On June 17, the Treasury Department implemented the first round of punishing sanctions as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act officially entered force. The event marks the opening broadside in a sanctions campaign that is among the most ambitious ever conceived. The new sanctions outlaw nearly all interactions with the Government of Syria, including military support, economic transactions, or reconstruction of the shattered country. On top of a snarl of existing sanctions targeting individual Syrian government figures, the sanctions threaten to immobilize the assets of any corporation or individual — Syrian, American, or foreign national — dealing with the Syrian government in virtually any capacity. 

The sanctions are a stalking horse for regime change. In this respect, they will almost certainly fail. In fact, the only guaranteed outcome is that ordinary Syrians will be forced to endure further hardship.

Wrath of Caesar: The pain is the point

The State Department maintains that the sanctions are intended to break the political stalemate in Syria by isolating the regime of Bashar Al-Assad and forcing a transition of power under UN Security Council Resolution 2254. Implicitly, however, the sanctions seek to instrumentalize civilians’ misery to create domestic political pressure against Al-Assad. This is profoundly cruel logic, and it amounts to a form of collective punishment, a war crime outlawed by the 1949 Geneva Convention. In effect, the U.S. is now punishing the civilian population of Syria for the opposition’s inability to unseat Bashar Al-Assad militarily. 

Prior to the onset of the uprising in 2011, Syria was a liberalizing middle-income state ruled by an insular totalitarian regime.[1] Nearly a decade later, persistent conflict has reduced Syria to a failed state with a virtually pre-industrial economy. The regime remains in power, and it continues to consolidate its control throughout the developed spine of population centers running from the Jordan border up the Syrian coast to Turkey. Only two sizable enclaves remain outside the direct control of Damascus, one in the northeast and another in the northwest. 

As the pace of the conflict slows and the Al-Assad regime cements its power, the international community is increasingly assessing the pivot away from emergency humanitarian aid to the sort of strategic post-conflict support that will be needed to address the root causes of Syrians’ misery in the long term. The Caesar Act makes the pivot toward stabilization and development all but impossible. Estimates of the cost to rebuild Syria’s decimated public infrastructure range from $250 billion to $400 billion. Rebuilding Syria will require a staggering degree of international support of a kind not seen since the U.S. attempted (and failed) to rebuild the Iraqi institutions that were strangled by a decade of sanctions and pulverized by the 2003 U.S. invasion. 

In Syria, the Caesar Act freezes the prevailing conditions in amber. The new sanctions are specifically crafted “to deter foreign persons from entering into contracts related to reconstruction.” The vital infrastructure that is needed to sustain basic livelihoods, health services, schools, industrial agriculture, an efficient civil administration, or a stable local economy will remain dysfunctional as a result. 

U.S. officials acknowledge that such impacts will impose significant hardship on civilians. This is deliberate. If the sanctions are successful in a narrow, technical sense, they will bankrupt Syria’s government and hobble state institutions. As UN ambassador Kelly Craft told the Security Council, the mechanistic purpose of the Caesar Act is to “deprive” the Government of Syria of revenues and foreign support. The misery this approach engenders will be foisted indiscriminately upon the Syrian population, of whom more than 80 percent are already impoverished. This figure will certainly jump as the Syrian economy sinks further down the terminal death spiral it entered in late 2019.[2] The World Food Program chief has already warned that famine is on the horizon.  

Already, public sector employees in Syria cannot withdraw salaries because computerized financial networks have gone offline due to the sanctions. If past examples from Iraq and Sudan are any guide, further misery is guaranteed as medical diagnostic tools, civil aviation software, and other technological services in Syria are cut off from the outside world. 

Perversely, the sanctions will also make it considerably more difficult for aid actors to respond to the humanitarian needs that are already skyrocketing as state institutions collapse. Sanctions will exercise a strong chilling effect on international financial institutions, thus impeding humanitarian response activities. More stringent bureaucratic processes will also make it more difficult for local Syrian NGOs to operate. This will place more power and money in the hands of behemoth international NGOs that feed on global crises to sustain massive operating budgets and glamorous offices in the U.S. and Europe.  

The cruelty inflicted by Caesar is ultimately pointlessness. There is abundant evidence that economic sanctions almost never succeed in bringing about regime change. The most important reason for this is simple: in most instances, such sanctions target anti-democratic or totalitarian states in which there is seldom room for popular dissent. This lack of legitimate democratic institutions is often among the explicit justifications for U.S. sanctions in the first place. As a result, through the Caesar Act, the U.S. Congress has summarily condemned Syrian civilians to life in a failed state in which they have little say over the policies pursued by central authorities.  

Caesar holds Syrians hostage to escalate tensions with Iran 

Who could support such a policy of deliberate cruelty? The entire U.S. foreign policy establishment. As Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey stated in a recent briefing, “Washington [is] fully united” behind the sanctions.

Establishment think tanks are in lock-step behind the Caesar Act. The gushing advocacy for the sanctions has come from the same editorial boards, regime change cheerleaders, Iran hawks, and corporate think tanks that promoted the militarization of the conflict in the first place. The undercurrent of this support is the belief that Syrian civilians can be held hostage as leverage against Iran. Within the defense establishment, there is an implicit understanding that until the Syrian regime changes, Iran (and to a lesser extent, Russia) will be stuck with the monetary expense and the political cost of supporting the Syrian pariah state. 

In this sense, the Caesar Act is not only punitive, it also furnishes a means of directly escalating the confrontation with Iran via intensified economic warfare. It is important to note that the Caesar Act is an instance of sanctions overkill. Nearly all ranking members of Syria’s ruling political and security apparatus were already individually sanctioned. As a result, the most powerful aspect of the Caesar Act is that it allows the U.S. government to use the ongoing Syria crisis as a pretext for further sanctions targeting outside actors, including Iranian officials, Iran-linked militias such as Hezbollah, and regime-friendly businessmen.

This is clearly articulated in a recent report by the Congressional Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative foreign policy vulcans. The RSC advocated that the Caesar Act be applied proactively in Lebanon, Jordan, the Persian Gulf, and as far afield as Latin America. The United Arab Emirates has already been publicly warned over the sanctions, and America’s chief diplomat, Mike Pompeo, has vowed that more “crippling sanctions” will come.

This context explains the ardent support for the Caesar Act from House Foreign Affairs chair and AIPAC darling Eliot Engel, who first introduced the act in 2016. Engel repeatedly introduced the bill until its passage in 2019 as a rider to the bloated NDAA. A joint statement issued by Engel and his fellow heads of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees described the sanctions to be a tool “to send a message to the regime and its enablers that Assad remains a pariah.” The statement makes no mention of the act’s deliberate brutality against civilians.

Crime and punishment

There is ample reason for moral outrage over the Syria crisis. Nearly 400,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March 2011. It is estimated that 129,000 Syrians have been forcibly disappeared — some by ISIS or opposition militias, most by the Government of Syria itself. Most are likely dead. More than half the pre-conflict population remains internally displaced or condemned to refugee camps or permanent asylum abroad. Without doubt, Syria will be studied by future generations of IR scholars as the graveyard of the principle of the responsibility to protect civilians. The events of the war have vitiated norms against chemical weapons use. The principle of territorial non-aggrandizement is also likely to give way to Turkey’s repeated land grabs in northern Syria border areas, which have been cemented through illegal population transfers. Meanwhile, state sovereignty has been profoundly challenged by UN Security Council Resolution 2165, which suspended Syria’s territorial sovereignty to permit unfettered cross-border access for UN humanitarian convoys, thus dealing a significant blow to the nation-state basis of the post-war international order. 

The failure to halt the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria is a black mark against the global community. Nonetheless, it is the Al-Assad regime that must shoulder most of the blame for the human costs of the conflict. The Government of Syria’s violent crackdown on peaceful domestic protests in spring 2011 cannot be forgotten. Likewise, as the conflict became more heavily militarized and international in nature, Damascus’s military forces purposefully destroyed vital infrastructure to rout it enemies, with little concern for civilian casualties. These forces continue to target hospitals and roads in a pyrrhic battle against opposition forces that were trained by the U.S. and which still receive the support of Turkey, a NATO ally.

Nonetheless, the Caesar Act is not calibrated to redress any of these deeply troubling issues, despite its overwhelmingly negative consequences. On balance, the new sanctions bring almost no additional leverage to bear against the regime, and their costs will be borne almost universally by the civilian population. In this respect, the Caesar Act is the natural expression of a militarized U.S. foreign policy that is predicated on coercion, force, and imperial domination. 

We owe Syrians better

The U.S. is the most powerful country in the world, yet its approach to Syria has vacillated between malicious confusion and scandalous ineptitude. What has remained consistent throughout, however, is the reliance on coercion as the failed proxy war has become a theater for brutalizing economic warfare waged via sanctions. This is a disgrace, and it makes the U.S. complicit in the continued immiseration of the Syrian people. 

Admitting the failures of past policy does not require the international community to absolve the Al-Assad regime of responsibility for its own criminal actions. On the contrary, correcting course is now imperative for precisely this reason. Doing so is a necessary first step to achieve justice for Syrians and mitigate the harms inflicted upon Syrian civilians in part by U.S. imperial blundering.

Concrete steps are possible. The U.S. should abandon the xenophobia of its restrictionist asylum meritocracy and increase refugee admittances. The U.S. should also boost its stabilization assistance to neighboring states that have been destabilized by the protracted conflict. Finally, it is imperative that the U.S. provide robust but conditional reconstruction support to Syria itself. This support must be cautious and extremely selective, but through conditional rapprochement predicated on non-interference, it is possible to incentivize incremental political progress while actively producing more positive outcomes for Syrians. 

The foreign policy establishment will resist even these modest proposals. Congress, lobbyists, think tanks, and the Beltway’s Middle East 'experts' are insulated from the worst consequences of savage U.S. wars and imperial policies. They remain united behind sanctions as a form of light-touch power projection, despite the fact that sanctions are often a strategic blunder and a moral calamity. To uproot this malign orthodoxy, it will be necessary to elect representatives who are responsive to the actual security needs of the working class, not (national) ‘security’ as it is defined by outside political machines. Eliot Engel, a chief the architect of the Caesar Act, once boasted that “I sit down with AIPAC on every piece of legislation.” His recent defeat by progressive primary challenger Jamaal Bowman is a deliverance. Americans deserve a better Congress. So do Syrians.

Until we manage to dispense with such indiscriminate and dangerous sanctions regimes, U.S. foreign policy will continue to sacrifice foreign populations in the name of ‘national security’ imperatives that are as violent as they are meaningless.

[1] The regime’s brutality did not prevent the U.S. from using the Syrian security apparatus as a node in the massive, global network of black sites. To quote former CIA agent Robert Baer: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt.”

[2] Currency depreciation has halved the parallel market value of the Syrian pound multiple times already in 2020. The economic volatility has caused Syria to break up into three regional economies, each with a different currency in circulation.