U.S. policy toward Syria is a fascinating, if depressing, case study. Many of my friends and colleagues who work on Syria—nearly all of them, in fact—have been baffled by President Obama’s approach to the Syrian conflict. The administration’s apparent resistance to rethinking its policies, despite rapidly changing events on the ground, sparks a number of challenging questions, particularly for someone like me who works at a think tank: When the basic thrust of policy seems immovable, irrespective of events on the ground, how should researchers respond? Should influencing policy be the animating objective of policy research? Who exactly should our work be directed to?
Having participated in the contentious debates over military intervention and the “Responsibility to Protect” since early 2012, I thought it might be time to go a bit “meta” and try to make sense of what did—and didn’t—happen from that point on. That is what I tried my best to do in a new journal article—“What is Policy Research For? Reflections on U.S. Failures in Syria.”
Is Obama’s foreign policy ideological?
In my work on Islamist movements, I’ve been interested in the idea of political “inelasticity”—that is, how what Islamists do (or don’t do) has little effect on how their opponents view them. That’s because secularists and liberals will view them as Islamists, regardless of anything else, because, well, that’s what they are. The problem is that beliefs, attitudes, and policies are resistant to revision, because they’re steeped in deeper philosophical and ideological divergences that are somewhat divorced from everyday politics.
Inelasticity is helpful in understanding Obama’s policies on the Middle East, and particularly on Syria, for similar reasons. Administration officials aren’t oblivious to what’s happening in Syria; it’s more that the facts on the ground—even though they’ve changed rapidly and repeatedly over the past five years—seem to have no real effect on the basic contours of our Syria policy. This would seem surprising, since the president has styled himself a post-ideological technocrat who’s simply interested in “what works.”
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2016/02/10-obama-syria-policy-experts-hamid
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