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The Obama administration and civil war in Syria, 2011–2016: US presidential foreign policy making as political risk management

Journal of Transatlantic Studies volume 19, pages 517–547 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

From 2011 to 2016, the Obama administration’s Syria policy appeared to be in constant flux. Prominent accounts portray this as the result of foreign policy making in an arena with no good options, or the use of programs as smokescreens to conceal underlying goals. Both portrayals fit the foreign policy making literature, which views policy as crafted by a president who acts either as guardian of the national interest or as a consummate politician. But the record on Syria does not square with these accounts. The Obama administration neither tried to find solutions to the strategic problems that Syria posed in and of itself, in order to advance the national interest, nor exploited Syria as a political opportunity, to enhance domestic political power. I show, instead, that the trajectory of US Syria policy was consistent with efforts to minimize the risk that the crisis posed to President Obama’s central foreign policy objectives and his domestic political capital and legacy. The Obama administration’s Syria policy resulted from a distinct logic of political risk management.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. E.g., Kilic Kanat and Kadir Ustun, “U.S.-Turkey Realignment on Syria,” Middle East Policy 22(4):88–97, 2015, p.91; Gideon Rose, “What Obama Gets Right,” Foreign Affairs 94(5):2–12, 2015, p.10. Relatedly, Philippe Beauregard, Arsène Brice Bado, and Jonathan Paquin highlight significant shifts in France’s stances toward the early Arab uprisings to motivate their study. See “The Boundaries of Acceptability: France’s Positioning and Rhetorical Strategies during the Arab Uprisings,” Mediterranean Politics 24(1):40–61, 2017.

  2. Andreas Krieg, “Externalizing the Burden of War: The Obama Doctrine and US Foreign Policy in the Middle East,” International Affairs 92(1):97–113, 2016, pp.109–113; Hal Brands, “Barack Obama and the Dilemmas of American Grand Strategy,” Washington Quarterly 39(4):101–125, 2016, p.106; Marc Lynch, “Obama and the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs 94(5):18–27, 2015, pp.24–6.

  3. Samuel Charap, “Russia, Syria and the Doctrine of Intervention, Survival 55(1):35–41, 2013, p.37; Jülide Karakoç, “US Policy towards Syria since the Early 2000s,” Critique 41(2):223–43, 2013. Steven Heydemann’s study of the discrepancy between change-promoting rhetoric and stagnant US aid post-2011 provides a complementary explanation. See “America's Response to the Arab Uprisings: US Foreign Assistance in an Era of Ambivalence,” Mediterranean Politics 19(3):299–317, 2014. On the effects of uncertainty regarding US policy and intentions towards the region, see Jordi Quero and Andrea Dessì, “Unpredictability in US Foreign Policy and the Regional Order in the Middle East: Reacting vis-à-vis a Volatile External Security-Provider,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48(2):311–30, 2021.

  4. E.g. Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). In one leading formulation, Donald E. Nuechterlein defines national interest as “the well-being of American citizens and American enterprise involved in international relations and affected by political forces beyond the administrative control of the United States government.” This definition allows the treatment of national interest as distinct from “the public interest,” which parallels it but within US territory; “strategic interests,” which are “second-order and derive from” the national interest in that they are a product of “the political, economic, and military means of protecting the nation”; and “private interests,” which are “the activities of U.S. citizens and companies abroad whose prosperity does not affect the security or economic well-being of the entire” country. See United States National Interests in a Changing World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), pp.6–7.

  5. E.g. Jussi Hanhimäki, “Global Visions and Parochial Politics: The Persistent Dilemma of the ‘American Century’” Diplomatic History 27(4):423–47, 2003; Frederik Logevall, “Politics and Foreign Relations,” Journal of American History 95(4):1074–78, 2009; William G. Howell and Jon C. Rogowski, “War, the Presidency, and Legislative Voting Behavior,” American Journal of Political Science 57(1):150–166, 2013.

  6. Jonathan D. Caverley, “Explaining U.S. Military Strategy in Vietnam: Thinking Clearly about Causation,” International Security 35(3):124–43, 2010, for example, explains President Johnson’s decision to favor a capital-intensive military strategy in Vietnam instead of deploying more ground troops in these terms. See also Karl DeRouen, “Presidents and Diversionary Use of Force” International Studies Quarterly 44(2):317–28, 2000, on US presidents and the choice to use force internationally as a diversionary strategy.

  7. Aaron Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies,” Trans-action 4(2):7–14, 1966; Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1973); William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, “Presidents, Congress, and the Use of Force,” International Organization 59(1):209–32, 2005; Douglas Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and Politics of Waging War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Brandice Canes-Wrone, William Howell, and David Lewis, “Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis,” Journal of Politics 70(1):1–16, 2008; Matthew A. Baum, “How Public Opinion Constrains the Use of Force: The Case of Operation Restore Hope,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 34(2): 187–226, 2004; Matthew Baum and Philip Potter, “Relationships between Mass Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis,” Annual Review of Political Science 11:39–65, 2008.

  8. Alexander L. George, Presidential Decisionmaking in Foreign Policy: The Effective Use of Information and Advice (Boulder: Westview, 1980); Rose McDermott, Risk-Taking in International Politics: Prospect Theory in American Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); Irving Janis and Leon Mann, Decision-Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment (New York: Free Press, 1977); Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982); Alex Mintz, “How Do Leaders Make Decisions? A Poliheuristic Perspective,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48(1):3–13, 2004; Alex Mintz and Carly Wayne, The Polythink Syndrome: U.S. Foreign Policy Decisions on 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and ISIS (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Maryann Gallagher and Susan Allen, “Presidential Personality: Not Just a Nuisance,” Foreign Policy Analysis 10(1):1–21, 2014; Allen Dafoe and Devin Caughey, “Honor and War: Southern US Presidents and the Effects of Concern for Reputation,” World Politics 68(2):341–81, 2016; Saunders; and McDermott, Presidential Leadership, Illness, and Decision Making (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  9. Foreign policy making outside the US may depart from the models discussed here. See, for example, Nicolas Blarel and Niels van Willigen, “How do Regional Parties Influence Foreign Policy? Insights from Multi-Level Coalitional Bargaining in India,” European Journal of International Relations 27(2):478–500, 2021, and Blarel and Avinash Paliwal, “Opening the Black Box – The Making of India’s Foreign Policy,” India Review 18(5):457–70, 2019.

  10. By domestic political power, I mean the president’s ability to prevail in implementing his policy agenda while in office and to carry out and secure the longevity of policies and decisions that he views as constituting his legacy as president.

  11. Wildavsky; Schlesinger; Canes-Wrone et al.

  12. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47(2):263–92, 1979. An especially helpful summary of prospect theory is Jack S. Levy, “An Introduction to Prospect Theory,” Political Psychology 13(2):171–86, 1992, including pp.179–80 on the multiple dimensions of editing. Janice Gross Stein, “The Micro-Foundations of International Relations Theory: Psychology and Behavior Economics,” International Organization 71(S1):S249-63, 2017, reviews the fruits of international relations scholarship’s nearly four decades-long engagement with psychological theories, including prospect theory, and highlights ongoing research programs that resulted from it. McDermott’s Risk-Taking in International Politics is an influential application of prospect theory to foreign policy decision making. Barbara Vis and Dieuwertje Kuijpers, “Prospect Theory and Foreign Policy Decision-Making: Underexposed Issues, Advancements, and Ways Forward,” Contemporary Security Policy 39(4):575–89, 2018, analyze key challenges of that research program and offer suggestions for progress. A distinct approach, which incorporates elements of prospect theory but goes beyond it, is the “Risk Explanation Framework” developed by William A. Boettcher, III, which incorporates “reference dependence, personal predispositions, and uncertainty and information accuracy.” See Presidential Risk Behavior in Foreign Policy: Prudence or Peril? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  13. Trita Parsi, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 68.

  14. Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine.” Atlantic, April 2016; Parsi, 63; Nicholas D. Anderson and Victor D. Cha, “The Case of the Pivot to Asia: System Effects and the Origins of Strategy,” Political Science Quarterly 132(4):595–617, 2017; Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, “‘Here, We See the Future’: The Obama Administration’s Pivot to Asia,” in Edward Ashbee and John Dumbrell, eds., The Obama Presidency and the Politics of Change (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 307–27; Chi Wang, The Case of the Pivot to Asia: System Effects and the Origins of Strategy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).

  15. Parsi, 72–9, 87, 98, 161–172.

  16. Parsi, 181.

  17. Jonathan Chait, Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail (New York: Custom House, 2017), 48.

  18. Chuck Todd, The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House (New York: Little, Brown, 2014).

  19. Todd, 461.

  20. CBS, 1/9/14; CNN, 4/11/14. News sources cited by organization followed by date due to space constraints. Online Supplementary Material contains full citations.

  21. Todd, 90.

  22. Goldberg.

  23. Insightful analyses of the war that pay close attention to its international dynamics include Emile Hokayem, Syria’s Uprising and the Fracturing of the Levant (London: IISS, 2013); Marc Lynch, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016); Christopher Phillips, Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); David S. Sorenson, Syria in Ruins: The Dynamics of the Syrian Civil War (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2016); Samer N. Abboud, Syria, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); and Raymond Hinnebusch and Adham Saouli, eds., The War for Syria: Regional and International Dimensions of the Syrian Uprising (London: Routledge, 2019).

  24. Erik Mohns and Francesco Cavatorta, “‘Yes, He Can’: A Reappraisal of Syrian Foreign Policy under Bashar al-Asad,” Mediterranean Politics 15(2):289–98, 2010; WSJ, 31/1/11.

  25. US Department of State, “Remarks After International Conference on Libyan Crisis.” Secretary Clinton, 29 March 2011; CBS, 27/3/11.

  26. In Mezz’Ora, 6/5/11.

  27. WH, 18/8/11.

  28. Jonathan Stevenson, “The Syrian Tragedy and Precedent,” Survival 56(3):121–40, 2014. Stevenson was NSC Director for Political–Military Affairs, Middle East and North Africa, for much of this period (November 2011-May 2013).

  29. NYT, 24/3/13.

  30. Principally Saudi Arabia, Qatar, also Jordan, Turkey, UAE.

  31. NYT, 1/4/12, 21/6/12.

  32. WP 15/5/12.

  33. NYT, 21/7/12, 25/3/12, 1/4/12, 14/10/12; Reuters, 18/6/13.

  34. WSJ, 14/6/13; NYT, 22/10/13.

  35. NYT, 11/11/12; Reuters, 31/10/12, 22/11/12, 12/12/12.

  36. Coming after an 18 July bomb attack that killed top al-Asad security advisors and began an opposition military offensive, the statement may have attempted to deter foreign intervention. NYT, 23/7/12, 18/7/12.

  37. NYT 3/12/13; Guardian, 8/12/12.

  38. Reuters, 24/12/12; Independent, 26/12/12; FP, 15/1/13; Le Monde, 27/5/13; Guardian 13/12/13.

  39. WH, 13/6/13.

  40. NYT, 21/8/13.

  41. Local Syrian sources put the death toll at 1,338, with at least one hundred additional fatalities from conventional weapons. See LCC, “Syria Today 21-8-2013,” 21 August 2013.

  42. MSF, “Syria: Thousands Suffering Neurotoxic Symptoms Treated in Hospitals,” 24 August 2013.

  43. WH, 30/8/13; Guardian, 17/9/13; BBC, 24/9/13.

  44. CNN, 30/8/13.

  45. Guardian, 31/8/13.

  46. WT, 26/8/13.

  47. LAT, 28/8/13.

  48. Independent, 27/8/13.

  49. CBC, 29/8/13. On the debate and vote in the House of Commons, see James Strong, “Interpreting the Syria Vote: Parliament and British Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 91(5):1123–39, 2015, and Juliet Kaarbo and Daniel Kenealy, “No, Prime Minister: Explaining the House of Commons’ Vote on Intervention in Syria,” European Security, 25(1):28–48, 2016.

  50. WSJ, 30/8/13; WP, 30/8/13.

  51. Reuters, 29/8/13.

  52. NYT, 31/8/13; WH, 31/8/13.

  53. Reuters, 6/9/13; WP, 6/9/13.

  54. Reuters, 9/9/13; WSJ, 9/9/13; US Department of State, “Remarks with United Kingdom Foreign Secretary Hague,” Secretary Kerry, 9 September 2013.

  55. WH, 10/9/13.

  56. NYT, 14/9/13; WSJ, 23/6/14.

  57. On the causes of fighting between armed groups that were aligned on the same side of the civil war in Syria, see Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, “On-Side Fighting in Civil War: The Logic of Mortal Alignment in Syria,” Rationality and Society 32(4):402–60, 2020.

  58. Al-Arabiya, 6/8/14; NYT, 7/8/14.

  59. NYT, 3/8/14; George Packer, “A Friend Flees the Horror of ISIS.” New Yorker, 6 August 2014.

  60. Videos of the killings released 19 August, 2 September.

  61. CNN, 20/8/14; NYT, 2/9/14.

  62. WH, 9/9/14.

  63. BBC, 15/3/15; CBS, 15/3/15. For a critical discussion of this argument, see Lionel Beehner and Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, “3 Flaws in Pro-Assad Support,” USA Today 17 February 2015, p.7A.

  64. Phillips, 213–14, 217, 225. On pro-regime forces, see Reinoud Leenders and Antonio Giustozzi, “Outsourcing State Violence: The National Defence Force, ‘Stateness’ and Regime Resilience in the Syrian War,” Mediterranean Politics 24(2):157–80, 2019, and Leenders and Giustozzi, “Foreign Sponsorship of Pro-Government Militias Fighting Syria’s Insurgency: Whither Proxy Wars?” Mediterranean Politics, Forthcoming, https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2020.1839235. On the Russian intervention, see Lawrence Freedman, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 128–31; Dimitri Trenin, What is Russia Up To in the Middle East? (London: Polity, 2017); Sanu Kainikara, In the Bear’s Shadow: Russian Intervention in Syria (Canberra: Air Power Development Centre, Royal Australian Air Force, 2018).

  65. Peter Trubowitz, Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

  66. Michael Ignatieff, “Are the Authoritarians Winning?” New York Review of Books, 10 July 2014.

  67. Colin Dueck, The Obama Doctrine: American Grand Strategy Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  68. Anne-Marie Slaughter, Clinton’s policy-planning director. Quoted in David Remnick, “Going the Distance: On and Off the Road with Barack Obama,” New Yorker, 27 January 2014.

  69. Remnick.

  70. James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012), xviii.

  71. Remnick.

  72. Independent, 30/4/14.

  73. Goldberg.

  74. Marina Calculli explains the Obama administration’s stance towards the Middle East as “leadership by stealth,” highlighting the contradictions between its public emphasis on “retrenchment and disengagement” from the region and its simultaneous pursuit of clandestine action in Syria. See “Mirage of Retrenchment: Obama and the Syrian Conflict,” in Marco Clementi, Matteo Dian, and Barbara Pisciotta, eds., US Foreign Policy in a Challenging World: Building Order on Shifting Foundations (Cham: Springer, 2018), 279–96.

  75. James Pfiffner, “Decision Making in the Obama White House,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 41(2):244–62, 2011.

  76. Nancy Kassop, “Rivals for Influence on Counterterrorism Policy: White House Political Staff versus Executive Branch Legal Advisors,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 43(2):252–73, 2013; Mann, 211.

  77. CNN, 14/12/08, 28/4/11; WH, 5/6/13.

  78. Barack Obama, “Organization of the National Security Council,” Presidential Policy Directive 1, 13 February 2009.

  79. Pfiffner, 260.

  80. WP, 30/10/14; NYT, 24/11/14.

  81. Mann, xx.

  82. Mann; NYT, 20/7/12. As Martha Joynt Kumar has shown, the centrality of the president to White House organization, the use of campaign personnel as staff, and the infusion of the president’s views and priorities throughout the White House via staffing are themes that carry across multiple administrations. See “The White House World: Start Up, Organization, and the Pressures of Work Life,” Report No. 6, The White House 2001 Project, 2000, especially pp.11–14. The Obama White House thus reflects a broader pattern. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  83. Policy shifts in response to political pressure may be compatible with elements of Jeffrey S. Lantis’ argument regarding the effects of competition between “rival advocacy coalitions.” However, the political risk management account differs in a key respect: it argues that the administration selected policies in order to minimize political risk to the president. The advocacy coalitions argument, in contrast, holds that changes in policy constituted a response to Syria as a foreign policy problem in and of itself and were the outcome of contestation between coalitions regarding what was the correct solution to that problem. See “Advocacy Coalitions and Foreign Policy Change: Understanding US Responses to the Syrian Civil War,” Journal of Global Security Studies 6(1):ogaa016, 2021.

  84. Ryan Lizza, “The Consequentialist,” New Yorker, 2 May 2011; HP, 28/1/11; NYDN, 29/1/11; CNN, 30/1/11.

  85. McClatchey, 13/8/15.

  86. Stevenson, 132.

  87. Reuters, 24/8/13. Pew, 14/6/13 covers polling before the attack.

  88. WT, 26/8/13.

  89. ACA, 18/5/18.

  90. Pew, 15/9/14, p.13. The poll was conducted from August 14 to 17, 2014. Respondents were asked whether they approve of “U.S. airstrikes against militants in Iraq in response to violence against civilians.”.

  91. Reuters, 24/8/13.

  92. WH, 28/8/14.

  93. NBC, 10/9/14; WP, 22/9/14;

  94. CNN, 8/9/14; NBC/WSJ, 9/9/14; ABC/WP, 9/9/14. The ABC/Washington Post poll also found that 71% of respondents supported “U.S. airstrikes against the Sunni insurgents in Iraq.” In mid-August that support had been 54%, in mid-June, 45%.

  95. ABC/WP, 9/9/14.

  96. “I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Tonight, I want you to know that the United States of America is meeting them with strength and resolve,” WH, 10/9/14.

  97. WH, 10/9/14.

  98. Pew, 15/9/14.

  99. CBS, 17/9/14.

  100. NYT, 22/9/14; WP, 23/9/14.

  101. US Government, “Operation Inherent Resolve: Lead Inspector General Report to the United States Congress, April 1, 2020–June 30, 2020,” 31 July 2020.

  102. George C. Edwards, III describes this period in relation to public opinion. See Predicting the Presidency: The Potential of Persuasive Leadership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp.149–53.

  103. Reuters, 9/10/14.

  104. NYT, 7/2/14; WSJ, 12/2/13; Frederic Hof, “Saving Syria is No ‘Fantasy,” Politico, 11 August 2014.

  105. WSJ, 7/4/14.

  106. Goldberg, “Hillary Clinton: ‘Failure’ to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS,” Atlantic, 10 August 2014; CNN, 22/9/14.

  107. NYT, 14/10/14.

  108. WSJ, 7/4/14.

  109. For example, by submitting the request perfunctorily via e-mail, Hof.

  110. Leon Panetta, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2014), 449–50.

  111. WSJ, 26/1/15.

  112. WSJ, 7/4/2014.

  113. Aspen, 30/6/14.

  114. Panetta, 450.

  115. Hof, BBC, 29/5/13.

  116. WSJ, 12/2/13.

  117. Stevenson, 124.

  118. Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices: A Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 389. The term, as Clinton explained, had been coined by “planning experts to describe particularly complex challenges that confound standard solutions and approaches. Wicked problems rarely have a right answer; in fact, part of what makes them wicked is that every option appears worse than the next.” I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing the original source of the term to my attention. Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber conceptualize wicked problems and enumerate their distinguishing characteristics—which are not identical to Clinton’s description—in “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4(2):155–69, 1973.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Julia Azari, Matt Buehler, Bryan Daves, Justin Gorkowski, Jefferson Gray, Boris Heersink, Allen Lynch, Phil Potter, Elizabeth Prodromou, Lynn Sanders, Jim Savage, Mark Schwartz, Dave Stiefel, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback and Dominick Giovanniello and Marc Opper for excellent research assistance.

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  1. Institute of Political Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl

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Correspondence to Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl.

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Schulhofer-Wohl, J. The Obama administration and civil war in Syria, 2011–2016: US presidential foreign policy making as political risk management. J Transatl Stud 19, 517–547 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-021-00085-y

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Keywords

  • US presidential foreign policy making
  • Syria
  • Civil war
  • Obama administration
  • Political risk management
  • The US presidency