Three Lessons from Nine Years of Conflict in Syria

“However much Americans and their leaders may want to turn away from wars and atrocities geographically far away, sooner or later they will be impacted by them, usually in a jarring and harmful way.”

Nine years ago this month, in the early months of what the world was calling the Arab Spring, Syrians began protesting against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Whereas Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak had given in to their countries’ protests and relinquished power peacefully, Assad had no intention of compromising with his critics in the slightest. In March 2011, the government’s violent responses to unrest began, including the torture of children and the shooting of protestors. Since then, Syria has become the site of one of the most devastating conflicts since World War II, and it now features the massive, tragic humanitarian catastrophe of nearly a million refugees trapped near the Turkish border.

There are any number of lessons observers could draw from the Syrian war. With America in its nineteenth year of continuous combat in Muslim-majority countries (and its people weary of wars that seem never to have any end in sight), it would be understandable for U.S. policymakers to conclude that intervention in a place like Syria is futile. Why, an American can reasonably ask, should U.S. troops be thrust into a conflict thousands of miles away, in a country that has not attacked the United States, when there are so many problems to attend to at home? But if this is the conclusion America’s leaders reach, it will have terrible consequences, not just for America, but for the world.

It would be far better if current and future policymakers, instead, learned three other lessons from the last nine years. First, alliances with liberty and democracy at their core are vital to American interests, both strategic and moral. Second, while it is easy to fear the uncertainty of democracy and opt instead for the security that autocrats say they can provide, America has more to gain by embracing peoples’ democratic aspirations, rather than the short-term illusion of stability. And third, despite the public’s weariness with “endless wars,” the U.S. must maintain the ability to intervene swiftly in future crises—and develop the willingness to intervene early on rather than let conflicts grow and fester.