Grozny, Dresden, Guernica: Some cities have made history by being destroyed. Aleppo, once Syria’s largest metropolis, soon will join their ranks.
Its 1,000-year-old Muslim heritage has turned to dust, Russian aircraft have targeted its hospitals and schools, and its citizens have been shelled, bombed, starved and gassed. Nobody knows how many of the tens of thousands who remain in the city’s last Sunni Arab enclave will die crammed inside the ruins where they are sheltering. Even if they receive the safe passage they have been promised, however, their four-year ordeal in Aleppo has blown apart the principle that innocent people should be spared the worst ravages of war.
Instead a nasty, brutish reality has taken hold—and it threatens a more dangerous and unstable world.
To gauge the depth of Aleppo’s tragedy, remember that in 2011 the first protests against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria saw Sunnis marching cheerfully alongside Shias, Christians and Kurds. From the start, with extensive help from Iran, Assad set out to destroy the scope for peaceful resistance by using violence to radicalize his people. Early on, his claim that all rebels were “terrorists” was outrageous. Today some are.
There were turning points when the West might have stepped in—by establishing a no-fly zone, say, or a haven where civilians could shelter or even a full-scale program of arming the rebels. However, paralyzed by the legacy of Afghanistan and Iraq, the West held back. As the fighting became entrenched, the need to intervene grew, month by bloody month, but the risk and complexity of intervening grew faster.
As Assad was about to topple, Russia joined the fray, acting without conscience and to devastating effect. Aleppo’s fall is proof that Assad has prevailed and of Iran’s influence, but the real victory belongs to Russia, which once again counts in the Middle East.
After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when Tutsis were slaughtered as the world turned its back, countries recognized that they have a duty to constrain brute force. When members of the United Nations accepted responsibility to protect the victims of war crimes, wherever they are, conventions against the use of chemical weapons and the reckless killing of civilians took on a new relevance. The desire to promote freedom and democracy was not far behind.
This ideal of liberal intervention has suffered grievously. The American-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that even the most powerful country in history cannot impose democracy by force alone. The tragedy of Aleppo is less conspicuous, but just as significant.
After Assad drenched his people in nerve gas, crossing an American red line, Britain’s Parliament voted against taking even limited military action. As millions of people fled to Syria’s neighbors, including Lebanon and Jordan, most European countries looked the other way—or put up barriers to keep refugees out.
Particular blame falls on President Barack Obama. Throughout his presidency Obama has sought to move the world from a system wherein America often acted alone to defend its values, with a few countries such as Britain riding shotgun, to one in which the job of protecting international norms fell to all countries—because everyone benefited from the rules. Aleppo is a measure of how that policy has failed.
As America has stepped back, the vacuum has been filled not by responsible countries that support the status quo, but by the likes of Russia and Iran, which see the promotion of Western values as an insidious plot to bring about regime change in Moscow and Tehran.
Donald Trump embodies the idea that liberal intervention is for suckers. His nomination of Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobil, to be secretary of state only reinforces his campaign message: As president, Trump wants to wrap up deals, not to shore up values.
Striking deals is an essential part of diplomacy—especially with adversaries such as Russia and Iran and competitors such as China. Nonetheless, a foreign policy that lurches from deal to deal without a strategy and without being anchored in values poses grave risks.
One is that allies become bargaining chips. Trump already has dangled his support for democratic Taiwan, which China claims as a renegade province, as something to be traded in exchange for help cutting America’s trade deficit with China. A grand bargain that Tillerson brokers with his friends in Russia and which, for instance, pulls American troops back from NATO’s front-line states in exchange for concerted diplomatic action against Iran or China would leave the Baltic states exposed to Russian aggression. An unparalleled network of alliances is America’s great strength. Trump must care for his allies, not trade them away.
© 2016 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (December 17). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Youssef Karwashan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, George Ourfalian/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images