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The Syria Hawk’s Lament

The U.S. took sides in a conflict in which it had little or nothing at stake, but the failure of that policy is not evidence of "retreat."
syria plane rocket

Charles Krauthammer wrings his hands about the end of Western “triumph,” and uses the strangest evidence to support his claim:

That era is over. The autocracies are back and rising; democracy is on the defensive; the U.S. is in retreat. Look no further than Aleppo.

It’s possible that one could find examples that support at least one of these assertions, but it is hard to see what the course of the war in Syria tells us about any of these things. Syria has never been democratic, and the vast majority of the regime’s opponents isn’t democratic, either. The U.S. isn’t “in retreat.” What Krauthammer is really complaining about is that the U.S. is not on the offensive as much as he would like. The proxy war that he and other hawks urged the U.S. to pursue is not going well, but that just tells us that backing rebels in Syria was folly that should never have been attempted.

The U.S. took sides in a conflict in which it had little or nothing at stake, but the failure of that policy is not evidence of “retreat.” On the contrary, it is a clear example of our bungled overreaching and trying to pursue a very ambitious goal of toppling a foreign government on the cheap. The core of Krauthammer’s objection is that the U.S. isn’t doing more to kill people in Syria. That is what he thinks would protect the “liberal-democratic historical moment,” and not doing that means that this moment is on the way out. This is a ridiculous standard by which to judge the status of democracy or the direction of U.S. foreign policy, but it is the one that he uses to make his tendentious point.

Globally, there has been some backsliding in established democracies as some have moved towards illiberal majoritarianism and one-party rule. That mostly has to do with popular dissatisfaction with the quality of leadership over the last two decades. Insofar as “democracy is on the defensive” in some places, that is the result of a domestic reaction against the shortcomings of the political class in those countries. The era of “Western dominance” overlapped quite a lot with the era of incompetent and sometimes disastrous Western governance, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long for the backlash to happen.

It is worth remembering that it was only three years ago that a majority of people in both Britain and the U.S. rebelled against a proposed intervention in Syria. The House of Commons rejected the idea, and Congress refused to authorize the attack in one of the most impressive displays of popular resistance to unnecessary war in modern times. The U.S. didn’t illegally attack the Syrian government in 2013 because for once our representative system of government worked as it was supposed to. If that’s a world where “democracy is on the defensive,” I hope we see more of it in the future.

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