Back to an old game with Syria

By most accounts it was a confident Bashar al-Assad who received Walid Jumblatt in Damascus on Wednesday. When it comes to Damascus’ regional position, the Syrian president sees the stars aligned in his favor. Which means that, at worst, he can afford to do nothing at all, and, at best, negotiate to arrive at nothing at all.

John Kerry, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, returned to the Middle East this week, visiting both Lebanon and Syria, and it’s not difficult to see what he had in mind. With the prospect that the Palestinian-Israeli track will remain stalled, ambitious foreign policy players in Washington are looking to the Syrian-Israeli track for a possible breakthrough. And these days when Americans propose openings toward Syria, they come to Beirut first, as did Kerry, to insist that “anything we do with respect to the peace process in this region will not come at the expense of Lebanon.”

That’s good to hear, but also irrelevant since the Syrians have already managed to largely reimpose their writ in Beirut. And this they’ve done because of many factors, Lebanese divisions chief among them, but also because people like John Kerry have spent years feeding Assad political oxygen by lauding the advantages of engaging Syria, even when Syria was destabilizing its neighbors.

Kerry’s trip will likely yield few tangible results. But the senator already knows that. His primary aim is to register his political stake in a Syrian-Israeli negotiation process, if one eventually resumes.

That may sound familiar. The Syrian regime spent the decade of the ‘90s receiving buoyant Americans in Damascus wanting to talk about peace with Israel. And while it’s true that the Syrians were prepared at one stage to conclude a final settlement, which was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, it was always essential to their approach that peace should not undermine the Assad regime. Peace had to be on Syrian terms and defined in such a way that it would preserve Syria’s complex security scaffolding propping up the regime.

Little has changed. For Bashar al-Assad, finalizing a negotiation process with Israel is far less important than using negotiations to advance other Syrian priorities. The first (not in any special order) is the consolidation of Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon, which is moving forward at a brisk speed. This means weakening all independent, potentially refractory Lebanese figures, above all Saad al-Hariri.

A second priority is positioning Syria advantageously regionally at a time when the Middle East is going through major transformations. Assad has maneuvered well. The Saudi and Egyptian regimes are getting old and Syria is, for now, on good terms with two of the more powerful states of the Arab periphery, Turkey and Iran. But the latter relationship only makes Assad more reluctant to engage in serious negotiations with Israel, unless it first accepts his minimal condition: a full withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines in the Golan Heights.

A third priority for Assad is to bolster his regime internally. The president is running Syria in a more centralized, hands-on fashion than his father. The notion that he was controlled by an “old guard” was untrue five years ago, and is utterly ridiculous today. Those from his family or community who had any leeway to threaten his position have either been eliminated or pushed to the sidelines. Under these circumstances, Assad will think long before embarking in resolute talks with Israel. He is more likely to prefer talking just for the sake of talking, which little threatens Syria’s domestic equilibrium.

Finally, there is the United States. With the Americans ensnared in Afghanistan and heading toward the exits in Iraq, Assad has nothing to worry about. Time is on his side, even as American envoys knock at his door in the name of engagement, but without any clear idea of how this is supposed to benefit the United States. Assad has already made clear that he has no intention of breaking with Iran or changing his policy toward Hezbollah. Yet the Americans just keep coming.

The natural reflex in a positivist place like Washington is to generate optimism in one direction when pessimism characterizes another. You know that soon the Syrian-Israeli track will again excite foreign policy actors, wonks and pundits in the American capital, because the Palestinian track might remain closed. We’ll be back to the old game the Syrians played so well in the past. That means don’t expect much from Bashar al-Assad. He’s perfectly at ease where he is.