The Syrian Revolution and Trump 2.0

My discussion with Bill Press about Syria and what we can expect from Donald Trump's second coming.

On Monday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with veteran journalist Bill Press to discuss, as he put it, “Syria, Trump and the State of the World.” I have enjoyed being a guest on Bill’s shows for over 20 years. I first met him when he invited me to be on CNN’s Crossfire, which he then co-hosted with Pat Buchanan. Bill is a friend and one of the most political savvy people I know.

Here is the first part of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. Listen to the whole discussion here. You can download Bill’s podcast on Apple or any other platform.

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The Bill Press Pod, Monday, December 9, 2024

Bill Press: Thank you for joining us here on The Bill Press Pod where we turn our eyes for a moment away from the political crisis here at home to consider the turmoil around the globe.

The world, in fact, is on fire. Just last week we watched the governments of France and South Korea fall apart, and then the sudden collapse of Assad’s murderous regime in Syria. Meanwhile, Russia continues it's unprovoked war in Ukraine, Lebanon struggles under an uncertain future, and Israel continues to pound what little of Gaza has not already been leveled.

All of this while Donald Trump prepares to retake the reins of American foreign policy, having pledged to pull out of NATO, abandoned the Paris Climate Accords and give Vladimir Putin whatever he wants.

Well, as bleak as it seems, let's find out from today's guest, our own unofficial foreign policy guru, Joe Cirincione, national security analyst, former president of Ploughshares Fund, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of his own newsletter called Strategy and History. Welcome back to The Bill Press Pod, Joe.

Joe: Thank you, Bill. I am delighted to be with you again.

Bill: So, Syria. It is unbelievable how fast this happened, over the weekend, with almost no bloodshed, the fall of the Assad dictatorship. Joe, this has so many implications around the world. I want to talk to you about every aspect of that but I think it's important that we see this in the context. And the context for us is that we remember the damage that Donald Trump's first administration had in terms of America's leadership around the world. Now, we're facing the prospect — the reality — of a Trump 2.0

What can we expect given what we already saw eight years ago from Donald Trump?

Joe: I would be very hesitant to have confidence in any predictions about Trump 2.0. He's like a quantum particle. It's hard to know with any certainty where exactly he stands or where he's going at any moment. The best we can do is talk about probabilities.

What I would say right now is that we're in for a bumpy ride. We’re in for a great period of uncertainty. Just look at the leadership he is bringing in. I have many criticisms of the Biden Administration, but it's not because they didn't have good, solid people in charge. They made mistakes, but these are sincere, dedicated professionals. You cannot say that about Pete Hegseth.You cannot say that about Tulsi Gabbard. You cannot say that about Kash Patel.

The thing that worries me the most is not just what Trump’s policies are, which are very often day-to-day, but that the people he's putting in place have no experience in these areas and are likely to be erratic. A mistake by any one of them could prove catastrophic.

Bill: You did not mention Marco Rubio

Joe: Well, he’s what some people are calling a “Normie”. Normal appointments. You know he'll be confirmed, probably without a opposition, because you may disagree with his policies, but he's capable, he's experienced. He has some sense of what it takes to run a major government institution. You can't say that for the majority of his appointees.

Bill: Just a quick question about some of the policies that he is talking about. On Meet the Press on Sunday, Donald Trump spoke again about his tariffs. He is absolutely going to slap on those tariff — up to 100% — and they're not going to affect consumers, consumers are not gonna pay the price, he said. Basically it's not going to interfere with our relationships around the world. Do you see it the same way?

Joe: Absolutely not. Trump made his sort of debut for his second term in Paris this weekend for the grand reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral. You could see all the European leaders flattering him, sucking up to him. The main reason is that they want to avoid tariffs on their countries. They want to avoid a trade war. They’re trying a new technique — not shunning him, not confronting him, but trying to appease him in someway to make him back off.

I think we are in for a period of very rocky relations between the US and Europe. It might have the unintended benefit of strengthening European unity at a time when Europe is fractured. Now, many European leaders are talking about their need to step up. They need to strengthen the EU; they need to develop an independent European military capability.

For example: Who is going to help Syria? Donald Trump is sending the message that it's not our problem. We should stay out. Well, you can't stay out at a time like this. Syria is going to need billions of dollars; they’re going to need political encouragement to move towards a more democratic path, away from the chaos of the last 50 years in Syria. Who will help them if Donald Trump isn't going to? Europe will have to step up.

Bill: Is NATO dead?

Joe: I do not think NATO is dead. But this underscores the necessity of American leadership. Trump doesn't have any sense of the importance of the alliance. NATO is the most successful security alliance in history. But Trump sees it as all transactional. Not the US leading NATO but the US making a deal with France, making a deal with Britain, making a deal with Italy. He sees all this as: What’s in it for him?

Just step back just for a second. We can't think of Donald Trump as representing just some shift in a geopolitical worldview or an ideology. He is not that kind of guy. You have to think of it more like what would happen if Tony Soprano became president. Or more contemporaneously, a Batman villain, like the Joker or the Penguin.

This is all a heist. Trump will use his position to extract as much wealth as possible from the US government and from foreign governments. And to increase his power. And to make sure he doesn't lose that power. That's what it's about for him. So every policy issue that we are discussing always comes down to: What's in it for him?

Bill: Climate change. Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, of course Joe Biden put us back in. No doubt what Donald Trump will do this time. Do you agree?

Joe: I agree. I think he's going to pull out. He had meetings with the fossil fuel industry before the election. He said to them: you give me millions of dollars and I will give you a policy that you're going to love. That is what will happen. He's going to set back US climate change activism by at least a decade.

Bill: So, finally - and then will jump into Syria - we've also saw last week the government of South Korea nearly collapse. The government of France collapse. We have seen dramatic transitions recently in Italy, in Germany, with Brexit in the UK. There seems to be this global anti-incumbency mode, right? An anti-government wave. Do you think, in part, that's what hit the United States on November 5?

Joe: There's no doubt. Every sitting government in 2024 that was up for re-election lost. Every single one, irrespective of their political orientation: left, center, right.

In fact, Kamala Harris did the best of any of the incumbent governments. She was the closest to staying in power.

We're still paying the price for the last 30-40 years of global economic policies, led by the United States, that saw the tremendous growth of wealth in the world. Tremendous growth of wealth — but unfairly distributed, with the top 1% in the world siphoning off money from the bottom 50%.

So, while the world is richer now, while the stock market is booming now, that wealth is so unevenly distributed that those who have been left behind are pissed. They are angry. They don't like what they seeing. Every election over the last 10 years has been a change election. The US followed suit. The voters wanted something different. They didn't care who the candidate was as long as they weren’t the ones that were sitting in the seat of power.

Bill: Yes. And almost nothing that anybody could've done about that that wave — almost a tsunami, right? — circling around the world.

So, let’s turn to Syria. It had been 13 years since there was unrest in that country that threatened to topple the government. Bashar al-Assad had held on. And, yet, it happened, it seems, so fast and with almost no violence or bloodshed. The capital taken over by these rebels. How did it happen so fast and do you even know who are these rebels are?

Joe: All this reminds us of Ernest Hemingway's quote about bankruptcy. Bankruptcy, he said “happens two ways: gradually and then suddenly.” We haven't seen anything like this, really, since 1989 and the serial collapse of the Warsaw Pact states that also took everyone by surprise.

As we begin our analysis of what's going on, we have to be humble. Nobody saw this coming. No intelligence agency, certainly not in the United States, not in Israel, not the Europeans. No Washington analyst was predicting this. It caught everyone by surprise.

Except, perhaps, for the Syrian people. The rebel groups — and there's a coalition of them — understood that Assad had been weakened. Bashar al-Assad is the son of Hafez al-Assad. The Assad family had been in power since 1971. That's the year I graduated college. That’s when the Hafez Assad became the president of Syria. They have ruled with an iron grip. Ruthlessly, brutally.

You mentioned the 2011 Arab Spring when the Syrians rebelled, trying to overthrow the government. The rebellion was viciously repressed, with Assad killing an estimated 600,000 people.

Bill: Using chemical weapons.

Joe: Yes, in some cases, chemical weapons. The US was able to eliminate most of Assad’s stockpile of about 1000 tons of deadly nerve gas — enough to kill every man, woman and child in the Middle East. Getting those out of Syria was one of the singular successes of the Obama administration. Some small quantities remained. Assad used some chlorine-based gases to kill people; he used to use a bit of VX and Sarin in some attacks. But mostly it was just bombardment.

In fact, Russia saved the regime. Putin came in when Assad was nearly toppled. It was in Syria that the Russians perfected the kind of carpet bombing of cities that you now see in Ukraine. Syria is where it started. The bombing of Aleppo, for example, took over 100 days to wrestle the city away from the rebels. The rebels this weekend took it back in 48 hours.

Who are these people? It's mainly led by a group called Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS for short. Headed by a guy known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. I think he might be Italian — Jolani (jokingly).

His parents were forced out of the Golan Height when Israel conquered that area in the 1967 war. He was a jihadist fighter in Iraq after the US invasion of 2003. He was put in various US and Iraqi prisons, then was sent into Syria by al-Baghdadi - remember him? — where he founded al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

He broke with Al-Qaeda in 2016. In 2017 he forms his new group, HTS, which he says is a more moderate group and fought against Al-Qaeda and ISIS for the last five years. HTS controlled a large section of Syria, the city and province of Idlib, with a population of about 4 million. Their rule there has been fairly moderate with a general freedom of religion, a general freedom of assembly. I wouldn't call it democratic, but he seems to be forging a third way between the kind of secular democracy the West would like to see and the Islamic style that has dominated the region over the past few decades.

There's some hope that he's going to continue this path. All his words, all his actions so far have been in that direction. Which is one of the reasons you see such joy from the Syrian people. Whether they're in Syria celebrating in the streets, or they're in Europe or they're here in the United States. The Syrian people, overall, are thrilled by what has happened. “We are free,” they say, “We are free at last.”

Bill: What has been the American relationship with this rebel group? Do we recognize it? I read somewhere that they've been classified as a terrorist group.

Joe: Yes. Because we characterized al-Nusra as a terrorist group, and then HTS grew out of it, we still consider HTS a terrorist organization, although not for anything that they themselves have done currently. There's even a bounty on al-Jolani’s head by the US.

So, one of the first things the US has to do is reassess that relationship. If you want to start meeting with these people, you can’t categorize them as terrorists. If we want to have relations with them, provide aid, etc., that's one of the first steps we will have to take.

We don't have much of relationship with them, right now. There are a number of rebel groups in Syria. We’ve been backing the Kurdish groups that are operating in northeast Syria. The Turks have been backing their own group, that they call the Syrian National Army or SNA. So, there are various groups and one of Jolani’s major tasks will be to bring this wartime coalition together to govern. This is not go going be a one-group or one-man rule. This is must be a coalition to rule this nation of 22 million people.

Bill: But it's not ISIS.

Joe: They are not ISIS, correct. HTS fought ISIS, is against ISIS. Their policies have been not as much Islamic as Syrian. That’s how they cast themselves, as a Jolani said just recently in an interview with CNN, “Global jihad leads to only destruction and failure.” He sees himself as a Syrian revolutionary, not someone trying to overthrow the West or fight the United States and European countries.

Bill: You mentioned 13 years ago when Vladimir Putin sent in Russian troops. Russian bombers saved Syria for Assad and Vladimir Putin said at the time that if there were any other threats to Syria, Russia would be there. Russia would protect Syria; Russia would be their defender. They were MIA this time around. Joe, what happened?

Joe: Ukraine happened. Ukraine drained all of Russia's military resources, including pulling equipment out of Syria, pulling troops out of Syria. The Russian forces have been shattered by the Ukrainian war. By some estimates Russia has suffered 1 million casualties, 1 million soldiers killed or wounded in battle. Half of their armor destroyed in the almost 3 years of war in Ukraine. So, that is where Putin was focused. That is why Russia was missing in action when Assad needed him.

Bill: A big blow to Vladimir Putin, right?

Joe: Absolutely. This was his major gain over the last 15 years in the Middle East. Through this, he strengthened ties with Iran. He was developing a real sphere of influence in the Middle East, including warm water ports on the western coast that Russia was using to operate in the Mediterranean. That's all gone.

Bill: It seems to me another loser in this whole thing is Iran. Iran lost a lot with the defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and now Iran was, next to Russia, the main supporter of Assad. They had to pull out too.

Joe: Absolutely. The Iranians fled just hours before Assad himself fled. I don't believe there are any Iranian forces still operating in Syria. That’s because those forces where mainly Hezbollah. Some 10,000 fighters came in from Lebanon, which shares a border with Syria. They came in to fight the rebels over the last 10,15 years.

Well, those troops don't exist anymore. They were pulled back to Lebanon. They were killed in the fighting over the last few months. You know I'm very critical of Israel's policies, but it is Israel's shattering of Hezbollah that shattered the other pillar of support for Assad. He didn’t have the forces to fight back. His own army was corrupt. You saw them melt away as the rebels advanced. We’ve seen similar scenes like this before. The roads strewn with Syrian uniforms that the soldiers took off and discarded as they melted back in into a population.

So Iran is now weaker than it's been in decades. I can't think of a time it's been this weak. For one thing, it's lost its land bridge. One of the reasons Iran was backing Assad was Syria served as a conduit for shipping arms across Iraq and through Syria into Lebanon and other areas. That’s gone now as well. So Iran is really isolated once again in the region.,

Which opens up an opportunity for US policy. What are we going to do? Will we try to pressure the advantage and try to hammer Iran into submission now? Or are we willing to seek some sort of diplomatic accommodation?

Bill: This underscores the importance of trying to understand what Donald Trump meant when he said over the weekend — his advice is in All Caps, of course, on Truth Social: DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Joe, we have 900 troops inside of Syria, last time I checked. So what do we do? Can we just stay out of it?

Joe: There are two temptations here. One is just to pull out. It's not our problem, as Trump says. The other is to try to press the advantage. So, yesterday US forces conducted over 75 airstrikes on ISIS positions. Similarly, Israel in the Golan Heights, took over some Syrian bases and conducted bombing raids on Syrian Army facilities that they said they could threaten Israel. They didn't want the equipment to fall into rebel hands.

I can understand that in the short run, but don't think that military power is going to succeeded in the long run. I see the US role in Syria right now as very limited in military capability. It's focused on ISIS where our troops have been fighting in the northeast part of the country, attacking small ISIS enclaves. I think you could leave ISIS to the new Syrian government. They have an interest in eliminating them and can do so much more efficiently than the US forces can.

The US role now comes in helping Syria rebuild. That could be of huge geopolitical importance. Not just because it is good for the Syrian people but, remember, in this country of 22 million people, half of the people were displaced by this war. Of those, 6 million had to flee the country. Where? To places like Lebanon which destabilize Lebanon. To Europe, where I think there's almost 1,000,000 Syrians living in Germany.

This was the cause of much of the white nationalist blowback that we saw in Europe over the last 10 years. Resentment of these refugees. Well, a lot of those refugees are thrilled by what's happened and they want to return home. We should be helping them do that. We should be helping Syria rebuild.

The Syrians are a very pragmatic, hard-working people. With the right government, with the right resources they could make Syria vibrant again. I can't think of anything that's a better example of what enlightened government can look like in the Middle East.To give the region an alternative to the kind of autocratic governments that they currently exist. Importantly, it will help stabilize Europe as well. That’s the path we should be on. I hope the Trump administration takes not leave Syria alone, but give it a helping hand.

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