A coda on Syria’s chemical weapons

By Bret Stephens

It’s been nearly 12 years since Barack Obama made what was arguably the most consequential foreign policy decision of his presidency: Rather than order airstrikes on Syria after Bashar Assad killed hundreds of people with sarin gas, which the president had said would be a “red line,” Obama agreed to a Russian plan to arrange for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, to remove and dispose of those weapons.

Critics of the decision, including me, charged that Obama (and the isolationist Republicans who implicitly agreed with him) had shown America was a paper tiger whose threats would not be taken seriously by other dictators — including Vladimir Putin, who seized Crimea a few months later. But supporters crowed that diplomacy had achieved what military force could not.

“We struck a deal where we got 100% of the chemical weapons out,” John Kerry, the then-secretary of state, boasted on NBC the following summer.

Or not. Long before Assad was overthrown, there was extensive reporting that, true to the habit of most dictators, he had lied to the inspectors and surrendered only a fraction of his chemical weapons — a point demonstrated when Assad kept using them. Yet, aside from a limited U.S. strike ordered by Donald Trump in 2017, there were no consequences to the dictator for his cheating. Indeed, shortly before his unexpected ouster late last year, part of the world was moving toward renormalizing ties with his regime.

Now comes news of just how extensive Assad’s cheating seems to have been. Reporting from Damascus, The New York Times’ Megha Rajagopalan found that, according to the OPCW, “more than 100 chemical weapons sites are suspected to remain in Syria,” information that’s especially terrifying given the possibility that some of stockpiles could fall into terrorist hands. To its credit, the new government, whose leaders were once linked to al-Qaida, promised the OPCW that it would destroy the remaining chemical stocks. Whether they make good on the promise remains to be seen.

The world is now approaching a similar crisis when it comes to Iran’s growing stockpiles of a different kind of dangerous substance: enriched uranium. Trump has warned Tehran that he’s prepared to use military force to end the regime’s nuclear bids, while also saying he prefers a deal. So far, the administration is demanding direct talks, while Iran prefers indirect talks of the sort it conducted, to no effect, with the Biden administration.

However it turns out, the Trump administration should bear in mind the costs of the diplomacy that yielded the Obama team its fake victory back in 2013: years of additional depredations by the Syrian regime and an American president who looked, to America’s enemies, like a pushover and a sucker. Whatever else Trump might want, surely that wouldn’t be a reputation he’d relish for himself.