Over the course of two years, Obama got just about what Sarkozy got -- nothing. Yes, Syria smoothed its relations with Iraq and opened an embassy in Beirut. But Assad continued to supply Hezbollah with ballistic missiles and continued to meddle in Lebanese politics, allowing Hezbollah to topple that country's elected government, whose chief allies were the United States and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis thought they had a deal with Damascus to keep the so-called March 14 coalition in power in Lebanon -- and then they, too, slipped back against the wall.
Assad seems to have finally run out of dance partners; both Kerry and the White House have sharply denounced the regime in recent days. But there is a new reason to believe in Assad: The consequences of his fall could be calamitous. Filiu says that "Bashar could be a safeguard, a talisman, to exorcise the ghost of sectarian strife" -- Iraq-style bloodletting -- "which is something every Syrian is thinking about 24 hours a day." Filiu still believes that Bashar has the "capacity" to reform, but he concedes that there are no signs that he has "the will" to do so.
You can't help feeling that Western policy toward the Syrian regime has been guided by a kind of geopolitical wish-fulfillment, in which hard-headed "engagement" masked a dubious faith in Assad's capacity and will. Or maybe it's fairer to say that the upside of engagement was so great and the downside so small that everyone kept plugging away long after they should have given up. As Andrew Tabler says, "Policy involves a tremendous amount of reverse engineering" -- figure out a policy, and then line up the facts to fit in.
But there's a broader point here about engagement itself. One of the themes that emerges from Ryan Lizza's rather murky account of Obama's foreign policy in the New Yorker is the dawning recognition of the inadequacy of engagement as a controlling metaphor for foreign relations. The Obama White House spent its first few years in office trying to soothe the dudgeon raised around the globe by the Bush administration's bellicosity and high-handedness. The administration's theory was that it could make real gains by dealing with other countries on the basis of "mutual respect and mutual interest," to use a favorite Obama formulation. The "reset" with Russia, for all its limits, has vindicated this theory. Engaging Khartoum may have helped ensure the peaceful referendum on Southern Sudan this past January.
But there are also plenty of recalcitrant regimes that will pocket the respect without changing their behavior. Iran is the most obvious example; China may be another. And the Arab Spring has offered a stiff lesson in the limits of engagement. Private admonishments had no effect on Arab tyrants, and the administration has learned -- again and again -- that it must choose between siding with regimes and siding with citizens. And in fact there is a real cost to "engaging" with tyrants: Whether you intend to or not, you send a message of acceptance to the regime and of indifference to the plight of the citizen. That price is sometimes worth paying, or at least unavoidable (think: Saudi Arabia). But often it's not. In this case, the Bush administration may have been right.
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