Abstract
A deadly chemical weapon attack in August 2013 on innocent civilians in the Syrian town of Ghouta sparked off an international crisis in which Syrian-American relations reached a new nadir. Accusing the Syrian government of crossing its “red line,” Washington attempted to rally international support for military strikes against the regime, focusing attention on its human rights abuses and the threat Syria posed to the national security of the United States and its allies. Damascus responded with condemnations against American imperialist aggression and threatened the United States with an uncontainable conflagration of conflict in the region.
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Notes
When using the term hostility here, it is not to be understood as armed conflict—in part the possibility of regular military warfare is negated by the asymmetries of military power between the two states. However, both Syria and the United States can be described as having been engaged in an enduring conflict of interests, policies, tactics, goals, and ideas. I argue that their diplomatic and political clashes, frequently exacerbated by the withdrawal of ambassadorial representation on both sides, can be categorized as a form of hostility when one understands that peace, or peaceful relations, denotes more than just the absence of interstate military combat. The latter is an archetypal realist conceptualization of peace that places analytical emphasis on military engagement. However, a broader and more complex understanding of both conflict and peace facilitates a reading of US-Syrian relations as hostile, antagonistic, and certainly not peaceful. See: Johan Galtung’s seminal work “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3) (1969), pp. 167–191, which argues that structural violence can still prevail even in the absence of war;
and Kristine Höglund and Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, “Beyond the Absence of War: The Diversity of Peace in Post-Settlement Societies,” Review of International Studies, 36 (2010), pp. 367–390. The literature relates to internal state politics, but the concept can be extended to the nature of interstate relations.
Only five books on US-Syrian relations have been published in English to date. The best and most rigorous of these is David Lesch’s Syria and the United States: Eisenhower’s Cold War in the Middle East (1992); it is an excellent historical account drawing upon key primary documents, but it takes us no further than 1957, when US-Syrian relations were just beginning to take shape.
Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiraven Ehteshami, Syria and Iran: Middle Powers in a Penetrated Regional System (Routledge, 1997), p. 23.
Stephen Hobden, International Relations and Historical Sociology: Breaking Down Boundaries (Routledge, 1998), p. 24.
Orientalist literature built on the work of a number of influential scholars who used the Middle East as a comparative model for other subjects of their work, such as Ernest Renan, Karl Marx, and Max Weber, as well as the diaries and reports of high-ranking government figures who had been based in the region, such as Britain’s Lord Cromer. By the 1960s, the works of orientalist scholars such as H. A. R. Gibb, Harold Bowen, and, later, Bernard Lewis were particularly prominent. For examples of Lewis’ work and the deterministic approach outlined above, see: The Middle East and the West (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963); and, more recently, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2002). “Modernizationists” were an offshoot of the orientalist tradition, the most well known being Samuel Huntington, author of the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis. It is worth noting that Middle East studies did not exist per se—in the academy, scholarship on the region was largely the domain of philologists, while jurists and economists were relied upon for expertise outside of academia. The reliance on linguists meant that a knowledge of and access to ancient texts was often passed as qualification to comment on contemporary issues in the region. Zachary Lockman argues that these foundations meant scholars were not focusing on the more universally common features of the region, and moreover were inclined to view it through the temporally narrow lens of the ancient and medieval texts they were familiar with. For an excellent overview of the development of orientalism and Middle East studies, see: Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East; the History and Politics of Orientalism (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and for a reassessment of orientalist histories,
see: Israel Gershoni, Amy Singer, and Y. Hakan Erdem (Eds.), Middle East Historiographies: Narrating the Twentieth Century (University of Washington Press, 2006).
EH Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Macmillan Press, 1946).
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (5th edition, Knopf, 1978);
for the application of the theory to a case study, see: Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Little, Brown, 1971).
Fouad Ajami, “The End of Pan Arabism,” Foreign Affairs, (1978–1979), pp. 355–373.; Jubin Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 12.
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Addison-Wesley, 1979).
Namely: Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and the Egyptian-Israeli truce; Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution. For the significance of these events in shaping the modern Middle East, from a neorealist angle, see: David Lesch, 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East (Westview Press, 2001).
Shibley Telhami and Michael N. Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 3–4.
For example, see Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Cornell University Press, 1987);
Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, Regions and Powers (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 217;
Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiraven Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States (Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 19–21.
For example, Peter Sluglett, “The Cold War in the Middle East,” in Fawcett (Ed.), International Relations of the Middle East, (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 40–57.
Ajami, “The End of Pan Arabism.”; Adeed Dawisha, “Requiem for Arab Nationalism,” Middle East Quarterly, 10 (1) (2003), pp. 25–41.
Goodarzi, Syria and Iran, p. 12; Humphreys, Stephen, “The Strange Career of Pan-Arabism,” in Between Memory and Desire. The Middle East in a Troubled Age (University of California Press, 2005), pp. 73–74.
Rick Fawn and Raymond Hinnebusch, Iraq War: Causes and Consequences, (Lynne Rienner, 2006) p. 129; Goodarzi, Syria and Iran, 13;
Robert Rabil, Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror in the Middle East (Praeger Security International, 2006), p. xxi.
Hinnebusch and Ehteshami, Syria and Iran, 162; Eberhard Kienle, Baʿth v. Baʿth: The Conflict between Syria and Iraq 1968–1989 (I.B. Tauris, 1990), p. 136;
Efraim Karsh, The Soviet Union and Syria: The Asad Years (Chatham House, 1988), 3.
Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2004), p. 64.
Alan George, Syria: Neither Bread nor Freedom (Zed, 2003), 9–14;
Lisa Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 157–158.
Fred Lawson, Why Syria Goes to War: Thirty Years of Confrontation (Cornell University Press, 1996), 12.
As explained in Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 99; and see also: Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Routledge, 1991), p. 49.
Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi (Eds.), State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, (Macmillan Education Ltd., 1988), pp. 5–6.
J. S. Mill edited by J. M. Robson, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (Routledge, 1973).
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Gani, J.K. (2014). Introduction. In: The Role of Ideology in Syrian-US Relations. Middle East Today. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358356_1
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