terror programs. In response the French and Germans partnered with the Russians to oppose the Iraq War. During the first Obama administration, the White House explicitly asked NATO to increase its troop commitments to the Afghan conflict to prevent the Taliban’s re-emergence. With a very few exceptions the European allies didn’t just fail to provide, they rejected Obama’s request with fanfare.

I’m not asserting the Americans’ wars were smart plays, or that the link between anti-terror programs and other aspects of strategic policy is what I would have done. I’m saying that the American complaint that the European allies are not carrying their weight – and that there is an explicit link in the American mind between anti-terror support and ongoing NATO security guarantees – is neither new, nor a surprise, nor merely the position of a political outsider like Trump. This is policy. This is bipartisan. This is done.

And holy crap does that throw a lot of things up in the air!

So what does life after NATO look like?
United States. Freed from needing to maintain static deployments throughout Europe or from preparing for mass Army deployments to the Continent, and freed from needing to be responsible for global security in general, the United States can revert to their pre-World War II strategic posture: one of permanent offense. Few troops manning front lines. Little need to rush to the aid of every country on the planet. Yet boasting a military capable of intervening anywhere, anywhen. For the roughly 4.5 billion people on this planet whose physical and economic security was dependent upon active, constructive American engagement, an America that is a persistent wild card is quite possibly the worst outcome of all. And what does the U.S. need to put into place to make this happen? Not a damn thing.
United Kingdom. Theresa May has already struck a deal with the Trump administration to more closely coordinate strategic policy. This wasn’t done because of NATO’s imminent end, but because of Brexit. The Brits leaving the EU means they need to massively increase the size of their diplomatic and intelligence operations. May offered to trade the information such operations generate for a closer alignment with the Americans. From the point of view of the London-Washington alliance, the hard work has already been done.
Russia. Moscow has been praying for a breach between the Americans and the Europeans for decades, and the day has finally arrived. Not a moment too soon either. The Russian demography is in terminal decline and the country will largely lose the ability to field a credible army in just a few years. Russia’s current borders are completely indefensible with its current military, much less a smaller one, so Moscow believes it must expand to something more closely resembling the old Soviet borders. This will bring it into conflict with eleven different countries, five of which are standing NATO members. The one country that could have stopped a Russian assault? The United States. Expect Russian operations within, against and beyond Ukraine to accelerate now that the Americans are no longer a major factor.
Poland and Romania. Warsaw and Bucharest are, well, screwed. Poland and Romania are two of the five countries that the Russians feel they must at least partially secure. Neither have a hope of fighting off the Russians without massive amounts of outside assistance, and with the Americans exiting stage west they will be forced to turn to local powers – powers with which both have less than ideal relations.
Germany. There is zero hope for Poland without tens of thousands of German troops fighting on Polish soil. Considering that currently Germany doesn’t have tens of thousands of deployable troops, and even if they did, historically German troops haven’t tended to leave Poland after being there, and Warsaw-Berlin relations are about to become dizzyingly complicated. Every time the Germans have armed, the result has been a broad-spectrum European war. It is far too soon to call that inevitable, but unless the Germans prove comfortable with Russian troops within a couple hundred miles of Berlin, the era of German pacifism is nearly over.

Turkey. The Turks have been de facto out of NATO for over a decade, following a breach in relations with the George W Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. Now, how much progress the Russians make in the Balkans and Caucasus is largely up to politics in Ankara. Figuring out the specific path forward is an exercise in futility. Not only are the Turks only now waking up from a century long geopolitical coma and they have yet to figure out what about their neighborhood really matters to them, Prime Minister Erdogan is cut from the same nationalistic, populist cloth as the American, Polish and Russian presidents. But whatever happens, relations with the Germans will be key. Germany and Turkey are the only countries in Europe that have the potential manpower to hold off, much less roll back, a Russian advance…and the two are currently in a spat that is dangerously close to severing formal diplomatic relations.
Sweden. The final three NATO countries the Russians will target are the Baltic Trio of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All three Baltic states count Sweden as their strongest and most enthusiastic sponsor. Sweden now has a choice to make. Continue with its policy of neutrality and watch its Baltic apprentices die, or act. Sweden has the military, economic and diplomatic strength to forge and lead a Scandinavian alliance to bulwark the Balts against the Russians. Now we’ll see if they have the will.
Japan. Shinzo Abe was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after his election (and then the second one, after May, to visit after inauguration), and he came with a big fat bribe. Abe knows that Japan is likely to find itself in a full-court conflict with China in the not-too-distant future and needs to be sure the Americans will at a minimum remain neutral. Assuming no American-Japanese hostilities (and the bribe seems to have done the trick), Japan is highly likely to give the Chinese a drumming. The Chinese are more dependent upon maritime supply lines for both merchandise exports and energy imports, while the Japanese navy has longer reach and less strategic exposure. And now that Japan’s second new carrier is fully operational, the Japanese are pretty much good to go.
China. For Beijing the Americans leaving NATO is quite possibly the worst outcome of all. If the Americans are not nailed down defending a long land border in Europe, American power becomes far more freeform. That hugely expands the role of the American Navy in American strategic planning, and the Navy is the branch most capable of containing Chinese power. Even if American relations with Japan were to significantly cool, China just became completely boxed in.

One final thought:

We have not had large-scale regional – much less global – competition outside of the American-Soviet rivalry for 70 years expressly because the Americans took care of pretty much everything. But the Americans have been moving slow-motion in the general direction of disengagement from their Cold War alliance system since 1989. Today’s developments are not the final word on that disengagement, this is simply the end of the interim where people didn’t really know where the Americans stood. We are only now starting to understand the degree to which the Americans just are not going to be there.

Remove the Americans and every country in the world – starting with the European nations – needs to figure out how to look after their own economic and physical security. Different countries will have different ideas of how to do that, and many of those ideas will be mutually exclusive. History is about to start moving again.

And history is bloody.

Should you find any of this interesting (or terrifying) you can read more at the link to the archive at the top of this email. And in a shameless plug, my newest book – The Absent Superpower – has a full chapter on the coming war between Russia and the Europeans.